Who's to blame for Rockets' embarrassing first-round exit, and what comes next after a disastrous season?

The bar kept dropping over the course of eight months, yet the Rockets still couldn't clear it. Now, a team with quite a bit invested in the 2025-26 season leaves it having accomplished almost nothing. They put over 2,800 minutes on Durant's aging body. Maybe he's still a star next year, but common sense suggests he's never going to be better than he just was. Who knows what VanVleet and Adams, both 32, will look like after their own injuries. But if this year taught the Rockets anything, it's how utterly reliant they still are on a point guard who never gets to the rim and a center whose primary functions are to screen and rebound to produce even a functional NBA offense.

Yet we can't really take any notable lessons away from the seasons the young players had, either. The evidence suggests that the Amen Thompson point guard experiment was a failure, but what are we supposed to take from a shaky ball-handler trying to lead an offense that ranked 27th in 3-point attempt rate? How much of Alperen Sengun's finishing woes are the result of the paint consistently being packed? Of course, Reed Sheppard made a mistake in the biggest moment of his career in Game 3, coughing up the turnover that functionally ended the series. Ime Udoka, Houston's third-year coach, didn't trust him enough over the course of the season to let him make mistakes like that in lower-leverage moments.

On just about every front, this season was a failure for the Rockets. The questions now are who is to blame, and how can they right this ship?

Culprit No. 1: General manager Rafael Stone

The Rockets have drawn plaudits -- including from me! -- for their roster-building under Stone. They are incredibly creative. They stockpile assets effectively. They manage contracts as well as any team in the NBA. The basic concept of their team, at least as of last July, was sound. They'd built a defensive and rebounding behemoth that only needed a single star scorer for balance. They got that scorer, Durant. Time to head off to the races.

But the veterans were supposed to supplement a long-term core, not shoulder the ambitions of the entire franchise. The injuries they endured shone a light on that core. The Rockets tanked viciously for three years. Thanks to the Nets, they picked in the top four of four consecutive drafts. None of the players they selected has grown into an All-Star, and of the four, Thompson is the only one who's at all close. In hindsight, at least, the Rockets probably deserve a bit more scrutiny for drafting Jalen Green over Evan Mobley. Sheppard over Stephon Castle is also looking questionable, though Thompson's presence likely would've made Castle's shooting issues untenable on this roster.

Sengun, 23, has become an All-Star, but he's stagnated. The finishing issues are still there. The hot 3-point shooting from early this season dissipated. He regressed meaningfully on defense this season. Development isn't linear. This could just be a bump on his road to stardom. He's also played for five years now. If this is who he is, the Rockets simply don't have a young player capable of being the best player on a traditional championship team.

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But the Rockets weren't going for a traditional championship roster. They were betting on the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Yet when that whole began to crumble due to injury, they didn't bother to supplement it with new parts. It was evident by the trade deadline that the Rockets could not function offensively without a point guard in VanVleet's place. Houston chose not to pursue one. Stone's explanation at the time? "Given the number of injuries we've taken, one thing we did look at was ... 'Is this just not our year?'"

This was an arguably justifiable stance. Given their youth and asset pool, even with championship expectations, the Rockets were never all-in on this season. They planned to have a long runway. But in a sense, that should have heightened the urgency to improve. How could you use this postseason to evaluate the young players without giving them some degree of offensive support?

It didn't need to be expensive. Luke Kennard flambéed the Rockets for big stretches of this series. The Lakers got him for a second-round pick and an expiring contract. The Rockets are among the NBA's most asset-rich teams. They couldn't have sprung for, say, Ayo Dosunmu or Coby White from the Bulls? Both of them went for less than a first-round pick. Both of them make less than $13 million. Both have had major postseason impacts on their teams.

Even given Houston's first-apron hard cap and relative lack of tradable salary, players like that were obtainable. Neither makes the Rockets the 2026 champion. But this isn't binary. It doesn't have to be "your year" to make any sort of investment in the present. The whole world knows the Lakers are preserving assets and cap space to go star-hunting and they still got Kennard. Players like White or Dosunmu would've helped, and they could've been longer-term pieces.

There were smaller, transactional mistakes here. Dorian Finney-Smith gave them almost nothing. Clint Capela was little more than a big body. Even the best front offices miss on some moves. But given the optimism about Houston entering this season, there are far greater big-picture questions here than we assumed there would be. That falls on the front office.

