Rockets Face Crossroads After Early Playoff Exit

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

Houston has plenty of decisions to make, including whether to bring back Kevin Durant

By Sam Quinn

May 2, 2026 at 12:16 am ET • 19 min read

- - -

The Houston Rockets expected to compete for the 2026 championship. That's the only justifiable reason to trade meaningful assets for a 37-year-old Kevin Durant .

Those expectations were at least partially dashed by Fred VanVleet's torn ACL, but the opportunity it created would be a reasonable silver lining. With VanVleet out, the Rockets could test the readiness of their young core to step into bigger roles. Maybe they could compete on their own without the presence of their veteran point guard. Nope.

The Rockets started the season out strong, winning 25 of their first 40 games and outscoring opponents by over nine points per 100 possessions with Steven Adams in the lineup. Then Adams suffered a Grade 3 ankle sprain, ending his season. The Rockets ranked fourth in Cleaning the Glass ' Offensive Rating on the day Adams got hurt and third in defense. They ranked 14th and ninth afterward. So much for contending without VanVleet.

Fine, the exasperated Rockets likely rationalized, maybe a championship wasn't in the cards, but they still had Durant and the young core. They could at least compete in the playoffs, maybe win a round, get some useful intel on their younger players and go out with a bit of dignity. The postseason bracket helped out in that regard. Their first-round opponent was a Los Angeles Lakers team missing Luka Dončić and Austin Reaves .

Even that proved a bridge too far. Durant got hurt before the series, but he played in Game 2 and it didn't matter. The Lakers took a 3-0 series lead. The Rockets at least put up a fight and won the next two, but the Lakers ultimately defeated them 98-78 in Friday's Game 6 to take the series.

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.

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

_Originally reported by [CBS Sports](https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/rockets-offseason-preview-kevin-durant-ime-udoka-nba-playoffs-lakers/)._