The Houston Rockets were 16-8 on Dec. 10 when news started to leak that the Miami Heat were considering offers for Jimmy Butler. Houston had missed the playoffs in each of the four previous seasons, but all it took were those 24 games to ignite a rumor mill. Houston was at the top of everyone’s list of Butler suitors even though they were, and remain, in the infancy of their winning window. General manager Rafael Stone went on SiriusXM NBA Radio that same day to remind fans of that.
“We like this team. We definitely do not intend to change anything, and I would be shocked if something changes this season,” Stone said. “We like where we’re at. We want to continue to develop our guys, full-stop. Will I listen to other teams? Of course I will, that’s my job, but again, no, there’s no part of me, there’s no part of our decision-making process that suggests that we’re looking to do anything big now or in the near term.”
The quote itself is meaningful, but it’s mostly GM speak. No winning general manager is going to openly push for significant change. It’s the timing here that’s so significant. Stone acted immediately to try to squash a rumor before it could spread because he wanted to avoid the increasingly common roster-building expectations foisted upon any newly competitive group. The moment a young team gets good, the pressure to go trade for a star and push all-in to win right away begins. Heck, the team doesn’t even need to be good yet. The lottery-bound San Antonio Spurs took their swing on De’Aaron Fox in Victor Wembanyama’s second season.
Sometimes that makes sense. Cleveland nabbing Donovan Mitchell while Evan Mobley and Darius Garland were still on rookie deals opened an immediate window while those two were still cheap, gave the Cavaliers four players with obvious All-Star potential, and, perhaps most importantly, got Cleveland the sort of in-his-prime superstar that market would not normally have access to. They took a risk that has clearly paid off. That does not mean that every team needs to jump at the first star available to it. Go ask Phoenix how that strategy has panned out.
Where do the Rockets — who were ousted in Game 7 of a hard-fought first-round series against the Warriors on Sunday night — fall on this spectrum? The honest answer is… wherever they want to. They have a 52-win team already, and seven of their 11 most-used players this season are 23 or younger. They have the best collection of tradable draft assets in the NBA: three unprotected Suns picks (including one this year), an unprotected Mavericks pick in 2029, and unprotected swap rights with the Nets in 2027 to go along with most of their own picks. They play in a historically desirable market for All-Stars. They’re going to get expensive in the coming years, yes, but they managed to sign Alperen Sengun for below the max and guaranteed Jalen Green only three years, so they’ve handled their finances well to this point. They may have just lost to the Warriors, but there’s no shame in losing a Game 7 to Stephen Curry.
It’s entirely reasonable to suggest that if the Rockets made the right trade for the right superstar right now, they could win the 2026 championship. “Could” is the operative word there. There’s no immediately plausible scenario in which they’d be favored to do so. Say they nabbed Kevin Durant. Even if Durant doesn’t decline one iota, they’re starting next season behind the Thunder and Celtics. Depending on how the offseason goes for everyone else, that list could be longer.
Former Rockets general manager Daryl Morey abides by something he calls the 5% rule. “If you’ve got even a 5% chance to win the title — and that group includes a very small number of teams every year — you’ve gotta be focused all on winning the title,” Morey told Grantland in 2012. Would the Rockets with Durant added to their current team in place of, say, Jalen Green and Jabari Smith have a 5% chance at the championship? Probably, yeah.
But think about when that quote was delivered. It was 13 years ago. The NBA has changed quite a bit since then. Only a simplified and far less punitive apron system existed in 2012. The concept of hoarding future draft capital didn’t really exist either. Boston hadn’t even made the trade that would one day get them Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum yet. At that point, LeBron James was midway through a streak of eight consecutive NBA Finals appearances. In 2025, we’ve had six consecutive years with a different champion. The league is different now.
The best James teams, or Michael Jordan teams, or Stephen Curry teams, might have had close to a 50% chance at the championship. Now, more teams crack that 5% threshold every year, but none ever come close to the the dominance past teams were capable of. The league isn’t built for that anymore. The rules and realities of the modern NBA are drastically tilted towards sustainability.
Think about where the Rockets would stand after a Durant trade. They’d be in the 5% inner circle with a handful of other teams, but they’d probably only have a year or two with him before he ages out of superstardom. If he gets hurt, the 5% disappears. If it turns out that he doesn’t fit with the incumbent roster, you’ve lost whatever time it takes to make follow-up moves to fix that. Or if some other team simply does a better job of going all-in at that moment and outplays you? You’re just out of luck. The meaningful asset expenditure you’ve made to get Durant hasn’t netted a championship, and the assets you could have used to win one down the line are gone. This isn’t meant to dismiss Durant entirely. If the price is low enough? There’s no harm and potentially quite a bit to gain. But the Rockets aren’t desperate, and they shouldn’t act desperate.