Culprit No. 2: Coach Ime Udoka

There are very clear, surface-level complaints with Udoka's coaching job. The offense was a mess. Only Clippers players, on average, held the ball longer per touch than the Rockets did. Only the Lakers averaged less overall offensive movement, according to NBA.com tracking data.

On a possession-by-possession basis, it was rarely clear what exactly the Rockets were trying to accomplish. There was just a lot of aimless dribbling. They were painfully bad at creating and punishing mismatches. One reason Kennard had never had a playoff series like the one he just had was that opposing coaches had almost always been better at exploiting him defensively. When faced with aggressive, strategic wrinkles, the Rockets rarely had coherent adjustments. The Lakers forced nine Durant turnovers by doubling him in Game 2. That shouldn't have surprised the Rockets; they forced seven Durant turnovers doing the same basic things against him 42 days earlier. JJ Redick coached circles around Udoka in the first round.

Udoka's willingness to call out players in the media is the sort of move that tends to yield immediate results but can wear thin over time. We never got to see whether or not that would be the case in Boston because he only lasted a year there. The tone he struck after the Game 3 collapse certainly didn't seem like it would go over very well in the locker room. "Grow up," Udoka said. "You're not young anymore. We've been to the playoffs once. And you've watched every situation right now."

[Ime Udoka blasts Rockets after 'horrendous mistakes' led to Game 3 collapse vs. Lakers: 'Grow up'

Austin Nivison

Truthfully, "watched" might be the appropriate word here in the case of Sheppard, the No. 3 pick in the 2024 draft. The Rockets played 196 clutch minutes in the regular season. Sheppard played in less than half of them. He's in his second season. If you don't let him make these mistakes in the regular season, he's not going to learn from them in time for the playoffs. Houston's need for offense was well-known. Udoka wouldn't commit to Sheppard as a starter until March. The Rockets went 17-4 in regular-season games he started.

The way Udoka managed Sheppard points to the bigger problems he's posed for the Rockets on a roster-construction level. He's very particular about the sort of players he wants, and that affects the decisions the Rockets are able to make.

There was fairly substantial reporting from a variety of sources, for example, saying that Udoka wanted VanVleet as his free-agent point guard in 2023 over James Harden. Udoka dismissed the idea that he was opposed to adding Harden, but said, "Fred is just a better fit." The idea of adding a less ball-dominant guard around such a young roster made sense. Nonetheless, three years out, Harden, now with Cleveland, remains an All-Star. Even when healthy, VanVleet could never claim that. It's hard to imagine Houston's season going this far sideways with Harden at the point.

The Rockets came into this season with only VanVleet, Sheppard and Aaron Holiday as traditional guards on their roster. That left them incredibly thin offensively after VanVleet got hurt, but it seemed to be by design. Stone couldn't add more guards because doing so would give Udoka options beyond Sheppard. Sheppard played only 654 minutes as a rookie and the Rockets needed to actually see him play in his second season. Yet in Game 2 of the Lakers series, Udoka started the poor shooting Josh Okogie, a defensive-minded wing, and gave Sheppard just 11 minutes off the bench.

From that perspective, Udoka's presence almost made the Durant trade necessary -- not from a basketball standpoint, but an asset-management one. Udoka trusts defensive veterans. He rarely trusts rookies and most rookies are bad defenders. The last thing the Rockets wanted was to use the No. 10 pick on a player Udoka refused to play. The price on Durant was reasonable and he fit the sort of team Houston wanted to build, but Udoka didn't really leave the Rockets with much room to keep building organically.

Udoka is in his fourth season as an NBA head coach. In each of his first three years, he led his team to at least a 10-win improvement. Maybe this season is the outlier. Maybe it points to the sort of coach he's going to be. Not every coach is right for every situation. Some -- Scott Skiles comes to mind, and more recently, Tom Thibodeau -- are great at building cultures and getting players to buy in defensively, yet tend to be too strategically rigid to win at the highest levels of the playoffs.

Again, without seeing how his Boston tenure would have played out organically, it's hard to say for certain if Udoka is this sort of coach. But the sort of offense he ran this season and against the Lakers, regardless of the players he had or didn't have, simply wasn't playoff-caliber. Celtics fans had similar complaints about his uninspiring offensive schemes. If this is the case, well, it's fair to wonder if the Rockets might have outgrown Udoka as their coach.

