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Well, my timing was impeccable.
Originally, The Athletic was going to publish a column of mine today about the five NBA teams that I thought would fall short of their preseason win-total over/unders. One of those teams was the Houston Rockets, and a key line in there read:
“Somebody besides Fred VanVleet will need to help (Kevin) Durant out and make a perimeter shot. And if the 31-year-old VanVleet misses any time, the backcourt immediately goes to yikes.”
Um … yikes?
Monday’s news that VanVleet, the only starting-caliber guard on the roster, has suffered a torn ACL immediately dampens the Rockets’ hopes for this season. Maybe not fatally, and in some ways, there may be a silver lining, which I’ll get to shortly. But, yeah, this is bad.
The whole point of trading for Durant was so that the Rockets could make a charge toward the top of the Western Conference this season, but the rest of the roster already betrayed some weaknesses that VanVleet’s injury exponentially exacerbates. As of Sept. 19, per BetMGM, Houston’s preseason Vegas over/under was an aggressive 55.5 wins, a number that frankly seemed more a result of “We got Durant!” vibes than a cold analysis of the roster.
Yes, Houston finished second in the West a season ago, but with a relatively low win total for a No. 2 seed (52 wins) and atop a seven-team West pile separated by a very small margin. The Rockets were second, but their underlying stats were hardly different from those of the Golden State Warriors, Denver Nuggets, Minnesota Timberwolves, LA Clippers and even the Memphis Grizzlies (and, of course, the Warriors beat Houston when it mattered in the playoffs). It feels like the initial condition of “second seed” was doing a lot of lifting.
VanVleet’s injury matters so much because Houston’s offseason had left it so overweight in big forwards and centers and paper-thin in the backcourt, especially with Jalen Green gone in the Durant trade package. In particular, for a team with two All-Star frontcourt players already in Durant and Alperen Şengün, the decisions to give multiyear deals to Steven Adams and Dorian Finney-Smith and Clint Capela and Jabari Smith Jr. now seem like total overkill, especially because even the “smalls” they signed (Jae’Sean Tate and Josh Okogie) do their best work masquerading as power forwards. Having six rotation-caliber power forwards plus Jeff Green in reserve is a nice luxury, but not when you only have 14 total players and three of the other ones are full-time centers.
Meanwhile, the most accomplished true guard on the roster is … Aaron Holiday? And along with signing all those bigs, Houston left itself vulnerable in another way: A team already light on shooting is now desperately short in this area, even with Durant. The Rockets were 27th in 3-point frequency and 21st in percentage a season ago, and more than half the makes came from VanVleet, Jalen Green and Dillon Brooks. Sure, Durant can offset some of that, but who spaces the floor for Durant? VanVleet was supposed to be that guy.
The other half of Houston’s quandary is that filling VanVleet’s rotation spot may be difficult. While the Rockets can claim a $12.5 million (half of VanVleet’s salary) injured player exception, they capped themselves at the collective bargaining agreement’s first-apron threshold by signing Finney-Smith using their nontaxpayer midlevel exception, and the fairly needless addition of Capela put them just $1.3 million from the first-apron line ($195.9 million). If the Rockets get off to a bumpy start, it’s possible they pivot the opposite way by attempting to shed $6.8 million, get below the tax line and stave off a future year of repeater tax once they pay Amen Thompson and Tari Eason.
Speaking of Thompson, we also need to talk about the silver lining, if you will, to the injury: The Rockets get to test what they hope is true and badly want to be true. It’s Point Guard Amen Thompson or bust now in Houston, and behind him, Reed Sheppard is either going to sink or swim.
Thompson is the only player who can reasonably be the lead ballhandler with the starting unit. His inability to shoot will have opponents going miles under screens and daring him to beat them off the ball, and if the Rockets want to lean into Şengün-Adams pairings (as they did at the end of last season), the spacing could get hilariously ugly (as it did at the end of last season).
Thompson, however, is Houston’s most talented young player; he’s not as accomplished as Şengün, yet, but has a much greater ceiling. Ripping off the Band-Aid might be the only way to figure out how this works, or if it works at all. It’s possible the offense is kind of bad, but the defense, with Thompson and Eason at the point of attack, is so huge and hellish that it doesn’t matter.
Behind Thompson, the Rockets have the safety net of Holiday’s floor as a slightly-better-than-replacement-level backup who makes open shots and competes on defense. But he’s limited as a creator, something magnified by the fact that only a couple of other guys on this team can dribble (I’m only slightly exaggerating).
Realistically, it has to be Shep Time now, and the 21-year-old should be the first guard off the bench. With Houston already looking at lowered expectations, there is no reason to shunt the third pick in the 2024 draft to the nether regions of the bench again. He only played 652 minutes as a rookie despite being healthy nearly all season, an amazingly puny total for a player drafted so highly. Every other 2024 lottery pick played at least 1,000 minutes except the injured Nikola Topić and Devin Carter, and Minnesota’s Rob Dillingham.
Sheppard wasn’t exactly gangbusters when he got chances — a 9.7 PER on 35.1 percent shooting — but Houston needs to give him every chance to succeed.
The irony, of course, is that the opportunity to test large samples of Thompson at point guard and Sheppard in the rotation was going to be much more difficult with a healthy VanVleet commanding 2,000 minutes. The Rockets are clearly worse off as a result of his injury — my prediction model has it costing them four wins — but they have a chance to make lemonade with Thompson and Sheppard in a more forgiving environment.
Alas, it’s not quite the same thing as loading up for a full-throated run at a championship.
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John Hollinger’s two decades of NBA experience include seven seasons as the Memphis Grizzlies’ Vice President of Basketball Operations and media stints at ESPN.com and SI.com. A pioneer in basketball analytics, he invented several advanced metrics — most notably, the PER standard. He also authored four editions of “Pro Basketball Forecast.” In 2018 he was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Follow John on Twitter @johnhollinger
