HOUSTON — Kevin Durant’s first Houston Rockets season did not go as intended.
On Friday night at Toyota Center, while his teammates attempted to force a decisive Game 7 against the Los Angeles Lakers, Durant sat on the bench in street clothes with a sprained left ankle. He could only watch as the Lakers shifted into cruise control and the Rockets staggered toward the end of their season.
When the final buzzer sounded on the Lakers’ 98-78 win, the Rockets were right back where they were at the end of last season: exiting the playoffs in the first round.
In Houston’s locker room after the game, players exchanged hugs and gifted each other jerseys, relics of a season that failed to meet the raised expectations set when the Rockets traded last summer for Durant, who was injured for all but one playoff game against the Lakers.
The Rockets have suffered first-round playoff exits in back-to-back seasons, both in series where coach Ime Udoka said it felt like his team "got behind the eight ball."
Against the Lakers, who were missing Luka Doncic, the Rockets lost the first three games – two without Durant – but avoided elimination by winning the next two games to force the series back to Houston for Game 6. Friday’s blowout 20-point loss was the Rockets’ lowest-scoring game of the season and among the lowest-scoring playoff games in franchise history.
Udoka highlighted the growth of Houston’s young core, including the group that started the last three games of the series against the Lakers – Alperen Şengün, Amen Thompson, Reed Sheppard, Jabari Smith Jr. and Tari Eason – and said he was proud of his team’s resilience to battle back in the series. But he also acknowledged that change is necessary going forward.
"We do need to address some needs," Udoka said. "The lack of shooting at times, whether it’s a backup point guard or our young guys did enough this year to kind of run that with Fred (VanVleet) back. And so we’ll take a look at all those things, I think, and have some very interesting conversations on having a little bit of more of a mix instead of some duplicates out there."
The Rockets’ fate this season was accompanied by plenty of hypotheticals. What if Durant had been healthy in the playoffs? What if the Rockets had not lost VanVleet, their starting point guard, and center Steven Adams to injuries earlier in the season?
Şengün said none of those questions crossed his mind in the dying moments of Houston’s season.
"We cannot think about (that) stuff. Whoever is in the court, we fight with them," Şengün said. "Losing them, it wasn’t good, but you stay with it. The goal is always same: just fight, go to the end. We did it with the young guys, including myself in the young guys, too."
In the end, the Rockets’ main issues boiled down to offense. In the playoff series against the Lakers, Houston shot 46.2% from the field in its two wins and 38.6% in its four losses. The Game 3 loss was particularly excruciating, a last-minute meltdown that felt achingly familiar to anyone who watched the Rockets struggle throughout the season to execute at the end of games.
In Game 6, the Rockets didn’t grab offensive rebounds at their typical rate and reverted to bad habits that plagued them earlier in the season. When the Lakers switched, the Rockets failed to create advantages and became stagnant. The ball stuck. Isolation play prevailed.
"It’s a team thing. It’s not any blame to them (players) or myself," Udoka said. "It’s a little combination of both, no doubt, understanding what works for us, what’s worked well, and then not deviating from that. So on me to get them into the sets, on them to run them and do the things we worked on leading into the series."
Udoka reportedly signed a six-year contract extension last summer. Udoka said he and Rockets general manager Rafael Stone will sit down "ASAP" to discuss the roster.
The Rockets have eight players under contract for next season, including Durant, but the team has plenty of decisions to make this summer. Thompson is extension-eligible ahead of his fourth NBA season while Eason, who was drafted by the Rockets with the 17th overall pick in 2022, will become a restricted free agent this offseason.
"I was drafted here, I’ve grown up here, my family’s here," Eason said. "I love Houston. As far as everything else, God knows."
When the Rockets were eliminated by the Golden State Warriors in last season’s playoffs, it was clear that Houston lacked a go-to scorer to catalyze the offense. Durant was brought in to solve that problem. This season, it’s not as easy to identify one main area of need, Smith said.
"I ain’t gonna say we need to make a trade or go out and get somebody, you know what I’m saying? I just think everything we need is in house," Smith said. "Everything that we need is on the bench, coaching us. Everything we need is on the bench behind us, coaching. I think we got it all, but it’s just on us to not have those mental lapses where we lose leads in the fourth quarter early in the season, where you have random three-game losses and stuff like that."
He continued, "I think maturity’s a big part of it but I think if everybody’s going into the offseason and do what they’ve been doing – that’s improving every year, get better, come back a little smarter, come back a little stronger, a little older – I think everything we need is in house right in front of us."
Whether the Rockets decide to run it back or go for a major change, the sting of how the season ended is sure to linger.
"Back-to-back first-round exits, it’s just – it’s rough," Thompson said. "It’s motivation, for sure. I feel like I’m going to be thinking about this all summer."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How a season built around Kevin Durant unraveled in the playoffs
