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Houston Rockets
Win Total: 43.5 | Moore's Projection: 41
Bet/Lean/Pass: Pass.
Handicap
The Rockets are fun as hell.
They play tough, physical defense under Ime Udoka. They have so much good young talent they don't honestly have enough room in the rotation for all of them. They have good veterans like Fred VanVleet, Dillon Brooks, and Steven Adams.
There's a lot to love about them.
Houston had the worst differential between expected wins by point differential and actual wins. In other words, they "should" have won a whopping five more games last season.
A good question is how much their win total accounts for all this. Their win total a year ago was 31.5, and they cleared it by a full ten wins. They made the jump. Can they make another one?
In the season where a team makes a 10-win jump or more in their win total (Rockets from 31.5 to 43.5 this season), the average difference in wins vs. win total is 0.12. It's very close.
So the question to decide as you bet this team is if you think they made as much of a jump as they can, for now, with this roster.
Internal development and their expected wins last year justifies the jump to 43.5. How do they go beyond that?
Houston was 29-34 when Sengun played last season, below .500 overall. They went 21-9 vs. teams under .500, a very good rate for a team in their overall record/net rating range. They went 20-32 vs. teams over .500.
That's actually my biggest issue with the over. I have Houston projected at 44 wins without consideration of schedule, but when accounting for who they play in the tough Western Conference, I have them down at 41 wins instead. Life in the Western Conference is tough.
But there's just so much talent. Reed Sheppard looks great in preseason. If he finds a way into the starting unit, he's a ROY candidate. Jalen Green has put up numbers, maybe this is the year he finally puts it together for a full season and not just March. Tari Eason is back, and his defensive impact when he was healthy was massive.
One more thing: Houston's looking for star trades. There was a lot of noise about Kevin Durant last year and over the summer but Durant seemingly wasn't interested. League sources said they definitely inquired about Kyrie Irving last offseason. If a major name comes available, the Rockets will pounce.
TRENDS
Since 2011, not including the 2020 COVID-shortened season…
- Teams with an expected win total four games worse than their actual are 17-11 to the over the following season
- Teams to win 10 or more games more than the previous season are 51-33-2 to the under (59%) the following season
- Teams that won 10 or more games than their win total are 17-15-1 to the over the following season, but if your win total is in that "not bad, not great" range between 30 and 45 wins, the under 8-4
How It Goes Over
The kiddos are awesome and take a step forward, Jalen Green learns how to play around Sengun, the defense is stout again, and a few more games go their way as they climb to 45-47 wins.
How It Goes Under
The Rockets' luck vs. teams like Denver and other contenders they had last year regresses and while the team's talent is better, they get stuck in neutral and once again wind up a .500 team.
Sneaky Guy I Like
It's gotta be Eason. Eason had 3.1 stocks (steals plus blocks) per 36 minutes his rookie season. He only played 22 games last season but it jumped to 3.7. He's a big-defensive-play-maker. The Houston kiddos being so good defensively is really impressive and a credit to the work of Ime Udoka and his staff.
Data courtesy ofNBA.com/stats, Basketball-Reference.com, DunksAndThrees.com, and PositiveResidual.com.
