Rockets, Bulls falter again in must-win games
It's become a familiar refrain down the stretch of this season: The Chicago Bulls and Houston Rockets faced virtual must-win games in their increasingly desperate pursuit of playoff spots - which seemed assured at the start of the season - and both fell on their faces.
It just about closes the book on the postseason hopes for two of the league's most disappointing teams. The Bulls' magic number for elimination is down to one; any loss for them, or any win for the Indiana Pacers, will make it official. The Rockets have more breathing room, but not much: They're a game-and-a-half out with three to play - not quite dead, but gasping for air.
For the Bulls, at least, the loss was understandable. They were playing on the road against a very good Miami Heat team. They scrapped and clawed and hung around all night, but simply ran out of gas in the end. Chicago's taken some inexcusable defeats - including a thrashing at the hands of the depleted Memphis Grizzlies earlier in the week - but this wasn't one of them.
Houston's loss, though, was a catastrophe.
With a cupcake finishing slate, the Rockets looked to be in decent shape entering Thursday's game despite sitting a game out of the Western Conference's final playoff spot. Their final four games pitted them against four of the five worst teams in the West. First up was a home date with the Phoenix Suns, who had lost seven straight coming in, were 8-42 in their previous 50 games, and had won all of seven road games the entire season.
It looked, on paper, like a formality. The Rockets certainly seemed to treat it as such. The Suns went on to demolish them on the boards, burn them from long distance, force them to turn the ball over, and win the battle for nearly every loose ball. The Rockets allowed the league's 28th-ranked offense to score 124 points.
It was this kind of night:
As James Harden put it after the game, "That basically sums up our season."
The Rockets still have three beatable opponents left on their schedule, but they've proven there's no such thing as a gimme, and even winning out won't matter if the Utah Jazz and Dallas Mavericks take care of business down the stretch.
The most vexing part for both these teams is they returned virtually unchanged rosters following eminently successful seasons. The Bulls won 50 games a year ago and came within an eyelash of taking a 3-1 series lead on the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference semis. The Rockets won 56 games - with far worse injury luck than they've experienced this season - and came up just three games short of the 2015 NBA Finals.
Their struggles have been mostly of the intangible variety: Both installed new coaches (the Bulls in the offseason, the Rockets 11 games in), experienced considerable slippage on one end of the floor (the Bulls on offense, the Rockets on defense), and seemed undone by some dark alchemy of bad vibes and combustible chemistry.
Whatever the various causes, two of last season's best teams are teetering on the brink of elimination. If and when their seasons end before the playoffs start, they'll have long summers ahead to ponder just what went wrong.