Hey there, Last Night In Basketballers — I am, as I do every year, re-appropriating the Three Things I Noticed on League Pass format to preview the upcoming season. Instead of three things I noticed, it’ll be something more along the lines of three things I’m looking forward to, interested in, or want to see. Some of them might be narrative-based, some might be stats, and some might include video. But they'll all be focused on the 2026-27 campaign.
The schedule for those posts will be as follows (podcasts previewing each division with Mo Dakhil are in parentheses):
- Atlantic Division (BOS, BKN, NYK, PHI, TOR) (Podcast)
- Central Division (CHI, CLE, DET, IND, MIL) (Podcast)
- Southeast Division (ATL, CHA, MIA, ORL, WAS) (Podcast)
- Pacific Division (GSW, LAC, LAL, PHX, SAC) (Podcast)
- Northwest Division (DEN, MIN, OKC, POR, UTA) (Podcast)
- Southwest Division (DAL, HOU, MEM, NOP, SAS) (Podcast)
So without further ado, let's get to the Houston Rockets, who flamed out of the playoffs in disappointing fashion last year.
Fred VanVleet, load-bearing
The Rockets sorely missed VanVleet last season. They had little in the way of offensive organization. They got into their sets very slowly (fourth-slowest in the NBA, according to GeniusIQ tracking), which led to their taking more shots in the final four seconds of the shot clock than any team other than the Hornets, per NBA Advanced Stats. They had one of the lowest assist rates in the league, instead counting on players like Kevin Durant and Alperen Sengun to repeatedly go one-on-one in order to create their shots.
They finished the season in the bottom half of the league in three of the four factors on offense: effective field goal percentage (18th), free-throw rate (20th), and turnover rate (22nd). They somehow ground out a top-10 offense despite that fact, thanks to their absolutely massive offensive rebound rate (first by a mile), but everything was a lot more difficult than it had to be, because they didn't really have a point guard on hand to do point guard things.
Reed Sheppard and Aaron Holiday were the only players on the team who were nominally point guards. Sheppard didn't have the coach's trust, as was made obvious by the fact that he couldn't even start despite being the only real point guard on the roster, as well as by the way his minutes and touches were often jerked around throughout the year. (Amen Thompson was resultingly probably miscast as a true lead ball-handler, even if I think the idea that he regressed last season while playing that role is somewhat overstated.) And Holiday has been a point guard in name only throughout his career.
I've often talked about how teams are essentially drawing dead offensively when they don't have good point guard play. The Rockets disproved that to a certain extent during the regular season, but their playoff offense was a disaster, as they slumped to 105.4 points per 100 possessions, which would have ranked dead last during the regular season by more than 3 points per 100.
VanVleet returning should help. They should be more organized. They'll have another shooter on the floor, even if it's one who can't get to the basket anymore and isn't really good at making shots from inside the arc. But boy, counting on 32-year-old VanVleet, coming off a torn ACL, to be such a lynchpin of the offense feels dicey. You shouldn't be in a situation where you desperately need him to turn back the clock to three years ago in order for your offense to function correctly outside of grabbing offensive rebounds.
Alas, that is the situation in which the Rockets find themselves — unless Thompson takes another step forward as a ball-handler and/or Sheppard does the same and Ime Udoka decides that he finally trusts Sheppard enough to keep him on the floor even when he makes a mistake.