A year and a half ago, as those three men preened and posed on a giant platform billowing out clouds of dry ice like a b-boy crew from a severely dumb region of outer space, the Miami Heat seemed like the terrifying beginning to decades full of unimpeded waltzes to NBA championship for teams lucky enough to not just get their hands on one player of an elite caliber, but several. Boston had done a somewhat similar thing a few years earlier, but their amalgamation had seemed more natural, at least as far as basketball observers’ past expectation defined the NBA’s nature, and Beantown’s crew of three had come together at the ends of their careers to achieve what none could alone. Their grouping was a pained admission of failure in a way; while some tried to paint the Miami teamup as such, particularly for the Balding One, most saw this as a corporate merger and inevitable monopoly, a way for these rising, or already blindingly bright, stars to ensure multiple titles for years to come.
Such established dominance didn’t come to fruition immediately, though. No, instead a well constructed collection of veterans led by a single basketball god took down those Heat in last year’s Finals, finally giving the 2004 Pistons some company as an alternate plan to winning a title besides “collect a lot of superstars, preferably three”. In the interim, many have argued that Dirk’s guidance of the Mavericks to the promised land doesn’t deviate too greatly from past champions, but only the 93-94 Rockets stand out so remarkably in memory as a team guided by one hand so greatly (though PER disparities between the top two players on champions of recent years tell a different story, most notably among the Spurs of the early 00′s and the Shaq-led Lakers). What Nowitzki and Dallas’ triumph might ultimately have done on a macro-level is change the strategy: since not every team can collect all of the stars, why not just collect as many of them as you can and instead amass all of the talented role players that those top-heavy teams can no longer afford thanks to their salary obligations up top? Or better yet, why not just do the talented role player collecting through the draft and keep that cap room flexible to be able to nab the first available superstar that will join the team in question? Enter Houston.
The Rockets obviously aren’t the only ones with this idea; the lockout-shortened 2011-12 season has been the year of the team, in its truest form. From the defensive-minded younglings in Philadelphia to the slightly bigger defensive-minded youth in Indiana to the gun-em-to-death athletes in Denver, many squads have found success in 2011 through a reliance on more than just a select group of players on both sides of the ball, replacing star power with good ol’ fashioned manpower, usually obliterating opposing benches with their endless platoons of guys (who can ball). Never before has piling up a collection of good pieces looked like such a viable strategy, even if pundits around the NBA universe seem more than happy to pour a bucket of spirit-crushing upon all who think these teams can actually do anything except take a couple of game come May. Still, this phenomenon might just be new enough that we will get a few years of it to crush the traditional notion of star-collection.
One team with a particularly strange hold on this group is the Portland Trailblazers, a group that seems the natural standard-bearers of the Mavericks’ legacy of last year (since the Mavs themselves don’t quite seem up to the challenge, even if both teams share a 14-11 record at the moment. Look at those point differentials, people). After years of building a Thunder-like trio of stars through the draft, injuries seemed to have robbed them of the Roy/Oden/Aldridge era, leaving just the latter to head a bunch of über-talented, lacking-in-traditional-position players that can basically all shoot, (mostly) all defend (looking at you, Crawford) and all play given the right matchups. If any one team has seen this shift in the traditional power structure of teams and embraced it, it’s been the perennially forward-thinking progressives up in the Pacific Northwest.
Still, Houston holds it own strange place in this new paradigm as a team just waiting to be branded among these contenders, scraping and clawing for its chance both to be respected and completely vindicated once it gets its hands on one of those franchise-direction-shifting studs. Unlike most oft hese teams, the Rockets seem not to have fallen into this state by chance (Utah), portending-failure-turned-good-fortune (Denver) or rebuilding-gone-right (Philadelphia), but rather by outright strategy. While Houston’s GM, Daryl Morey, has taken his fair chance on high-risk assets who could turn out to be stars in Terrence Williams and Hasheem Thabeet, most of Houston’s plan has been to consistently contend with guys that other teams simply thought of as “good, but not good enough”. THose guys, Kyle Lowry and Luis Scola most obviously but several others, have helped turned Houston in to the kind of bare-knuckled, indefatigable grouping of talent that competes with just about any team any night, even as the Rockets’ organization tries at any cost to deal a handful of these men to any team with a disgruntled star that can come be this crowd’s Aldridge or Dirk.
What’s flatly silly about all of the doom and gloom foretold by those who short-sightedly claimed the Heat and its ilk would ruin the NBA landscape was that, for decades, collections of superstars had been ruling the league without (and sometimes with) cries of unfairness, from the Showtime Lakers’ triumvirate of number one picks to the old Boston big three to the Bulls’ ridiculous run with the league’s best player, best rebounder and best all-around player (somehow all different men). Miami’s hutzpah-showing move to snatch all three of the 2010′s prized free agent class was simply a new way of committing to a time-tested, true plan; instead, the Rockets, Nuggets and 76ers look to be the (don’t say trailblazers, don’t say trailblazers) pioneers here, trying what none, or at least very, very few before them, have done: win without the star