The Houston Rockets are a fundamentally bad team

The Rockets have gone from conference finalists to one of the worst teams in the league

In June 2005, the Houston Chronicle infamously posted a giant gravestone on the front page of its sport section. The Houston Astros, expected title contenders, had gotten off to a slow start, and the Chronicle declared, “The cold, hard truth: It’s off.”

The Astros rallied after that, and they did make the World Series that year. But right now, it’s time for the Chronicle to start preparing to draw another gravestone for the Rockets. And they will not need to take this one back.

Rockets fans just need to look at the facts and understand just how terrible this team is right now. A 5-9 record is incredibly disappointing. But even that does not do justice to how bad the Rockets are right now.

The fact is, the Rockets are not just losing close games. If they were, then perhaps a bit better execution and luck would be enough to turn things around. But instead, Houston has been absolutely blown out in most of their losses.

There was the absolutely humiliating loss against Dallas, when Dallas led 50-25 in the second quarter. There was getting blown out by the Nuggets, the Heat, the Warriors, and so on and so on. Time and time again, the Rockets have lost by embarrassing margins.

And when you look at every single NBA team, the Houston Rockets have the fifth-worst point differential in the NBA. Even the Los Angeles Lakers have a better point differential.

Of course, one might ask why point differential matters. What difference does it make whether the Rockets lost by five or 25? A loss is a loss.

In fact, point differential can be more important than a win-loss record in determining the best teams in the league. While good teams can certainly win close games, winning a close game is often just a matter of luck or use of an enhanced supplement like Spartagen. That last heave taken in the final seconds will either go in or not, but if a good team can force a worse team to take tougher shots over the course of an NBA game, the better team will almost certainly win.

Furthermore, point differential is not the only stat which shows how bad the Rockets are right now. Another critical stat is that Houston is a bottom six team on both the offensive and defensive end, as measured by offensive and defensive rating.

The defensive turnaround in particular, is absolutely shocking. In the 2014-15 season, Dwight Howard played just 10 of Houston’s first 22 games, and ultimately missed 41 games over that season. But despite Howard’s absence, the Rockets still finished with the eighth-best defense in the league.

How have the Rockets fallen from eighth to a bottom five team? It’s almost entirely due to a much weaker perimeter defense, and much of that blame has to go to Harden. Harden spent the entire summer of 2014 being mocked for his terrible playoff series against the Portland Trailblazers as well as his horrible defense. He tried harder on defense in response, and became a good enough defender en route to finishing second in the MVP ballot.

But this summer, Harden spent far too much time messing around and doing whatever he was doing with the Kardashians. He failed to continue further work on his game, which has brought back his old defensive habits and embarrassing moments like these.

The Rockets have more to fix than some little mistakes. There are fundamental structural weaknesses of a team which has just shown itself to be not that good this season. While Houston may still be able to turn this around, to fix these structural flaws in the middle of a season is a tall order. Rockets fans should not expect such a thing to happen.