Culprit No. 3: The players

Alperen Sengun

Sengun's defense took a big step back this season. Some of that comes down to physical limitations. Some of it is effort. His finishing was again up-and-down. He's impossible to judge circumstantially. He plays through as much traffic as almost any other big man in the NBA. He also misses a lot of bunnies. Why did he stop shooting 3s? He averaged 3.4 attempts in his first 11 games of the season and made 46% of them. He went on a cold streak, and his average was cut more than in half down to 1.5 the rest of the way.

It doesn't matter that he was missing them. Developing a reliable 3-point shot will be critical for both his growth as a player and Houston's as a team. It's very hard to be a star center without protecting the rim or making 3s, and given those physical limitations, the former is unlikely. With Thompson unlikely to ever start making 3s, Houston needs some spacing out of the center position to compensate.

Amen Thompson

Thompson probably had the hardest job of anyone here. With Dillon Brooks gone and Tari Eason simply playing worse defensively, his defense was more important this season than it was last, yet his offensive role increased drastically when VanVleet got hurt. He wasn't ready to run an offense and he couldn't be as aggressive as he probably would've liked as a driver because of how little space he had to work with. But if he's going to be even a watered-down version of the Russell Westbrook, Giannis Antetokounmpo "freak athlete rim pressure" player, his touch simply has to be better. He ranked in the 28th percentile in points per shot on layups this season, and he was in the 35th percentile in points per possession on putbacks. He misses looks he needs to make, and he probably needs to take more even through traffic, if only as a vehicle for development.

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Jabari Smith

Udoka compared Jabari Smith's development cycle to Kawhi Leonard's -- which he helped oversee in San Antonio. Essentially, he knew Leonard wanted to do more than just stand in the corner shooting 3s early, but San Antonio gradually gave him more ball-handling responsibility. Maybe it's something the Rockets are working on behind the scenes, but it is not manifesting on the court for Smith.

In Leonard's fourth season, he attempted 276 shots out of isolation or as a pick-and-roll ball handler. Smith took 100 and made 31 of them. He averaged 1.21 dribbles per touch this season, near the bottom of the team. Leonard was never a fair comparison, but Smith is a fourth-year player chosen at No. 3 overall. It's a pretty meaningful disappointment that he still hasn't developed much of an ability to create his own shot off the dribble.

Reed Sheppard

It's only Year 2 for Sheppard. At 6-foot-2 and 185 pounds, he's tiny. There's not much he can do about that and it's always going to create defensive problems. If he's going to justify a major role anyway, he needs to shoot the way Kon Knueppel did as a rookie. Maybe a better system makes that happen. He's the rare player for whom 39.4% on almost 10 3-point attempts per 36 possessions isn't going to cut it.

Kevin Durant

And then there's Durant. His struggles with double-teams are hardly new. The Rockets didn't do him many favors when it came to roster construction. He's an apex shot-maker who's always relied on teammates to do the heavy lifting with shot creation. Put him with someone like, say, Harden and he won't have to worry about doubles. With no teammates consistently generating advantages, Durant was more vulnerable than he should be at this point.

He should've been on the bench for Game 3 of the Lakers series. Udoka said he was getting treatment for his injured ankle. It's undeniably a bad look. Durant left his last three teams on less-than-great terms. We don't know and likely will never know whether or not his leaked messages about his Houston teammates were real. We do know that the Rockets struggled through two .500-or-so months in the aftermath of the controversy.

We can't say what kind of teammate he is behind closed doors, but there's a bare minimum responsibility for leadership that comes with being a player as accomplished and experienced as he is, and supporting your teammates from the bench of a playoff game you're missing because of injury falls under that line. Maybe he could've escaped some measure of blame for the disastrous turn this Rockets season took if not for everything that happened with him in Phoenix, Brooklyn and Golden State.

Durant is the common denominator there, and the contrast with the way LeBron James steered the Lakers through adversity in the first round was stark.

What should, and shouldn't, happen next for Houston?

Trade for a superstar?

Let's start here: please, please don't panic trade for Giannis Antetokounmpo. That's the obvious instinct. The Rockets have the ammunition. They have the motivation after coming up so short this season. He just makes no sense for this team on multiple levels.

