houston-rockets Page 3 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

For NBA MVP, the value bet is Zion, but who will actually win is obvious
It’s easily forgotten that NBA is actually an acronym that stands for National Basketball Association. For a casual observer that follows the league’s personalities and news breakers on social media, the league can be viewed as a multiplatform action/drama that sparks the audience’s adrenaline with ...

Sam Presti, mixed bag
Sam Presti is lucky he’s in Oklahoma City. He would be held accountable for his screwups if he were in charge of a larger market franchise with a longer-tenured and demanding fanbase. But, before we tackle those, Presti has proven to be one of the best judges of talent and character. He has crushed ...

The NBA found its pretense to probe the Philadelphia 76ers
Over the last few years, jilted NBA Governors have raised a bigger stink over their players mingling with other teams’ representatives before the free agency period has officially begun. In 2019, the NBA passed stricter tampering rules, including an increase in the maximum fine for tampering to $10 ...

John Wall got a Brinks truck full of money from a bad team, now he gets to join a contender in LA
The Houston Rockets and John Wall have agreed to a buyout of his contract where he’ll take a pay cut of about $6.5 million. That’s not a bad deal considering Wall just sat out an entire season and made over $44 million to do so....

Thunder, Magic luck out in a top-heavy NBA draft
After three years of embarrassing tanking, GM Sam Presti and the Oklahoma City Thunder have returned to relevance. They came into the NBA Lottery with the sixth-best odds at the top pick in the 2022 NBA Draft and ended up with the second pick in the draft. The Orlando Magic won the first pick and wi...

So the James Harden-Ben Simmons trade looks like a dud
Upon hearing the news of any trade, the first reaction is to think about which team won the trade initially. In the NBA court of public opinion, that distinction usually goes to the side that obtains the more prominent name or superstar player. With Ben Simmons (and others) being traded for James Ha...

The Rockets didn’t win much, but they were a blast to watch towards the end of the season
Once the NCAA Basketball Tournaments come around, the rest of the NBA season can feel like a slog. If you were already upset about players missing games, the volume gets ratcheted up on that, and at that point it’s fairly clear which teams are the best in the league. It’s also hard to muster excitem...

And the award for Most Unreliable Player of the Year goes to…
The NBA season has finally ended, and now it’s time to hand out some hardware. But this isn’t your usual NBA award. We’re handing out the MUP for the Most Unreliable Player of the Year. The criteria’s open to anything from being unavailable due to frequent injury, dealing with bouts of narcissism, t...

James Harden has the most to prove of any star player this postseason
The NBA postseason is nearly upon us, and each year you can pick out a few players that have something to prove. Giannis Antetokounmpo did it last season (no matter how many breaks they got along the way), leading Milwaukee to the title, and LeBron James the year before when he led the Lakers to the...

James Harden might be realizing this Big 3 stuff ain’t all it’s cracked up to be
James Harden may be coming to the realization that the grass is not always greener on the other side when it comes to life in Brooklyn after last year’s failure and how this season has played out thus far. A recent report from Bleacher Report points out Harden being frustrated by Kyrie Irving’s par...

Now Daryl Morey thinks he can land Harden in the offseason? Just make a trade already, man!
Daryl Morey is really trying to apply that “shoot for the moon, if you miss you’ll land among the stars,” saying to his attempts at a Ben Simmons trade. Actually, knowing what we know about Morey he would probably debunk that saying with the explanation, “the stars are actually light years farther a...

Out of shape? James Harden says absolutely not after returning home for Christmas to pound on the Lakers and Clippers
Christmas at home might be the turning point in James Harden’s 2021-22 season. The Brooklyn Nets played at Crypto.com arena against the Los Angeles Lakers on Christmas Day, against the Los Angeles Clippers on Dec. 27, and in between those two games, Harden’s high school in Lakewood, Calif., retired ...

Lakers on their way to wrong kind of history
Injuries and the novel coronavirus have played a role in it, to be sure, as has the fact that they’re now up to 22 players used this season and it’s not even January, but the Lakers stink....

Rockets are stuck in a staring contest with John Wall and there’s no end in sight
If you want to know who has the sweetest gig in America right now, look no further than John Wall of the Houston Rockets. Wall isn’t rehabbing an injury for the first time in years, he’s supposed to be 100 percent healthy, yet he has not suited up for one of Houston’s first 23 games this season....

Everybody hates Harden
Some people have the innate ability to make people dislike them no matter how great they are at whatever it is they do. James Harden is one of those personalities in the NBA. Harden isn’t necessarily a bad guy, but for some reason, many fans and even other players don’t really jive with him. ...

Adam Silver doing his best Vince McMahon impression in NBA’s new deal with UAE
I’m not sure what’s more obvious: A media outlet taking the NBA to task for a multiyear partnership with the United Arab Emirates, or the inevitable controversy that will come of it. It doesn’t take long to unearth copious amounts of dirt about the UAE’s record and ongoing pursuit of human rights vi...

James Harden had a ‘glitch in the matrix’ moment, recreating <em>NBA 2K</em> gameplay
The start of the season hasn’t been the NBA 2K simulation that most thought it would be for the Brooklyn Nets, but James Harden had himself a moment over the weekend that sums up the Nets’ slow start this year....

I’m old, so I made my kids help me rank this year’s NBA City Edition jerseys
The new NBA City Edition jerseys are out, with 28 new looks heading to the hardwood while the Jazz and Suns run it back with last season’s getups. Last year, Deadspin ranked Utah’s at No. 8 among the City Editions, and Phoenix at No. 23. Maybe it was the run to the NBA Finals, but those Suns “Valley...

Ben Simmons is going full James Harden, which you should never do if you don't actually shoot the ball
For those who saw clips from the Philadelphia 76ers practice on Monday, it would have been reasonable to draw the conclusion that guard/forward Ben Simmons didn’t want to be there. One picture showed him practicing with his phone in his sweatpants pocket, and in a viral clip he was dribbling a baske...