On Sunday, the Rockets will look for more than just a chance to move into first place in the Southwest Division.
With their win against the Timberwolves on Friday, they moved to 15-4 since Tracy McGrady's season ended and, combined with the Spurs' loss to the Celtics, to just a half-game behind San Antonio heading into a showdown for first place. First, however, they allowed themselves a moment to consider how stunning their turnaround to reach even this point has been.
They began the season battling the injuries to McGrady and Shane Battier and soon had Ron Artest also going in and out of the lineup. They often never knew who would be playing even an hour before tip-off. They lost McGrady for the season when he announced on his own his decision to have microfracture surgery. And as challenging as the usual basketball issues and distractions had been, they received the most unexpected of jolts when forward Carl Landry was shot early Tuesday morning.
Yet they have steadily improved since the All-Star break and find themselves competing for the lead in arguably the deepest division in the NBA.
"Who'd have thought?" Shane Battier said.
Few would have predicted such a thing. The turnaround was not a sudden or stunning as the 22-game winning streak last season, when the Rockets kept rolling without another star, Yao Ming. But they have emphasized working to improve, knowing that the record would follow. With that, they head to San Antonio before playing their greatest post-season nemesis, the Utah Jazz, Tuesday in Salt Lake City, thinking the same way.
"We will have a few more of those," Luis Scola said. "We will have Utah in Utah, New Orleans at home, Dallas in Dallas. Those types of games are playoff types of games. It's good for us. It's good training. It's a good thing for us."
It has worked so far, more than anyone could have predicted.
ROCKETS 107, TIMBERWOLVES 88: If the Rockets were tempted to look ahead to the Spurs on Sunday, they never showed it. Knowing that they had struggled for stretches in wins against the Timberwolves this season and knowing that a loss, even a struggle against the undermanned Wolves would be about the worst way to head to San Antonio, the Rockets rolled, leading by as much as 27 and giving most of the starters the fourth quarter off. They had seven players scoring in double-figures, scoring a season-high 18 fast break points, and outscoring the Wolves in every quarter, as if determined to take no chances.
