National Basketball Association

Warriors-Rockets will be about more than Curry, Harden

Published May. 19, 2015 9:23 a.m. ET

Sam Gardner

Though the NBA playoffs have been thrilling and at times unpredictable thus far, the Western Conference finals have ultimately left many fans with what they expected to see from the start: the No. 2 seed Houston Rockets looking to thwart the top-seeded Golden State Warriors and a championship run that has felt like an inevitability since roughly mid-December.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course.

The Warriors, behind the stellar play of MVP Stephen Curry, have been a buzzsaw in the West virtually since Day 1, and they’ve done so while remaining impossibly likeable for a team that’s as good as they are. Meanwhile, Houston has more than enough talent to keep the series competitive and enough personality to keep it interesting even if the former doesn’t pan out.

Still, chalk is chalk, and that’s what we’re left with — not just in the West, but also in the East, as well.

And while it might not be especially wise to bet on this one to become the first Western Conference finals since 2002 to require the full seven games, the series should still make for must-watch programming if only because the Warriors and Rockets have both consistently proven that you never know what you might see from them on a given night.

Schedule (all games 9 p.m. ET, ESPN)

*If necessary

It’s easy to point to the Warriors’ roster, which won 51 games last season, and say Kerr simply inherited a deep, cohesive, star-laden team, and Kerr himself would probably tell you that there’s a degree of truth to that. He knows a thing or two about good fortune, after he nearly took the Knicks job before reportedly reneging on a verbal deal with Phil Jackson and settling on Golden State — a serendipitous decision in itself.

But there’s a wide chasm that separates simply having the tools to be a winner and actually being one, and the Coach of the Year runner-up Kerr — whose two biggest victories in his first season on the bench may have been the quickness with which he won over the Warriors locker room and the talented cast of assistant coaches he brought on to help him out — is responsible for bridging that gap.

Meanwhile, in Houston, Kevin McHale is in his fourth and undoubtedly most successful season with the Rockets and has performed admirably, winning 56 games with a roster that not only underwent immense turnover during the offseason but also had several key players spend significant stretches out of action with injuries.

Over the course of the season, Houston used 18 different starting lineups and its players missed 180 combined games due to injury. Among the often-sidelined were starting point guard Patrick Beverley (56 games played), All-Star center Dwight Howard (41 games), starting forward Terrence Jones (33 games), and somehow McHale still had his guys on the same page, even if none of those 56 victories happened to come against Golden State.

McHale, for any criticism he may receive for his X’s and O’s shortcomings, perfectly straddles the line that often separates a hard-nosed coach from a so-called player’s coach. He makes the tough calls when he has to — like leaving MVP runner-up James Harden on the bench for the fourth quarter of Houston’s Game 6 win over the Clippers — and now that he’s finally won a couple playoff series, hopefully people will forget his shortcomings in Minnesota for good.

X-factors

Curry and Harden will be the main event in this series, but ultimately success for both teams in these conference finals may be determined by their ability to limit their opponent’s No. 2, as both teams’ stars have proven throughout the season that resistance against their respective games is often futile.

For the Warriors, Klay Thompson earned his first All-Star nod this year as a member of the Western Conference starting lineup, and on any given night, he can look as much like an MVP as Curry. The other half of the Splash Brothers has a tendency to go bonkers from time to time (just ask the Kings, for starters, about what it’s like when he goes into NBA Jam ball-on-fire mode), and though he was somewhat limited, by his own standards, during parts of the Memphis series, Thompson still has been incredibly efficient and has done everything Kerr possibly could want him to do during the postseason.

During the Rockets’ closest call against the Warriors this season — and at 98-87, it still really wasn’t all that close — Thompson scored just 11 points on an uncharacteristically bad 3-of-16 shooting. It was one of just five games this season without a made 3 for Thompson (who, by comparison, also had five games with at least five 3s on 70 percent or better shooting from deep), and if Houston has any expectation that it’ll make a series of this thing, it’ll have to get Thompson off his game on the regular. Good luck with that.

It also wouldn’t hurt the Rockets any if Howard channeled 2010-11 Dwight Howard (or just about any playoff Dwight during his time in Orlando) when matched up with the Warriors, who will at the very least throw Draymond Green and Andrew Bogut in his face to make life frustrating over the next week or two. Others have pointed out that Howard’s solid numbers this postseason (17.2 ppg, 13.8 rpg) could be interpreted as being at least a bit misleading, and Houston will need Howard to be as invested mentally as he is physically to have even a shot. (Editor's note: Howard suffered a bruised left knee in Game 1.)

Houston has proved it can win without Howard, as it did 27 times during the regular season (not to mention eight more times in games, playoff and regular season, in which he played fewer than 20 minutes), but the Warriors are simply too good for Harden to beat them on his own. So as nice a complementary piece as Trevor Ariza can be, it’ll be Howard who has the best chance of making things interesting.

Breakdown

Back in January, Harden made a few enemies in Oakland when he declared to his teammates in a pregame huddle that the Warriors “ain’t that good.” The Rockets proceeded to get thumped by 25 in the game that followed, and most think that’s what’s probably going to happen again here. Houston is certainly feeling good about itself after rallying out of a 3-1 hole to eliminate the Clippers, but it’ll be interesting to see just how much that seventh game took out of the Rockets once they’re up against the league’s best team, which hasn’t played since Friday.

Offensively, the Rockets and Warriors are similarly styled, and both play at a breakneck pace with a propensity for taking and making the 3. The problem for Houston is that Golden State is just as skilled on defense, where it led the league in field goal percentage allowed.

During the regular season, Golden State led the league in 2-point shooting defense (45.8 percent) and played its best between 3 and 10 feet from the basket, where opponents shot a league-low 34.2 percent, and on long 2-point jumpers, allowing an NBA-best 36.6 percent to fall. The way to beat the Warriors is to make a lot of midrange jumpers, which the Rockets don’t do (they take an NBA low 4.7 percent of their shots between 10 and 16 feet from the rim), make a lot of 3s, which no one has been doing (the Warriors have held opponents to just 29.4 percent 3-point shooting in the playoffs), or crush them at the rim.

Quality offensive play from Howard could go a long way toward accomplishing the last option, and Harden will definitely get his, but the Rockets still have to stop Golden State, which is a puzzle no one has solved quite yet. In fast-paced games like we are apt to see in this series, the Warriors are going to get their looks, and a season’s worth of history says they’re going to make them. The only hope for Houston might be if Howard can stay engaged around the rim and dominate the paint, thereby allowing the rest of the defense to play tighter on the perimeter, and then do the same on offense. Even then, however, it may be only enough to steal a couple games in a series that, while exciting, will be unlikely to shock anyone.

Prediction

Warriors in five games.

You can follow Sam Gardner on Twitter or email him at samgardnerfox@gmail.com.