The Rockets have recently struggled to find consistency in March as we near the tail-end of the season. They are 8-6 since the All-Star weekend and are currently fourth in the West before their fixture tonight against the Lakers.
Kevin Durant’s burner account controversy came to light during the All-Star break, and several voices across the league have expressed concerns about the team’s chemistry ever since.
The problems have become increasingly evident, as even a franchise legend like Vernon Maxwell, who won two championships with the team, sees glaring issues with the team going into the postseason. Maxwell appeared on ‘All the Smoke’ with Matt Barnes and discussed the Rockets’ current state, as they are 15 games away from the playoffs.
Barnes began the criticism by saying that his prediction from the beginning of the season is coming to fruition as the Rockets are struggling without a traditional point guard.
“I said this early in the season, not having Fred Van Fleet was going to hurt them. Uh, I think Aean Thompson has done a great job. He’s putting up great numbers, distributing the ball. KD’s done distributing. Sengun can set the offense, but they don’t have anybody to really run that point.”
“I like Shephard, but he’s more of a scorer. He’s not necessarily your traditional ‘set the table for the talent they have on the offensive end.’ So, I think the point guard position is going to come back to haunt them this season.”
“They’re the bottom five for three-pointers made, the bottom five in turnovers. Losing Fred and Steven Adams has really hurt them. Both those guys are starters,” said Barnes.
While Barnes appreciated Durant’s teammates, Maxwell urged them to step up even more when the defense is throwing everything they have at Durant.
“Like I said last year, all we needed was KD. We got KD, a guy to roll the ball out to get you a bucket. But now everybody is standing around watching KD. And I mean s*** it’s just I don’t know,” Maxwell said.
“They said some s*** about some secret page KD did and talked about some of the players on the team, and it’s f***ing split the goddamn guys up, and guys don’t like to high five each other anymore.”
“No motherfu*kers want to bump chests anymore with each other. Everybody just split up the whole fu*king team. So I don’t know, man. It’s a lot of s*** going on out there in Houston,” the Rockets’ legend added.
After hilariously refusing to take up a hypothetical assistant coaching role with the Rockets, Maxwell’s discussion with Barnes circled back to the main issue: the absence of a traditional point guard.
“So it’ll be interesting to see if they can pull it together and make do with what they have. But I said this at the very beginning of the season, not having a true point guard with this team was going to hurt them,” Barnes said.
“Similar to where they didn’t have a true point guard when KD was in Phoenix with all those high-powered wing scorers they had,” Barnes said, pointing to a deja vu situation for Durant.
“But at the deadline, the trade deadline, why didn’t we go get a motherf****r? It was so many point guards. I mean, there were so many point guards we could have gone and gotten, man,” Maxwell exclaimed in shock.
“I mean, it’s crazy. I just didn’t understand that part. And I don’t know why we wouldn’t have, but that’s just crazy to me. Oh my goodness. Oh s***,”
Durant, at age 37, is currently averaging 25.8 points, 5.5 rebounds, and 4.4 assists while shooting 51.4% from the field and 40.2% from beyond the arc.
While he is arguably playing at an MVP-caliber level, the two-time NBA champion Vernon Maxwell believed that the rest of the team is not helping Durant at the right time and is “standing around” expecting him to do everything.
Maxwell resonated with Kendrick Perkins, Durant’s former teammate, who also claimed that the team’s chemistry clearly looks worse since the burner account controversy came to light.
While it is not clear whether the rumors are true, the idea that a veteran star player on the team could be saying such things about his teammates would certainly create a feeling of discomfort and tension in the locker room.
Kevin Durant has admitted that he takes too much pressure on his own shoulders and should rely on teammates like Amen Thompson, Jabari Smith Jr., Alperen Sengun, and Reed Sheppard a lot more often.
It seems that the biggest issue with the Rockets is not the burner account controversy but the failure to establish a pecking order. Take the Lakers, for example. LeBron James, at age 41, has fallen to third in the order of offensive options for the team, and it has recently been working for them.
Similarly, the Rockets should not use Kevin Durant as their primary ball-handler, as the issues became clear as day during their last game against the Lakers.
Instead, they should use Reed Sheppard or Amen Thompson as the primary ball handlers so that the opposition needs to constantly adjust to the inside-outside threat that a backcourt of Thompson and Sheppard poses.
With players like Jabari Smith Jr. and Kevin Durant as threats to space the floor, the two young guards will have a lot of room to exploit the opposition’s defenses.
A young team like the Rockets should not forget its identity, which they have built since the rebuild started after James Harden left. Their future lies in the hands of their young players, and they should not simply get comfortable because they have a superstar like Kevin Durant on their team.
There is no use in having a superstar on the team if the other players cannot capitalize on the attention Durant draws from the opponent’s defenses. Hence, it is now on the four young players that I just mentioned, Thompson, Smith Jr., Sengun, and Sheppard, to lock in for the rest of the season.
As much as they have the luxury of Durant right now, maybe in a few years, one of them could cement themselves as the next face of the franchise after Durant leaves. And this stretch is pivotal in proving that.
The Rockets have 15 more games in the regular season to fix their problems before they become at risk of facing elimination in the playoffs.