Durant, given his age, is an extreme example here. Think about the younger Giannis Antetokounmpo. He probably gives you a longer window of stardom than Durant does — let’s say four or five years — but he comes with other complications. Durant fits onto any roster. Shooting is the most portable skill in basketball. It’s more complicated for Antetokounmpo, who needs a bespoke roster. The Bucks didn’t take off until they surrounded him with shooting. The Rockets, right now, don’t have shooting. They just ranked 27th in 3-point attempt rate and 21st in 3-point percentage.
Antetokounmpo is absolutely capable of being the best player on a championship team. No current Rocket can definitively say the say. But the championship team Antetokounmpo is capable of leading emphatically is not the Houston Rockets as they exist today. Amen Thompson is many things. Heck, he’s almost everything you could want in a young player. But he’s not a shooter. He can’t coexist with Antetokounmpo. Are the Rockets ready to give him up? How about the handful of similar current Rockets, or the double-big construction that nearly toppled Golden State? Are they just trade fodder for the new team they’d build on the fly?
The entire roster would need to be remade to suit him. That’s absolutely doable. It just takes time, assets and risk tolerance. Every additional needed step introduces new things that can go wrong. It would treat the current, reasonably successful Rockets team as little more than a piggy bank to be smashed open and cashed out for Antetokounmpo and a handful of new veterans that support him.
For a less promising team, that would absolutely be a worthwhile venture. Think of the late 2010s Nets as an example here. They built themselves up from nothing into a playoff team, but winning a handful of regular-season games with D’Angelo Russell and Spencer Dinwiddie isn’t what anyone aspires towards. It made complete sense to ditch the old team when Durant, Kyrie Irving and James Harden came calling.
But the Rockets aren’t the 2019 Nets. Thompson and Sengun are not Russell and Dinwiddie. The Rockets are far better, and just as importantly, they’re far newer. They don’t even know for sure what they really have here yet. Thompson was a reserve on opening night. He ended the season as a Defensive Player of the Year candidate and a budding star. Sengun just made his first All-Star Team, and he did so despite significantly worse offensive numbers than he posted a year ago. Don’t you want to see what Thompson might become? What happens if Sengun can pair last year’s offense with this year’s defensive improvements? Reed Sheppard was just the No. 3 overall pick. Do you really want to sell low on him after 654 minutes? Do you want to sell low on a team as a whole that, despite its first-round loss, is clearly ahead of schedule and might be on track for true championship contention without major intervention?
That’s before we even factor in those picks. The lottery hasn’t happened yet. The Rockets are currently in the No. 9 slot thanks to the Suns. That might be the low point for those Phoenix picks given what a mess the Suns have created for themselves. Maybe the Nets are the Antetokounmpo team and that 2027 swap amounts to nothing. Maybe they keep rebuilding organically and it’s another lottery pick. There’s no “maybe” where the 2029 Mavericks are concerned. They’re just hopeless, and the Rockets should be quite eager to take advantage of that.
There is no guarantee that any of these players or picks yields someone like Durant or Antetokounmpo… but so what if they don’t? What harm does another year of data do? These assets aren’t going anywhere. There will always be unhappy stars. You can always jump back into the deep end of the trading pool later. One could argue they’re already positioned to do just that. All of those Phoenix picks are an obvious pathway to Devin Booker should the Suns ever come to their senses on their need to move him. Frankly, the Rockets could probably afford to think even bigger.
Do you really want to be the team that went all-in for, say, a Third-Team All-NBA player early when you’d have the inside track on an MVP candidate (one, unlike Antetokounmpo, who more cleanly fits your existing roster and timeline)? Aren’t you at least a little tempted to see if Anthony Edwards is really committed to Minnesota for the long haul? Don’t you want to know for sure that Nikola Jokić never gets fed up with all of the ways Denver has mismanaged the roster around him? Wouldn’t you like the flexibility to opportunistically pursue the right star rather than the one who happens to be available at the time?
They are the rare team that is ever in a position to do so. The Rockets aren’t the Cavaliers. They aren’t constrained by their market. They aren’t constrained by their assets either. They will have the chips to outbid practically anyone for the player of their choosing in the coming years. They can afford to build whatever sort of team under whatever sort of timeline they want. How many franchises are ever in a position to do that?
It’s a rare and precious opportunity, one that shouldn’t be squandered by jumping the gun. Just because the Rockets could compete for the 2026 title with a big splash doesn’t mean they need to. If they do this right, they could set themselves up to win for a decade or more. They could avoid the risks associated with going all-in on a short window and keep themselves in the 5% club for the longest period possible.
All of this is fluid. It could change in an instant if the right player hits the market, or it could change on the fly next season or beyond based on what their incumbent players do. But that restaint Stone showed this season is what makes the Rockets such a scary proposition to the rest of the league. He’s patient enough not to force the wrong trade, and even if it means waiting a few years, that sets him up to eventually make the right one.