What's Really Annoying About The Houston Rockets

It shouldn't be this way. The Houston Rockets should be fun, and instead they are the NBA's most effective realization of fun's precise opposite. Despite an athletic roster and a pair of superstars, they are a dour machine, and decidedly not the dunk-happy wondershow they could be. It's quite an achievement to make James Harden unwatchable, but this is the challenge the Rockets gave themselves, and their fundamentalist commitment to analytic orthodoxy has just about achieved it. Their system is working for them on the court, but they've won themselves no friends in the process.

There are any number of reasons to hate the Rockets, all equally petty and all more or less reasonable as far as this stuff goes. There is GM Daryl Morey and his King Nerd Rockstar posturing, and the pre-emptive genuflection that follows his every move. There is Dwight Howard's neverending and unstintingly corny Dwight Howard-ness. And there is James Harden's flopping addiction, the frequent occasions when Patrick Beverley's intensity becomes a health risk to all those near him, and so teeth-grindingly on. These are just the players, though, and for all their various issues it may be that it's the Rockets' system, and their success with it, that's really most irritating, here.

Houston is on pace to attempt the most three-pointers in NBA history by a wide margin. Their heatmap looks like a bisected infrared donut. But unlike the Warriors, Houston's version of analytics-driven futuristic basketball feels less fluid and improvisational than cynical and boring. It's like the difference between being a bird and playing Flight Simulator for eight hours. There is the sense, in every on-court moment, of a team approaching basketball as a problem to be solved, a matter of pulling the right levers. The Rockets have embraced spacing as a sort of droll market inefficiency to be capitalized. They are just an average shooting team, by the numbers, but they overcome this handicap through sheer volume.

Watching Harden tornado his way into the lane can be fun, and the same is true of Beverley's perpetual tightrope walk above an abyss of howling madness and frustration fouls. But, for the more aesthetically inclined, there is a deep bummer inherent in Houston's approach to basketball as hackable technology. It doesn't have to be this way. Nested in Houston's roster is a fun team, one that could make use of a preponderance of mid-size swingmen to play fast, inside-out basketball—and probably get all the threes their analytics department rightly prizes. In Josh Smith, Corey Brewer, and Terrence Jones, the Rockets have the the ingredients for a run-and-gun team that can hold serve on defense. Even weaponized smallball captained by James Harden would certainly be a lot more fun to watch than the current Morey-wave system.

What's most annoying about all this quantification and efficiency, maybe, is that it works: the Rockets are third in the Western Conference. Acceptance usually follows this type of success, with the requisite reverse-engineering of actually-this-is-cool sentiment sometime after that. It might be that we're just not there yet, but for now Houston's cold mechanicity turns a lot of people off. No player has been as symbolic of this descent into villainy as Howard. Where he used to be perceived as a gregarious star who had more fun than anyone—or at least as a high-spirited, Skittles-chugging goofball—he has become a punchline. Other stars actively disrespect him, and he's talked about like a leering simpleton.

More importantly, at least for Houston, Dwight Howard is talked about less because he's not as dominant as he was. While even a diminished Howard is a force in many ways, he was already having his worst season since his rookie year when, last week, a knee injury forced him out for two months. There is no structural damage, but Howard's is the type of bone-on-bone injury that will flare up continually for the rest of his career. Not only is Houston facing down a gauntlet of an upcoming schedule without Howard, they are looking at a different Howard for the playoffs and beyond.

While Howard's absence won't make the Rockets any less annoying, it will almost certainly make them less successful. Without a rebounder or strong post-up threat, Houston may have no choice but to double down on the tics and tendencies that make them the NBA's best heel. Harden suddenly has more responsibility to conjure free throws, no matter how much flopping it takes. Without Howard inside to physically deter would-be dunkers, Houston's perimeter defenders will be forced to dial up their peskiness. The team's calculated push to launch a historic amount of threes at the expense of offensive coherence marches on, stronger than ever. There is no answer on this roster besides this one.

Still, you can see that fun, phantom Rockets team poking its head out at times; this could be that team's moment to show itself. Howard's absence offers an opportunity for reinvention, the same way David Lee's did for Golden State. But Houston seems determined to cling to its computers no matter what. Thus far, they've responded to Howard's absence predictably: more frenetic perimeter scrapping on defense, more Harden isos. They aren't going to stop now.

This will piss aesthetes and casual fans off, although the Rockets had already managed that.

For Houston, the bigger challenge is making it work enough to stay annoying. Houston has the bones of a contender, and if Howard can return to approximate his early form and the shooters get hot, the Rockets are a team that could survive what promises to be a punishing Western Conference playoffs and make the Finals. Brimming dumpsters like the Knicks are supremely unlikeable and unpleasant to behold, but they don't need to be taken seriously. There's no way around Houston. They will be heard from in the playoffs. It may not be fun, but the NBA is probably the better for it. After all, if the Rockets weren't a threat to do some harm, they wouldn't be much of a heel.