Exits: Necessary miracles

In Houston this year, Rockets fans began to believe again. It wasn't enough.

There’s a locker room moment that has stayed with me. I was almost a decade younger, sent down to Houston on a reporting trip scarcely knowing what that meant, standing in the home team’s sanctuary before a March game, when Patrick Beverley invited me to chapel. I still don’t know why.

I couldn’t have attended. He also knew my credential didn’t allow me into that room. Yet the sincerity with which he asked it has lingered with me. It wasn’t the conclusion of an interview; we had, in fact, no prior rapport. Perhaps I had an irreverent look to me. I replied with a joke. I don’t remember how, or if, he responded. He exited stage right, down one hallway that must have taken him there.

A couple minutes later, Ryan Anderson entered stage left. He was in more of a hurry; he was headed somewhere fast. He couldn’t have overheard that conversation that happened moments ago. Still, as he strode past, he glanced my way, asked one question.

You wanna go to chapel?

This anecdote became my story’s lede, one built around the paradoxical relationship between a team’s cold Moreyball mathematics and its internal belief it would work. You can still read it. Since publication, though, the carefully crafted formatting, which once looked like this, has crumbled from site redesigns that broke whatever HTML was behind it. The images bleed between paragraphs without any breaks, relegated in the same manner that squad was. In the end, after 27 straight 3s skittered off the rim on that team’s judgment day, it turned out neither faith nor science was enough to defeat golden (state) gods.

I still wonder about that moment. Was this something Beverley and Anderson had concocted to prank stray reporters? Had spiritual revival actually come to Houston that day? Beverley, we now know, could’ve listened more intently to the morality within those sermons. But how those two synchronized just then will always baffle me. It’s unlike anything I’ve experienced since.

Anyway, the extent the 2026 Houston Rockets resemble that team is more akin to the mangled web code that remains of my story.

Those were formative years, ones which shaped my own hoops worldview that has always oscillated between science and faith. The stories that have filled my author pages have flipflopped between analytical breakdowns and overwritten religious motifs. Stories that stress that to think like front offices do are the best way to explain what happens in the billion-dollar corporate sector of bouncing leather. Other pieces that lament thinking that way loses what charm and artistic expression draws us to these Pacific Rim-esque clashes in the first place.

I didn’t understand this year’s Rockets. I loved them deeply, but they made no sense to me.

The math says this team had the seventh-best offense and fourth-best defense this regular season. Did it ever feel that way? The D’Antonism once practiced upon my first visit has long been expelled in an inquisition; this current team, instead, was a clusterfuck of contradictions. Take the offense, co-led by the sleekest athlete you’ve ever seen, fittingly named Amen, and also a biomechanics enthusiast’s nightmare. (‘Şengün’ translates to ‘joyful days’; that’s another strike against normative determinism.) What you love about your 1999 Honda Accord isn’t its sunroof, but its reliability no matter how it looks.

Add to that a shep(p)ard, a son of a father, and a nomadic crusader-for-hire, one who rejected his Slim Reaper moniker, saying, “I’m here to shine a bright light.” If that 2018 team had faith, this one did, too, but with each player boasting their own theology. That heterorthodoxy plagued their season. The same front office that saw some Steve Nash in Reed Sheppard was pitted against an Ime Udoka, eyes wide open like A Clockwork Orange, who saw another missed rotation. How unassumingly Jabari Smith Jr. embraced his role player path, to Kevin Durant, was proof he was too weak. Even Fred VanVleet, who the front office described as a savior, came to be seen within the fandom as the golden calf enabling those in charge to ignore their earthly suffering.

I mean, come on. Houston’s season even met its death at the hands of a king named James.

Photo credit Erik Williams

What I saw from Rockets fans this season, more often than not, was bewilderment. At Sheppard’s usage, at the front office’s acquire-any-point-guard abstinence, for Durant’s leaked DMs (which, trust us, no one was even bothered by, the #sources said), for how headless the late game offense always looked. That Steven Adams, even beloved by all mankind as he is, couldn’t have his offensive rebounding be the face of this team.

Durantless and doomed, facing its 0-3 humiliation with no more appeals left to proffer, the fandom’s joy finally seemed to come in this season’s final games. We all most love the scrappy upstarts, something Durant, despite how he became this squad’s best player from the first game, had taken from this team’s base. Starting five players, all 25 years old and under, was when that us-against- mentality returned to a fanbase. It came from the Sheppard bounce-back game, when Şengün took the coach’s chair. It was a callback from what Durant had taken: Really, the fandom’s innocence. Against the dying light, even if it was doomed this time, what I saw were fans that believed again.

Houston’s front office, like any other’s, has no room for these aesthetical musings. It’s tasked with the numbers, with making them go up. But those rising numbers didn’t tell Houston’s story. They always felt fraudulent, and the ending made that indisputably true. So we’re left in a lurch between what the data says, even despite itself, and what the fans yearn for. Because if the data doesn’t back its art, we’re forever stuck wanting to return to that innocent gap between science and conviction.

I would prefer almost anything to what the front office seems likeliest to do: run this same team back next season, almost through indecision rather than choice, in hopes its now risen messianic figure of a point guard can perform this team’s necessary miracles.

Perhaps it’s not chapel invitations this team needs, but an invite to Durant’s burner group chats where, hopefully, this team’s moral clarity can be found.