The Rockets are heading into the next chapter of the Kevin Durant era with a familiar problem hanging over them: the roster looks better on paper than it performed for much of last season.
Houston won 52 games, the same total it posted the year before, but the finish told the bigger story. The Rockets were knocked out in the first round again, this time by LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers, after spending the season trying to survive injuries and uneven stretches of play.
Fred VanVleet, the team’s on- and off-court leader, never got a chance to suit up after a season-ending injury in an offseason workout. Steven Adams, the Rockets’ best rebounder and screen setter, later suffered a season-ending injury in January.
That left Houston short-handed in key spots, and it showed. The team still did plenty of things well - it remained the NBA’s best rebounding team and stayed a top-10 defense all season - but those strengths weren’t enough to push the Rockets into the top four in the Western Conference.
Now the challenge is clear. If Houston wants this season to look different, three areas have to move in the right direction.
First, the Rockets need to lighten Kevin Durant’s load. Last season, with VanVleet unavailable, Houston leaned hard on its starters, and Durant carried a massive burden.
The Rockets still plan to depend on him; even at 36, he remains one of the league’s elite players. But without a traditional point guard, Alperen Sengun and Durant were forced to handle more than scoring duties, with Durant also serving as a point guard at times.
That workload showed up in the minutes column. Durant played the second-most minutes on the Rockets and in the entire NBA, and it was the most total minutes he had logged since the 2013-14 season.
Ime Udoka spent much of the year talking about wanting to manage Durant’s minutes, but the circumstances made that difficult. This time around, Houston has to make it happen so Durant reaches the playoffs as fresh as possible.
The bench is the next issue, and it’s a big one. With VanVleet out and Adams eventually sidelined too, the Rockets had to push players like Reed Sheppard and, at times, Tari Eason into the starting lineup.
That thinned out the second unit and left Houston with almost nothing coming off the bench. The result was ugly: the Rockets ranked last in points per game from reserves, averaging just 27.6.
Houston is betting that the return of Adams and VanVleet, plus the additions of Marcus Smart and Bogdan Bogdanović, will change that picture. The goal is simple: stop asking the starters to do so much.
Finally, the Rockets have to clean up the turnovers. VanVleet was brought in partly because of Houston’s ball-security issues, and his first season helped produce one of the best turnover marks in franchise history.
Last season was a different story. The Rockets slid near the bottom of the league in turnovers, and the mistakes showed up in the worst moments, especially late in close games when full-court pressure started forcing errors.
That problem reached its ugliest point in a must-win playoff game at home against the Lakers. With Houston holding a late lead, LeBron James pressured Reed Sheppard into a turnover that helped Los Angeles force overtime, and the Rockets lost.
It was the kind of mistake that summed up their season. If they want to get out of the first round, the Rockets have to protect the ball better, and VanVleet’s return should help a lot.
Training camp opens on the 23rd of this month, and Houston is hoping to build the foundation for a better 2026-27 run. To get there, these three fixes have to stick.
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