Occasionally, and by occasionally we of course mean rarely, the dumb luck of the NBA standings will create an early-round playoff series in which each team is somehow a bad matchup for its opponent. The force of the postseason naturally tends to create these as the process grinds on; to get one before things otherwise get interesting is both a gift from the universe and a pain in the ass for the teams involved. You think about a series like this, you watch it and rewatch it, and all you come away with is the brain-bending realization that the teams involved are not playing against each other so much as they are playing against their own capacity for discomfort.
And with that, we present to you Rockets-Warriors, or based on the result in Game 1 of this series, Warriors-Rockets.
The NBA’s postseason play to date, both the -ins and the -offs, have been largely turgid and self-explanatory affairs, with an average final score of 118-99. There isn’t a lot you can do with that dramaturgically, and don’t even start with Thunder-Grizzlies.
Warriors-Rockets, on the other hand, is clearly a different beast. It is already evident after one game that both teams have flaws that the other team can see and understand, and which they have already exploited. Houston is too young and too scattered and erratic when it comes to the shotmaking arts; Golden State is too old and too small and too reliant on Stephen Curry pulling shots out of his shorts. It helps that they also don’t like each other, but the way those faults and fits mesh together feels like kismet, even if it rarely looks like beautiful basketball. It isn’t. It just is.
The teams showed how well they can punish and be punished based on those criteria on Sunday night. For the moment, the two most influential players in the series have been Curry and Houston center Stephen Adams, and you wouldn’t have laid a single quid on the second part of the answer before game time.
Houston’s plan was to address the Curry matter with full frontal vigor—to, as the overemotive Reggie Miller liked to repeat, “put a touch on him”—as often in a possession as possible. That worked for one quarter, because as teams have learned to their peril over the last decade and change, Curry never stops moving and dares you to keep up, knowing full well that you can’t. Also, he has at least two morale-deflating, off-balance, one-leg-in-the-air drunken-flamingo 33-footers per game that he likes to break out for special occasions, just to see if he can give Kevin Harlan an instantaneous hernia.
But Curry aside—and that’s difficult to make happen in the mind’s eye when he plays 39 minutes—the Warriors survived Game 1 thanks to Jimmy Butler and an ostentatious defense that kept every Rocket not named Alperen Sengun in a state of befuddlement. Houston shot poorly—23 of 69 on all non-Sengunnian attempts, 6-for-29 on all three-pointers—and were careless with the ball (16 turnovers, 14 on outright steals). Fred Van Vleet and Jalen Green were a combined 7-for-34 from the floor and 2-for-17 from distance, and not all those looks were contested. When Adams wasn’t bullying the area near the rim into submission through the relentless application of his absurdly forceful presence, the Rockets could not do anything with their youth and skill that the Warriors didn’t want them to do.
That is, except for one electric stretch when they did. The Rockets shrunk a 23-point Warriors lead down to three during a 12-minute run between the middle of the third quarter and the middle of the fourth, highlighted by exuberant bursts from Jabari Smith and Tari Eason and some hypergrumpy work from Adams that highlighted the Warriors’ height and athletic deficiencies. Houston might have regained control of the game outright but for Moses Moody’s midrange jumper to interrupt the Rocket run; Curry’s subsequent 35-foot reminder of the thing the Warriors have and that the Rockets do not and cannot possess felt decisive. And while the 82-75 lead that Curry triple staked to Golden State was by no means insurance, it did return the game to its former equilibrium. Houston never came within a possession again.
All that said, Houston was the more vibrant and precocious team for roughly half the game, and Golden State the wiser and more persistent one in the other half. These are traits that will ebb and flow during most games between teams with equal but disparate strengths, and despite the rule that says the team that wins Game 1 wins the series seven out of ten times, there is another one that says you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
All the other series openers were pretty boilerplate, although the Minnesota-Lakers plotline is still not yet firmed up because the Lakers make people both in and out of the game think things not in evidence because they are the Lakers. But Rockets-Warriors is a different deal entirely because it is that rarest of commodities, the dead-even 2-7; the Warriors are up 1-0, but no lead is trustworthy here until it’s all the way over.
Seven-seeds have been remarkably inert in the current playoff format, having won only six of the 76 series against the two-seed, the same lack of success that the eight-seeds have against the one. By historical fiat, the Warriors should be outmatched and dispatched with noticeable zeal. But as we have seen, there are two sharply contrasting styles and philosophies at play here, which should make for more of what we imagine the playoffs might be if every team was truly equal…which of course they never are. But this is the 2025 Western Conference, in which everyone is roughly the same, for entirely different reasons. Except of course for Thunder-Grizzlies, that is. Sometimes you don’t eat the bear because the bear is already eating you.
