Houston Sports: Three New Year’s wishes for Houston teams

Houston Rockets

The first round of wishes comes for the Houston sports team, the Houston Rockets. Recently, the Houston Rockets have been on a tear winning nine of their last ten games. With this, they now find themselves oddly enough in fifth place at 20-15, just two losses behind Golden State, who sits in third.

It does help that they’re doing so without Paul as Houston is 4-0 since he went down. It also helps that Harden, love him or hate him, is lighting up the NBA averaging 39.4 ppg in the last ten games. But the addition of Austin Rivers, a former Clipper who played a role in the tunnel-gate scandal in LA, has helped Houston get themselves on a roll.

Although Houston is playing well right now, there are questions that everyone is asking. Can Harden keep this up all season long? There are 82 games in a season and the Rockets are asking the reigning MVP to step up and carry the team to the promise land every night. Harden can accept the challenge. But the question becomes suppose the Rockets make the playoffs, will he show up?

Harden’s reputation is at best questionable. A player who takes a lot of shots while drawing fouls that are not even close to contact can certainly have hate. But Harden hasn’t performed the same level he had in the playoffs. Sure, he averaged 28.6 ppg in the postseason a year ago, which was his career high. But can he keep this up and step up to the challenge and not hide? Also, will Paul’s injury come back to bite the Rockets in the latter part of this season?

Wish #1 – Make a playoff run and beat the Warriors

Here’s what I hope for. The Houston Rockets might not finish with the best record in the NBA this season. But they could put together a strong playoff run much like last year. I hope the Rockets can find a way to accept the role of being underdogs very well. If Houston can finish as the #4 or #5 seed, this would certainly not put pressure on the Rockets, unlike last season. Houston has to have a chip on their shoulder knowing that everyone outside the locker room will expect another team to win.

As far as beating the Warriors, that would be huge. Golden State is starting to show some cracks in their team. That doesn’t mean their dynasty is over by any means. But at some point, somebody will have to knock them off to have a chance to be NBA champions. We had our shot last year and we didn’t get the job done.

So why not hope that we get a rematch and hope that this time, we succeed in beating the Warriors. It’ll be tough for sure. But we made a big statement to the Warriors earlier this year that we scared them last year to where they ended up getting Demarcus Cousins, who has yet to suit up this season.

So for my first wish is for the Rockets to make the playoff run, beat Golden State, and hopefully surprise the basketball world by pulling off another remarkable finals appearance much like another Rockets team.