The NBA lockout may very well weaken title hopes for several teams, but the Houston Rockets will come out largely unscathed.
The NBA’s ugly, nasty lockout really isn’t good for anyone. Owners wners are losing more money with each passing day, NBA fans are growing more restless at an even faster pace and many players are beginning to feel a financial crunch at the same time rust is accumulating on their respective games.
But there’s no doubting that there are some teams that are more equipped to deal with the fallout of the lockout than others.
The teams that will suffer from the work stoppage are easy to spot.
The Boston Celtics are a great example. Their nucleus is getting a little long in the tooth and when we last saw them, they had the look of a team whose window to win a championship was closing rapidly.
The Los Angeles Lakers are another. They are breaking in a new head coach whose hiring garnered a lukewarm reaction, Mike Brown, and their superstar, Kobe Bryant, started to look a step slow in 2010-2011 even though he had a season that would be considered great by normal standards.
The teams that will be able to successfully weather the storm are fewer in number, but they are out there.
For my money, the Houston Rockets are the team that stands to gain the most out of the lockout.
For starters, they don’t have any championship window to worry about. They have been little more than a mediocre team over the last two seasons and the 2011 season (whenever it begins) promises to just be more of the same. Something tells me that their fortunes won’t be altered much one way or the other if Jordan Hill and Terrence Williams aren’t able to play in competitive games until Christmas.
Considering that the NBA salary cap will likely be considerably lower in this new collective bargaining agreement than it was under the previous one, the Rockets will be in pretty good shape. With Yao Ming having retired due to continued foot injuries, they have a roster largely devoid of big contracts.
Once teams are allowed to make roster moves, many teams will be scrambling to cut salary one way or the other to give them some flexibility, but the Rockets won’t have that issue.
That creates another advantage for Houston. They stand to be one of a select few teams that can afford to add salary. With fewer teams in the market to increase payroll, the Rockets will be much more likely to bring in a player to add to the puzzle.
Led by general manager Daryl Morey, the Rockets will also be in a better position to compete long term. Morey is one of a few “Moneyball” general managers in the NBA. To compare his style to the style of Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane is over-simplifying matters, but like Beane, his strategy is based on quantifying everything possible and finding inefficiencies in free agency and in the draft.
During his time as GM, the Rockets have always been competitive, but they have never been real contenders. They have hit on hidden gems late in the draft like Chase Budinger and Aaron Brooks and they have turned unwanted players like Chuck Hayes into valued commodities, but they have yet to add a real star to put them over the top. That is where his approach has fallen short.
With tighter salary caps, teams won’t be able to overspend like they are used to. The margin of error is much smaller. In short, teams will have to adopt an approach similar to Morey’s that emphasizes taking fewer risks and avoiding signing long-term deals. It will no longer be unlikely for the Rockets to end up as the highest bidder on an impact player. The playing field will be leveled.
Unfortunately for NBA fans, there is no end to this lockout in sight. Every time the two sides take a step forward, two steps back are sure to follow. The NBA Players Association continues to reject the deals put forth by the owners and commissioner David Stern warns that if they continue to do that, the owners will continue to scale back on issues that the Players Association had previously resolved in their favor.
There really are no winners in the NBA lockout. When the game returns, fan apathy may very well be at a level unseen since before the days of Bird and Magic and the product on the court in the early going will be ugly as players get back into game shape.
But make no mistake about it. The Houston Rockets will come out of the lockout with a future that looks much brighter than it would have had the lockout not happened.

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