Rockets could get boost from NBA's break - Houston Chronicle

The Rockets never thought of themselves as a sixth-seed sort of team. Though that worked out for them 25 years ago, when the reigning champion Rockets became the only sixth seed to win a championship, the 2019-20 Rockets considered their place in the standings when the season was halted in March to be an anomaly.

Amid an increasing expectation that the season will resume in late July, with the plans for schedules and playoff formats likely to be formalized with a Board of Governors vote on Thursday, the Rockets have come to think the layoff and restart might be good for their expectation to be better than a team in the lower portion of the playoff bracket.

As much as any potential benefit from the circumstances can never come close to the horrible cost of the coronavirus crises that so disrupted the season, the Rockets believe when they get to Disney’s little Hooptown outside of Orlando for training camp 2.0 and the restart of the season, circumstances might bring a return to contender status.

“I’ve thought about it a lot; the layoff could help,” Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni said. “Probably the biggest advantage is it will give us an extra month with a brand-new team that didn’t have a training camp (together) and was thrown in the mix of things in the middle of the season. We’re able to capitalize on a training camp for a brand-new team.”

They will not be the only team that will think that way when conversations return to the familiar basketball topics. In unprecedented circumstances, a return of the usual training camp optimism, along with the customary muscle watch reports of how players look when they report, could be welcome.

Even before then, once a restart plan is made official, the teams that benefit the most could be those that had players out with injuries in March that will be back in July. The Sixers getting Ben Simmons back or the Bucks having Giannis Antetokounmpo at full strength would change things.

The Rockets expect a version of that. There is a reason so much talk has been about Eric Gordon’s importance in the eventual postseason. Having spent much of the season coming back from knee surgery, he was able to spend the hiatus training as he could not between games.

Much had been made of James Harden’s similar training. Though the Rockets believe Harden — on his way to a third-consecutive scoring championship — did pretty well before he looked as if he could raid Russell Westbrook’s closet, a thinner version of Harden might better avoid the shooting slumps that marked the second half of the season before the stoppage.

How the NBA returns likely will not be a great factor in how well the Rockets might play, other than they can use some regular-season games and/or scrimmages before a postseason begins. It has seemed increasingly likely that the league would not go directly into the playoffs. If it did, as the sixth seed, the Rockets would face the Denver Nuggets. In a one-through-16 playoff bracket regardless of conference, they would face the Utah Jazz.

Either way, in the one-site scenario, the Rockets would not face the penalties of losing homecourt advantage against teams especially strong at home. Even if a limited regular-season schedule fails to move them back toward the top half of the standings (the Rockets were tied for fifth and 2.5 games from third) neutral site games would remove the damage caused by the four-game losing streak they broke March 10.

That losing streak and the tactics used by opponents could even provide useful information that so dramatically changed with roster moves to add Jeff Green, Robert Covington and DeMarre Carroll and the change to a center-free playing style with the injury and eventual trade of Clint Capela.

“We were just barely tip-toeing into it and getting them how we want them to play while trying to get a good seed or get up in the standings,” D’Antoni said. “Now we’ll have close to a month — that’s what we hear, but don’t know — but two to four weeks to fine-tune some of the stuff that’s hard to iron out during the season.”

D’Antoni has had enough time during the layoff to study each Rockets’ play with the same focus coaches normally devote to entire games before moving on to the next one. That’s more than enough to clarify and reinforce “How we want to play and how we need to play.

“Just seeing some of the things we need to shore up defensively, those are the main things,” he said. “We know we have to play faster. We have to be relentless about driving the ball to the basket, kicking it out for 3s and not settling. I think that’s pretty evident.”

Other teams that consider themselves contenders will try to get back to where they were. The Rockets will seek to evolve and even experiment in ways they could not in the rush of games.

“We’ve made some pretty material changes and I do think … the second/first training camp, all else equal, maybe favors us,” Rockets general manager Daryl Morey said. “It’s more time. When you make a trade at the trade deadline, you’re right there playing important games immediately. If you’re a head coach, you can’t take a lot of risky moves in terms of trying different combinations.

“If you have a training camp — and it’s still unknown how we’ll restart — and some exhibition games in there you have a little window to try things and see how they might look before you have the stress of trying them in a game that counts in the standings or the playoffs.”

Success for every team will depend greatly on the fitness levels of players returning from an unprecedented, in-season layoff. Fitness cannot be determined by videos or photos on Instagram. But the NBA is expected this week to expand the sore of individual workouts at facilities that are permitted and provide time to prepare for a July training camp.

“You don’t know how guys come back. You don’t know how guys will respond,” D’Antoni said. “I do feel we have a veteran team and guys, some of them, have been through strikes and different things and had to get ready quickly. I do feel good about where we are.

“I’m excited about it, I really am. We’ve had a theme all year that it’s in that locker room. It’s in there somewhere. We have to harness it and unleash it.”

It appears certain they will get that chance, with familiar optimism likely for many teams returning even before a plan is put in place.

jonathan.feigen@chron.com

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