Keep Houston weird
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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James Harden
18 min read
The article references Harden's departure to Brooklyn as the pivotal moment that started Houston's rebuilding journey. Understanding his tenure with the Rockets and the trade provides essential context for appreciating how far the franchise has come.
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Rebound (basketball)
13 min read
The article emphasizes Houston's historic 40.6% offensive rebound rate as their defining tactical innovation. A deeper understanding of offensive rebounding strategy, its historical value, and why teams typically don't prioritize it would help readers appreciate how unconventional Houston's approach truly is.
Through an action-packed month, the Houston Rockets are blistering hot. At 10–3, with the NBA’s best offense, they’ve validated their loudest optimists and, so far, silenced their biggest skeptics, with their biggest test since their opening-night OT loss to OKC set to come tonight against Denver.
The Rockets were the NBA’s “surprise team” last season, blowing by Vegas’s preseason win total of 43.5 and climbing to second in a crowded Western Conference before getting bounced in a bruising seven-game series against Golden State. By my estimation, they’ve played their rebuilding hand quite optimally: tanking when necessary, stacking prospects, signing veterans, and capitalizing on their players’ development at the right moments.
Zooming outward, this is really as much as you can ask for since James Harden decided to force his way to Brooklyn five years ago. While some teams that lose a major star spend years bouncing around in NBA purgatory, the Rockets have parlayed a series of smaller moves into a relatively quick path to contention. Houston even made a mediumish-risk, highish-reward splash this summer, trading Dillon Brooks and Jalen Green for Kevin Durant. Durant hasn’t been spectacular, but he’s been healthy and good, and along with Alperen Şengün and Amen Thompson, gives the Rockets three players who rank in the top 35 in the league in EPM.
The Rockets have also embraced some unconventional tactics. Last season, they leaned heavily on Steven Adams’ offensive rebounding to generate second-chance points — the team grabbed an astonishing 43.9 percent of offensive rebounds when Adams was on the floor. This year, they’ve doubled down on size, playing Sengun and Adams in more minutes together. They’ve even supplemented the double bigs with Durant and Jabari Smith, creating further supersized lineups. The result is a 40.6 percent offensive rebound rate so far, a multiple-standard-deviation outlier relative to the rest of the league, and on track to be the highest rate in NBA history.
It’s hard to believe that just five years ago, the Rockets were running full-on Micro Ball with Russell Westbrook and James Harden. But reinvention has basically been their trademark for two decades.
Some of Houston’s experimentation has been born out of necessity. They don’t exactly have a surplus of shooters, and losing Fred VanVleet to an
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