The season’s over for the Rockets. Free Darko’s calling it a movement. The lovely pollinated/uted Spring of South-East Texas is giving way to its brutal bludgeon of a relative that keeps most of us locked in our refrigerators, I mean homes, from May until October. LCD Sound System played its last show. All manner of students and teachers are preparing for the excitement of not seeing each other for a few months, and the tall-socked pageantry of America’s formerly favorite past-time is revving its carbureted engine for another go around the proverbial track. I’m a year older, and, presumably, so is everyone else.
So what can we say we’ve learned from this season, this year, this time we’ve spent watching giants run and jump and chase after an inflated leather ball instead of with our girlfriends, our wives, our responsibilities?
The Rockets are exactly where we left them this time last year: without a chair when the music stopped, with the best record of the teams with the worst records, with an actual lottery ticket’s chance of winning the draft lottery and a sour-grapes lament about the city not being located a little further east. The team is largely still seen as a collection of “scrappy overachievers,” who are otherwise mostly harmless and generally uninteresting.
Despite the shadowy déjà-vu of this particular disappointment, one thing’s for certain. Kyle Lowry is possibly the future.
I say ‘possibly’ because we can only reasonably base this assumption on a month’s worth of production, but what a productive month it was. Lowry’s numbers per game for March: 19.8 points, 8.1 assists, 5.3 rebounds on 47.5% shooting from the field and 42.7% shooting from three.
But if he can continue at the pace he’s set for himself as a starter or even (dear god) build on it, then Kyle Lowry (yes, you’re reading this correctly) could easily count himself among the top ten point guards in the league.
That’s a very hopeful ‘if’ but a welcome one to a Houston faithful without a whole lot of hope or faith to carry into the offseason.
And if this ‘if’ becomes a ‘then’, then the Rockets, with Lowry and Martin, could boast one of the more potent back-courts in the entire N. B. of A.
Here’s to wishful thinking actually being accurate analysis for once.