Though they haven’t won an NBA title, the decade of the 2010s will likely be remembered fondly in the history of Houston Rockets basketball.
Dating back to 2010, the Rockets have the fourth-most wins among the NBA’s 30 franchises. They’ve advanced to the Western Conference Finals twice in the past five years, which they hadn’t previously done since 1997.
They also added one of the top players in team history — and likely NBA history — in 2018 MVP and reigning scoring champion James Harden.
Led by renowned GM Daryl Morey, here’s a look back at some of the franchise’s most influential moves over the past decade.
(Editor’s note: There will be a separate list of the team’s top games of the decade, since it would be tough to compare any individual game to a transaction — with the latter often shaping the roster for years.)
Honorable Mention
The Russell Westbrook trade — For now, the July 2019 trade of Chris Paul and draft considerations to Oklahoma City for former league MVP Russell Westbrook leads the “honorable mention” category. That’s not to diminish his potential impact, however. Rather, it reflects the limited sample, with Westbrook having played just 28 games with the Rockets.
It’s been a largely successful start to the Harden-Westbrook partnership, with the Rockets at 21-10 and Westbrook averaging 24.1 points, 8.1 rebounds, and 7.1 assists per game. But this trade will ultimately be judged by what the duo does and leads the team to in future playoff runs.
It could eventually be remembered as the decade’s most meaningful move, if it leads the Rockets to their first NBA title since 1995. It could also be remembered as a disaster, if Houston struggles in the postseason and the draft picks given up to the Thunder end up being high ones due to a future rebuild. As the decade concludes, it’s far too soon to tell.
Hiring Mike D’Antoni — Houston’s current head coach prefers the focus to be on his players. However, he deserves ample credit for his own role in their success. Since taking the team’s reins in the 2016-17 season, the Rockets have the highest winning percentage of any NBA team.
It’s easy to forget, but before D’Antoni was hired in the 2016 offseason, the Rockets were at a bit of a crossroads as a franchise. The 41-41 record of the 2015-16 season remains the only season of the Harden era that Houston did not finish with a winning record, and many around the league believed Morey should make a philosophical change to a more traditional approach. The hire was not well received by many at the time.
As it turned out, the D’Antoni hire doubled down on the team’s three-point-heavy and analytics-oriented approach and brought total alignment to the organization. Since then, nearly the entire NBA has dramatically shifted its shot charts, with the success of D’Antoni’s Rockets blazing a trail that others have since followed.
D’Antoni won the NBA’s 2016-17 Coach of the Year award as Houston improved from 41-41 to 55-27, and he now has the highest regular-season and postseason winning percentages in Rockets history.
No. 5: Drafting Clint Capela
Now in his sixth season overall and fourth as the team’s starting center, Clint Capela is currently averaging 13.9 points (64.2% shooting), 14.4 rebounds, and 1.9 blocks in 33.6 minutes per game. That 14.4 rebounding total is the second highest in the entire NBA this season. But it’s easy to forget that Capela wasn’t supposed to be this good, considering he was drafted just 25th overall in the 2014 NBA Draft.
For title contenders like the Rockets, draft picks are often trade assets for immediate veteran help. For example, Houston’s last three first-round picks were dealt as part of trades in 2017, 2018, and 2019 for Lou Williams, Chris Paul, and Iman Shumpert. Thus, a contender such as Houston needs to hit on some of the limited draft selections it keeps in order to maintain a pipeline of younger talent.
Capela isn’t considered by most to be a star, but he’s a very good role player at a minimum. And at just 25 years old, he’s still one of the youngest players in Houston’s current rotation — even though he’s in his sixth season.
Another reason drafting an impact player is crucial is because it allows the team to take advantage of the player’s initial contract. In Capela’s case, being drafted near the end of the first round, that meant a four-year contract near the league’s minimum salary. When the max-salary contract of former center Dwight Howard expired after the 2015-16 season, Morey was able to re-allocate those funds into additional shooters for D’Antoni’s offense such as Eric Gordon and Ryan Anderson. That shift happened in large part due to Capela’s presence as a cheap, in-house replacement as the starting center.
While Morey has certainly brought in other excellent role players this decade — Gordon, P.J. Tucker, and Trevor Ariza at the top of the list — those players were signed using either cap space or the Mid-Level Exception (MLE). When using those types of resources, the player is supposed to be good, or at least to an extent. To draft a player as accomplished as Capela late in the first round is rare, and that’s why it’s one of Morey’s finest moves of the decade.
No. 4: The Kyle Lowry Trade
It’s often forgotten, but the biggest reason the legendary October 2012 trade for Harden became possible resulted from a separate innovative deal that Morey pulled off several months earlier.
The Rockets were at a crossroads entering the 2012 offseason. They had winning records in the last three seasons, but hadn’t made the playoffs in any of them. They needed an All-Star talent to take them to a higher level, but their middling records meant that they weren’t securing draft picks that were high enough to acquire those types of talents.
When Morey dealt promising young guard Kyle Lowry to the Raptors in July 2012 for a future first-round selection, it made sense on multiple fronts. For starters, it was the first time a draft pick used in a trade had reverse protection. To that point, many NBA trades included clauses to protect the team dealing the pick, in case later circumstances made that draft pick much more valuable than anticipated. For example, in that deal, Toronto would have deferred trading the pick to Houston to a later year had the pick been extremely high in the first round.
However, the Lowry deal was the first time that both teams were protected. While Toronto had the clause protecting it in case the Raptors were worse than expected, Morey inserted a clause protecting the Rockets in case Toronto was better than expected. In other words, if the Raptors had a strong season and the pick was late in the first round — the pick would not convey to Houston that year. Instead, the pick conveyal would be delayed until it was in a satisfactory range for both teams.
