This offseason, the Houston Rockets traded for future Hall of Famer Kevin Durant, who will turn 37 in September. They also signed 32-year-old forward Dorian Finney-Smith and 31-year-old center Clint Capela. Houston is squarely in win-now mode.
“We’re not a developmental team anymore,” Rockets general manager Rafael Stone told reporters Monday in his first public comments since the Durant trade.
Since they won 52 games and were the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference last season, this may seem obvious. “That shift probably happened a year or two ago,” Stone said Monday, but it wasn’t long ago that he sounded significantly different. Last December, in an interview on SiriusXM NBA Radio, Stone said, “We want to continue to develop our guys, full stop.”
This is not to say that the front office has gotten off track. Last season, Stone made it clear that he anticipated going through the regular season without making major moves, then evaluating where things stood in the summer. Given what it cost to get Durant in the end, it seems wise to have waited. The Finney-Smith and Capela acquisitions make sense in context, too. More on them later.
Why did the Rockets want to trade for Durant? “He’s Kevin Durant,” Stone said, laughing. “I think he’s really good, he’s super-efficient, he had a great year last year, so he’s obviously not 30 anymore but he hasn’t really fallen off.”
The Rockets hope that Durant “makes us a better offensive team while at the same time being another really long, very capable wing defender,” Stone said. “We just hope he adds him: the player that he’s been for the last two decades almost.”
In 62 games for the Phoenix Suns last season, Durant averaged 26.6 points with a 64.2 true shooting percentage, 6.0 rebounds, 4.2 assists and 2.0 stocks in 36.5 minutes. Ideally, he’ll give Houston the boost they desperately needed on offense and his new teammates will lighten his load on the other end.
“We like the fit,” Stone said. “We think it works well. We think he will add to us and we think we will help him.”
On paper, the Rockets have a “very deep roster,” Stone said. This is partially because they kept so many of their core players out of the Durant trade. On a related note, Stone said that coach Ime Udoka, who coached Durant as an assistant in Brooklyn, wanted them to make the trade, but lightly pushed back on the notion that Udoka would have been happy to mortgage the future for him.
“Organizationally, we only do things when it makes sense for all of us,” Stone said. “And so he was definitely an advocate for it, but only in this way. By no means was there pressure to do something like this. We thought we were going to be a very good team coming back no matter what, and when the deal came through in this manner, I think we all wanted to do it.”
Stone said that the team valued Jalen Green and Dillon Brooks, who went to the Suns in the trade. He called Cam Whitmore, whom they traded to the Washington Wizards for a pair of second-round picks, “insanely talented,” but said Houston was not in a position to let him play through mistakes and wanted to give him an opportunity to develop. He added that the Rockets targeted Finney-Smith (whose four-year contract is only guaranteed for two seasons, per HoopsHype’s Michael Scotto) in part because they wanted to replace the defense and intensity that Brooks brought them, and that they were “ecstatic” when the Capela signing materialized. Houston has a crowded center rotation, but Stone doesn’t see this as a problem.
“We loved [the two-big] lineup once we discovered it last year,” he said. “We thought it was really, really effective for us. Also, Clint just adds something we don’t have in terms of being kind of a center who can move a little bit easier on the perimeter, also as a lob threat. Finally, we just think depth is super important, and as we’re trying to make it through the season, we don’t want there to be huge drop-offs.”
Last year’s Houston team lost a seven-game first-round series against the Golden State Warriors, but Stone said he saw it as a “very legitimate” No. 2 seed with a “real chance of contending in the playoffs.” With Durant in the fold, “our goal is definitely to win a championship,” he said, and the Rockets are optimistic that they have put together the kind of team that can do so. Still, Stone is not getting ahead of himself.
“It’s July. Hope springs eternal,” he said. “So, for all of us, we’re gonna have to put in the work and earn everything we get.”
Watch all your favorite Amazon Prime Video Sports broadcasts live and free. Get access to NFL, NBA, NASCAR, WNBA, and more – all included with your Prime membership!