Antetokounmpo needs a very specific sort of roster to thrive. More than anything, he needs shooting. The Rockets have very little of it. Even if they don't have to trade Thompson to get him, how on Earth would they fit into the same offense? How many more picks and young players would the Rockets have to pour into retrofitting the roster to suit his needs? And how wide will the Antetokounmpo window be for whoever opens it? He's 31 with a recent history of calf injuries in a league that has never been more terrified of calf injuries. His playing style is enormously dependent on athleticism. The Rockets have largely rebuilt prudently. As many questions as remain about the organic alternative, the timing just doesn't work here. It would probably take two or three transaction cycles to get the roster around Antetokounmpo right, and he might not have that many cycles left as an MVP candidate.

I'm not dismissing the idea of any star trade. The whole "four top-four picks in four years and no obvious superstar" problem persists, so if the right franchise player hits the market, someone with a much longer runway than Antetokounmpo and a more apparent fit on the existing roster, it's worth exploring. As there is no obviously suitable candidate for that position, the proper course is probably going to be looking inward.

Should Durant return? Is Udoka the right fit as coach?

The single most important thing the Rockets need out of the 2026-27 season is clarity. They have to know what they have (and don't have) in all of these top picks they've made. Minimizing them was an acceptable tradeoff for championship contention, but that no longer seems all that likely in the near-term with Durant getting a year older and VanVleet and Adams potentially declining as well. If you're going to find out if Sengun and Thompson have superstar potential, you have to build a team entirely around them. Sheppard has to provide near-star-level offense to make his defense a worthwhile tradeoff, and you're only going to find out if that's in him by starting and playing him 30 minutes every night. If you want Smith to start scoring off the dribble, you have to actually let him dribble in games.

That probably means taking a step back, creating an environment in which immediate wins and losses are less of a concern, and focusing on process above all else. The offensive system has to improve. The role players need to be able to shoot. Young players have to be free to make mistakes.

If Udoka can't coach under those conditions, I'm not sure it makes sense to bring him back. At the very least, the team needs to go outside the organization to hire an offensive coordinator who can provide input on both lineups and tactics. It simply is not tenable to spend a No. 3 overall pick on a player your coach won't fully trust. You don't want to sacrifice the defensive culture he helped build, but there has to be a compromise here. If there isn't, a new coach is needed.

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Durant may not make sense here anymore, either. He's too much of a crutch offensively. The young players need to work through offensive hiccups, not pass to Durant late in the clock to bail them out. It might also be a cultural necessity. Any player that accomplished sets the organizational tone through his mere presence. His track record lately isn't great in that respect, and we saw what a difference Brooks made in Phoenix. Houston might need new veterans. It might also need its young players to become the veterans. Remember when Marcus Smart was the heart and soul of the Celtics? Trading him probably helped nudge Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown into the locker room positions they ultimately occupied.

Durant's timeline is now. Houston's is probably later. What they could get for him isn't clear. He'll have positive value. He likely won't return as much as he cost. But if these young players don't turn out to be the solution, you want the coffers as full of picks as possible in case you do need to trade for a star in a year or two. In the meantime, reinforcements are coming in the near future. Houston has two potential lottery picks in 2027, Brooklyn's and Phoenix's. It's supposed to be a weak draft. We can never predict that with much certainty. Remember when 2020 was supposed to be a bad class?

The bottom line: The Rockets have time

Stone was probably right when he mused that this might just not have been Houston's year. That doesn't mean 2027 or 2028 needs to be. It's as true of teams as it is of players: growth isn't linear. The Celtics made the Eastern Conference finals three times between 2017 and 2020. They regressed to the first round in 2021, didn't panic and break up their young core, and won it all in 2024.

The Rockets gave six players at least 1,500 minutes of playing time this season, and five of them are 24 or younger. They still have a mountain of draft picks, and they can add to that pile if they elect to pursue a Durant trade. They have time. They can do this slowly and properly.

As bad as things got at times against the Lakers, Houston can at least take solace in the success its best, young players had when given the chance. The five-man unit of Sengun, Smith, Sheppard, Thompson and Tari Eason outscored the Lakers by 26 points in the 73 minutes they played together in the first five games of the series. The Lakers in their present condition aren't much of a championship barometer, but that's at least something. Get out of their way and see what they can do.

If the Rockets learned anything this season, it's what not to do as they attempt to re-enter the championship picture. Now is the time to regroup and reassess, not double down on what didn't work this season.