As the Utah Jazz beat reporter, I wouldn’t normally take up an entire article talking about the plights of an opposing team, but the situation in Houston is so interesting to me that I’m doing exactly that tonight.
On Friday the Rockets came into Salt Lake City with an injury report that read as follows: Dante Exum (right calf strain), Eric Gordon (right groin strain), Rodions Kurucs (left oblique strain), P.J. Tucker (not with team), John Wall (left knee contusion), Danuel House Jr. (right knee contusion), Victor Oladipo (quad injury maintenance), Christian Wood (right knee sprain).
That’s a lot, and it doesn’t even begin to explain how ridiculous this season has been for the Rockets.
Most recently, the Rockets lost Gordon for 4-6 weeks after he injured his groin in Thursday’s game against the Sacramento Kings. But even before that game the injury situation wasn’t great, and then Tucker just decided he wasn’t going to play.
Tucker has been pushing for a trade from the Rockets and is reportedly upset that it hasn’t happened yet. According to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, Tucker prefers not to play until the team moves him elsewhere. That was not something that Rockets head coach Stephen Silas was aware of before Thursday’s game.
“I was under the assumption that he was going to be playing tonight, and he didn’t play,” Silas said after the loss to the Kings. “That was disappointing, but there’s no secret that it’s been a rough year.”
A rough year is an understatement.
Let’s not forget that this is Silas’ first year as head coach and he kicked off that accomplishment by having to deal with James Harden. Training camp started without Harden, who preferred to go to clubs and birthday parties without a mask on during a pandemic and made it perfectly clear that he was not interested in playing with the Rockets.
Since then there’s been a ton of player turnover, enough injuries to make anyone’s head spin, COVID-19 cases and contact tracing issues, and the hits just keep on coming. Oh, and I should probably mention that the Rockets are second-to-last in the Western Conference standings, have lost 15 straight games, and their owner is largely regarded as the cheapest owner in the league and regularly the butt of NBA jokes.
Before the Rockets took on the Jazz on Friday, Silas said that after the loss to the Kings, David Nwaba came up to him and said that it was a struggle for him to watch the team so depleted and that even though he was injured, he was willing to play the next night in Salt Lake City if Silas needed him.
Before the All-Star break it was expected that Nwaba was going to get surgery on his injured wrist, that he’d be out for weeks, and instead the guy is playing through pain just so the Rockets can field enough players to have a bench rotation.
“It’s tough to watch those guys go out there and compete every night,” Nwaba said. “With all these injuries I just thought I had to get out there and help even though I’m not 100 percent.”
Silas is hopeful that over the next week Wall and Wood will be able to rejoin the team, and Oladipo is only out on second games of back-to-backs, but even then, he barely knows what his team is going to look like from one night to the next.
Kevin Porter Jr., the Rockets’ leading scorer on Friday, just got back from the G League bubble and the loss to the Jazz was just his second game with Houston. Justin Patton has been in the league for four years and has played mostly with the G League over that time. Friday was just his 17th NBA appearance and he started at center for the Rockets.
Silas was asked before Friday’s game how soon he’d like to have some clarity on what his rotations are actually going to look like.
“As soon as possible,” he said. “I’d like to know who’s injured, who’s not, who’s available. I think the sooner we can get to a point where we know what our starting lineup is going to be what our rotation is going to be off the bench, the better it’ll be for the group. Obviously it hasn’t been like that all season, but hopefully at some point it will be, it’ll be like that.”
It’s bleak that he is even answering questions like that halfway through the season.
I guess that the point of all of this is to highlight the job that Silas is doing with what little is available to him. That rag-tag squad he fielded on Friday gave the Jazz a run for their money and played really hard. That doesn’t happen after everything the Rockets have been through without someone excellent leading the way.