It’s a strange thing to care about something that doesn’t have anything to do with you personally, to live for a city or a song, a book or an artist’s work, to love something that can never reciprocate. But we do it. We do it because even though we know none of it really matters, it does matter. It matters because we’ve decided that this thing, whatever it is, is important to us.
The Rockets have won their last six games (I’m writing this before the Minnesota game tonight). Granted, those wins have largely come against the NBA’s worst teams with four of the six registering a combined record of 15 – 50, and with its most recent win coming at home against a Spurs team on the second night of a back-to-back without both Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobli, the Rockets’ overtime victory over Portland on January 14th might be its only significant trophy from this week-long streak.
Houston is doing what all good teams do, beating bad teams. Does that mean the Rockets are a good team now? At this point, I don’t think anyone’s including the men in red on his or her list of early title contenders, and the argument that every win the Rockets garner now puts them further from the elite draft picks who would represent the team’s future success still holds water like the Titanic, but there might be some reason for optimism, even if that optimism is the subjective sort a mother has.
This group is starting to look more comfortable playing together. Despite K-Mart and the Cave Man’s slow starts this season, the additions of Dalembert(BEAR!) and Parsons have brought the defense, rebounding, and shot-blocking that the team’s other starters (ahem, Martin/Scola) generally lack.
And then Kyle Lowry became a one man monster truck rally (does this mean we can start calling him ‘Gravedigger’? I vote, yes).
If the team continues to improve, Rockets fans could be watching playoff games in the Toyota Center for the first time in three years. I know that for those of us who’s expectations are only fulfilled by legitimate title contention, (which is pretty much the reason they play, I understand) a first or second round playoff loss, a lower draft seed, and the strong probability of the same outcome next year just isn’t enough.
I, for one, though, have had a rough couple of months, as both a basketball fan and a human, and I’m personally glad to see the thing that I irrationally care about enjoy a measure of success, even if that measure is small. And while against my better/more logical judgment, I’ll be rooting for this team to win every game it possibly can because pride and dignity are curiously infectious and sometimes even a little is just enough.
