By: Forrest Walker
Are the Houston Rockets any good? If you lock them in a box with another NBA team and let them play basketball, you should get an answer. Much like Schrödinger's cat, the team's waveform should collapse upon observation, informing us of whether they're good or bad. Unfortunately, this team can beat the San Antonio Spurs impressively one day and then fritter away a win against the discombobulated New Orleans Pelicans literally the very next day. The Rockets are the thought experiment that Schrödinger designed to prove how ludicrous quantum physics are, and their continued superposition of life and death is just as confusing.
That's the secret, by the way. Schrödinger's cat was the product of a series of letters to Albert Einstein about the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, and it was meant to show that obviously a particle can't be in two states simultaneously. (The jury's still out on that.) Well, ol' Schrödinger's rolling in his grave today, because an entire basketball team is existing both as a terrible lottery team and as a first round favorite. The Rockets are 32 games into the NBA season and it's impossible to tell what they are.
The Rockets can step into their gym and play the kind of defense that props up championship hopes. We've seen them do it as recently as yesterday. Their offense looks unstoppable at times. When they're engaged and well leveraged their copious amounts of talent shine through and this team looks like the contender everyone thought they were. Then just a few hours later they forget to call a timeout with seven seconds left and just sort of run around like they forgot what basketball is.
The Rockets took lead after lead against the Pelicans, and they also gave up lead after lead. Double-digit-to-nothing runs permeated the evening on both sides, and the Rockets might have ripped off a run of their own if the game was 50 minutes long. Unfortunately for Houston, the NBA version of basketball is 48 minutes long, and the end fit snugly into one of the periods when the whole team was terrible. James Harden and head coach J.B. Bickerstaff worked as hard as they could to fall back down to .500 yet again, which is a perfectly reasonable place for a team that's both good and bad at the same time.
How else to explain Patrick Beverley temporarily turning into Steph Curry for a few minutes and nailing three after three? Beverley did the patented (but by whom?) cooking dance and then promptly missed a pile of three pointers and helped torpedo the team. The Rockets continually forgot what defense was, especially in transition. Unless they were locking down the Pelicans, which they did for a couple minutes at a time because when you can be frustrating and inconsistent you just have to go for it.
James Harden took turns shooting the Rockets into the game and back out of it. He also got in early foul trouble, which J.B. Bickerstaff handled by smartly letting him play in the first quarter then foolishly pulling him out in the third. Why be a bad coach or a good coach when you can be both? Let's go ahead and forget to call for a timeout when the team rebounds the ball down 2 with 7 seconds on the clock! Then when the Rockets had a mere 1.7 seconds to inbound the ball, still down 2, they basically ran in circles and unsurprisingly couldn't inbound the ball. But, hey, at least Harden kept missing threes in isolation plays down the stretch.
Losing to a division rival is bad. No matter what your expectations for the season, you need those wins, and the Rockets' huge hopes are crashing down to earth without wins to buoy them. They're winning too many games and they're too talented and too formidable when engaged to be a bad team. But they also throw away ever lead they get and spend half their season generating confusing, frustrating losses to inferior teams, which is a sign of a bad team.
So will they come out on Tuesday and drop a stinker against the Atlanta Hawks? Probably. Will the they wake up and blow out a decent team? Probably. Will it be both? Sure, why not? Maybe the team can shoot 24% from the field and win by 30 or something equally impossible. There's no telling if this team is good or bad, because they're both, at the same time, in the same place. Schrödinger's team is tough to watch.
