When Kevin Durant joined the Warriors in the summer of 2016, many NBA fans resigned themselves to a new basketball reality for the foreseeable future: every season would end with the inevitable and anticlimactic Warriors v whatever-Eastern-team-LeBron-is-on Finals. That was the new and future NBA. The Warriors, then LeBron, then everyone else a very distant third.
Enter the Houston Rockets. With Wednesday night’s 110-99 road win over Milwaukee, Houston have now won 17 games in a row and sit a full game ahead of the Warriors in the West with just 16 regular season games to play. There’s a real chance the Western Conference Finals will go through Houston and some have begun to wonder if the NBA Finals may do too.
“I expect to beat them,” Rockets center Clint Capela said back in December of the Warriors, a quote that raised a lot of eyebrows and a few chuckles. But Capela has every reason to be confident. The offseason additions of Chris Paul, Luc Mbah a Moute and PJ Tucker have turned Houston’s defense from a weakness to a strength – with Capela on the back end serving as rim protector with 1.78 blocks per game, sixth-best in the NBA.
Source :- theguardian
No comments:
Post a Comment