This protected the Rockets from an asset perspective. In essence, Morey believed that a quality first-round draft pick would have more value in trades because it would have more utility. The draft choice — if assured of being high enough — was attractive in that it could be used on whatever player and position the receiving team wanted, whereas Lowry was a known quantity and might not be a fit for some rosters.
The second reason for the Lowry trade was that Morey and the Rockets seemed to realize after three consecutive seasons on the so-called “mediocrity treadmill” that they might have to take one step back in order to eventually take multiple steps forward. In addition to the future draft pick being a better asset, taking a good player in Lowry off the roster meant that the 2012-13 Rockets would, in theory, boost the value of their own draft pick that following year.
Fortunately, the Rockets never had to find out how that plan would work — because the Lowry pick was used as the centerpiece of the Harden deal just days before the next regular season began.
In the end, both franchises clearly won in this trade, since Lowry was a big part of Toronto’s 2019 NBA championship squad.
No. 3: Signing Dwight Howard
Though the Dwight Howard era ended in a relative whimper with the 41-41 season in 2015-16, after which he left in free agency for Atlanta, it’s hard to argue that it wasn’t a successful signing overall.
Prior to luring Howard, the Morey era in Houston had been remembered for its swings and misses, when it came to pursuing star players in free agency. (Remember the iPad pursuit of Chris Bosh?)
By contrast, landing the top free agent on the market in July 2013 put the Rockets on the map as a contender.
In the ensuing 2013-14 season, the Rockets improved from 45-37 to 54-28. During 2014-15, they won two more games and advanced to their first Western Conference Finals in 18 years, with “Playoff Dwight” playing a large role. In probably the most memorable game of his era, Howard had 20 points and 21 rebounds in Houston’s epic Game 6 comeback against the Clippers in the 2015 second round — with the Rockets facing elimination and down by 19 points in the second half.
Houston went on to win the series in seven games.
In three seasons as Houston’s starting center, Howard averaged 16.0 points (60.1% shooting), 11.7 rebounds, and 1.6 blocks in 32.2 minutes per game. He never took them to the championship that the downtown celebration upon his July 2013 arrival seemed to portend, but Howard was a big part of the franchise’s growth in the middle part of the decade.
No. 2: Trading for Chris Paul
The Los Angeles Clippers certainly did well for themselves in the Chris Paul trade back in June 2017, with the acquisitions of Pat Beverley, Montrezl Harrell, Lou Williams, and a future first-round draft pick from the Rockets still paying dividends today. If the Clippers ultimately win a title in this era with those three former Rockets as key role players, it could eventually be argued that they “won” the trade.
Yet, no matter the end result in the months and years ahead, it’s also a deal that the Rockets almost had to make. The 2016-17 season ended with a 39-point home loss in Game 6 of the second round in which Harden and D’Antoni’s Rockets were overwhelmed by a San Antonio Spurs team that didn’t even have Kawhi Leonard. At that time, an offseason of making moves at the margins to add or improve depth wasn’t likely to elevate the Rockets to a contending level. Like most NBA teams of this era, they needed (at least) a second All-Star talent.
Enter Paul. In his first season in Houston, the future Hall of Famer averaged 18.6 points, 7.9 assists, and 5.4 rebounds per game as the Rockets went 65-17 — by far their best record in franchise history. The season ended in heartbreak, with the Rockets losing in seven games to the star-studded Golden State Warriors in the Western Conference Finals. Houston took a 3-2 lead in the series after five games, but Paul pulled his hamstring late in Game 5 and was unable to return.
Ultimately, though, Paul’s presence was the only reason they were likely a game from the NBA title in the first place.
A little over a year later, Paul’s roster presence (and corresponding salary slot) was an essential part of making the math work for the capped-out Rockets on the July 2019 trade for Westbrook.
Though Paul played just two seasons in Houston, it’s clear the Rockets are in a better position as a franchise than they were in May 2017 prior to his arrival. He was also one of the two lead stars on the most dominant team in franchise history. For those reasons, despite his abbreviated tenure, the Chris Paul trade was near the top of the list for 2010s deals.
No. 1: The James Harden Trade
This one is easy. On Oct. 27, 2012, Morey agreed to trade Kevin Martin, Jeremy Lamb, the aforementioned Toronto draft pick, and other future draft considerations to the Oklahoma City Thunder for James Harden, and it changed the course of modern NBA history.
Since then, Harden has become an MVP, a multi-time scoring champion, and one of the league’s most dominant and unstoppable players. At just 30 years old, the future Hall of Famer is already among the best two or three players in Rockets franchise history, and he’s increasingly creeping into the conversation about the NBA’s best players of all-time.
His current scoring average of 38.1 points per game is the highest of any NBA player in the last 56 years, and his scoring streak last season of 30+ points in 32 straight games was the second longest in NBA history.
He’s also shown extreme loyalty to Houston by signing multiple contract extensions with the Rockets in an era where many of his NBA All-Star peers have routinely switched teams. In turn, his willingness to secure his future for multiple seasons moving forward has helped make the Rockets attractive to other star talents such as Howard, Paul, and Westbrook.
Harden is still seeking his first title as the Rockets and the NBA transition into the 2020s. But his arrival is easily the biggest reason the Rockets have had chances and should continue to have them in the years ahead.
(Editor’s note: There will be a separate list coming in the days ahead of Houston’s top games of the decade. Happy holidays!)
