Basketball Bytes: The Rockets' Ascent Continues
Plus, the NBA players who are excelling in limited minutes.
Welcome to Basketball Bytes — a weekly NBA column in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various basketball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Basketball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
🏀 Rockets Aiming For the Sky
Over the past few seasons, the Houston Rockets have been one of the most fascinating teams in the NBA — and an unlikely source of fascination, at that.
As my colleague Michael Charles and I wrote going into last season, Houston was attempting a novel team-building exercise, taking the youngest roster in the NBA — filled with raw talents (Jalen Green, Jabari Smith Jr., Amen Thompson, etc.) who weren’t even old enough to legally drink, much less know how to play winning NBA basketball — and injecting it with a former Finals coach (Ime Udoka) and veteran newcomers like Fred VanVleet, Dillon Brooks and Jeff Green, all in an attempt to speedrun the transition from rebuilding to contending.
It looked like it was going to work, too, at least for a while last year. Around Christmastime, the Rockets peaked with a 60 percent chance to make the play-in tournament and a 36 percent chance to make the playoffs proper, according to my composite NBA forecast model. Though they eventually tailed off, missing the Western Conference’s final play-in spot by 5 games, the Rockets did finish .500 for the first time in the post-James Harden era, setting themselves up to improve even more in Year 2 of their grand experiment.
Sure enough, what seemed possible a season ago is looking relatively likely now. In that same forecast model, Houston went into Sunday with a 67 percent chance to make the playoffs, nearly double what their odds were at any point last season.1 In the early going, the Rockets rank fifth in the NBA in net rating and No. 2 on defense specifically, which is Udoka’s calling card (and would be the team’s best placement on the defensive side since leading the league in 2017-18).
In going from a net rating of -7.9 in 2022-23 to a +8.6 in 2024-25 — a gain of +16.5 points per 100 possessions — the Rockets are not only the most improved team in the current NBA (by far) over that span, but they are on pace to be the second-most improved team in any three-season stretch since the 1976 ABA merger, trailing only the San Antonio Spurs from their David Robinson-less 1996-97 season to their championship campaign of 1998-99:
Without question, Udoka’s defensive coaching and Houston’s veteran additions have played a huge role in developing the Rockets from a collection of prospects who consistently piled up big losses to a cohesive group that can compete with just about anyone in the league.
But the other major factor in Houston’s resurgence is the improvement of their young players. Jalen Green (22), Alperen Sengun (22), Jabari Smith Jr. (21), Amen Thompson (22) and Tari Eason (23) are all under the age of 24 this season, and all are playing at least 22 minutes per game for the Rockets. With the exception of Thompson, who was a rookie last year, all of the others improved their Estimated RAPTOR ratings from 2022-23 to the present season, in most cases significantly so. After an excellent debut, Thompson also has seen his RAPTOR increase slightly this season.
If we chart out all of the various improvements happening in Houston, most of the Rockets’ core players got better a year ago and have taken yet another leap this season:
The only young Rocket who isn’t on a meteoric upward trajectory is Green, who has taken a step backwards this season (though, again, is still better than he was two years ago). Green has always been one of those puzzling scorers whose visible talent and ability to create shots is at odds with his efficiency and statistical impact, so he may just remain an outlier relative to Houston’s other kids.
But overall, Houston has three of the NBA’s top seven players at age 23 or younger by WAR (Eason, Sengun, Thompson), and five of the Top 36 if we include Smith Jr. and Green. The only team with an average roster age as young and a net rating as strong as the Rockets have is Oklahoma City, which is pretty great company to be in as far as rising teams go.
They may also be able to at least mitigate the dreaded lack-of-playoff-experience penalty some, as VanVleet, Brooks, Green and Steven Adams have collectively played 243 playoff games in their previous careers. (Though it should be noted that this roster’s average prior playoff minutes, weighted by 2024-25 regular season playing time, is just 325.4 — squarely in the danger zone for postseason underperformance.)
But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.
The Rockets first need to actually make the playoffs before they can start thinking about whether this roster is capable of winning once they get there. The way they’ve started, though — and the way their young players are improving — suggests that those next-level plans might become pertinent sooner rather than later.
🏀 The Tari Eason All-Stars
Hey! Let’s talk even more about Tari Eason. For an in-depth analysis of the third-year forward, who was drafted 17th overall out of LSU in 2022, I would highly recommend this recent Substack post by
:
For our purposes here, I simply want to highlight just how excellent Eason’s metrics are this season. After posting an impressive +3.9 Estimated RAPTOR (driven largely by defense) in 22 games before a stress reaction in his leg ended his sophomore season prematurely, Eason now stands out on our chart above with an absurdly high +9.2 RAPTOR rating, including a much-improved +2.6 mark on offense.
Eason’s box-score rate numbers are excellent; he has a highly efficient 122 offensive rating on roughly league-average usage (19.5 percent), while also being the only player in the NBA with both a block rate and steal rate of 4 percent or higher. Moreover, he has the league’s sixth-highest on-court plus/minus and is Top 30 in on-minus-off plus/minus as well.
All of that adds up to the aforementioned off-the-charts Estimated RAPTOR that Eason sports. And yet, he also plays just 22.8 minutes per game — far less playing time than we’d expect from a player with such a great deal of impact when he’s on the floor.
Far be it from me to second-guess Udoka’s coaching decisions — after all, more time for Eason would eat into the minutes of either Dillon Brooks, Jabari Smith Jr. or Amen Thompson, none of whom would be readily unseated (for various reasons) — but it did get me thinking about which other players have the highest RAPTORs in the league while logging fewer than 24 minutes per night:
In pretty much all of these cases, there are reasons why a player might not see the floor as much as their metrics might appear to warrant. For instance, as Bollwinkel points out, Eason’s high-energy brand of two-way game is amazing coming off the bench, but perhaps wouldn’t be able to be maintained in greater minutes. Others, such as Dereck Lively II, limit their own playing time by ranking among the leaders in fouls committed per possession. Some are rookies who still need to earn more minutes, while others are stuck behind more highly regarded (or paid) teammates at the same position.
But I always think it’s interesting for teams to let players test their limits in expanded roles. And if a player like Eason keeps putting up such ridiculous numbers over a growing sample of the season, he leaves his coach no choice but to use him more — whereupon we’ll find out whether those shiny stats hold up or not.
Filed under: NBA, Basketball, Basketball Bytes
This despite losing at home to the Blazers on Saturday night, the second half of a back-to-back set hosting Portland. (They won Game 1 on by 28 Friday.)