Last season’s Houston Rockets did not work for a whole lot of reasons, and there’s even more evidence of that now.
According to Tim MacMahon of ESPN, Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, with the support of owner Leslie Alexander, pressured interim coach J.B. Bickerstaff into cutting Dwight Howard’s minutes to give Clint Capela more playing time. The stated priority was to help develop Capela, but Bickerstaff resisted the overtures.
League sources even went as far as to say that James Harden was a driving force in putting the idea in management’s mind, but team sources denied that.
Howard essentially confirmed that something similar to this was happening. By the end of the season, it was pretty apparent that Houston simply didn’t want Howard in the fold anymore. It was a grand experiment that did not work.
