After trading away James Harden in January 2021, the Houston Rockets were largely plagued by a problem not uncommon amongst bad teams: they didn’t have good players. Across three seasons from 2020 to 2023, the Rockets won a grand total of 59 games. Houston was a wasteland, where has-beens glumly cashed their final checks alongside wannabes.
And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. After signing high-level vets and bringing in Imo Udoka last summer, the Rockets speed-ran their way to competency, grinding their way to a surprising 41-41 record. The years of unabashed crappiness and draft pick hoarding gave way to a deep, versatile roster: most teams don’t a have single young guy as promising as the Rockets’ cache of Jalen Green, Alperen Sengun, Jabari Smith Jr., Tari Eason, Amen Thompson, Cam Whitmore and Reed Sheppard.
With their young core in place, the Rockets have entered the hardest stage of their rebuild as they must now discern which players are actually worth prioritizing; it’s easy to find good players, but hard to construct a great team. Namely, they must navigate the central tension between Alperen Sengun and Jalen Green, the team’s two first-round picks in 2021, who have developed into their leading scorers. Individually, they’re both great talents, albeit slightly jankier, Temu-y versions of bigger, starrier ones. Together, they’re fundamentally incompatible.
When Sengun and Green shared the court last season, the Rockets posted a slightly negative net rating and were outscored by 0.6 points per 100 possessions. Conversely, whenever Sengun and Green were separated, the Rockets had a positive one. To wit, once Sengun got hurt, Houston ripped off a ten-game winning streak, fueled by Green’s 31.8 points per game over that stretch.
Whereas Green attacks in conventional ways, Sengun is a dreamer; Green wants to get buckets, Sengun wants to conjure them. Their miscommunication is rooted in time and space. Green, an athletic two-guard from California, plays like he’s committed Kobe Doin’ Work to memory. The Turkish Sengun is perhaps the first young star to shape his game in Nikola Jokic’s image. Although there are theoretical ways to meld Sengun’s playmaking and Green’s bucketry, the pair vibrates on different frequencies. To be his best, Green needs Sengun to space the floor in ways that are beyond the big man’s capabilities; when Sengun sets up shop on the block, he envisions passes and cuts that Green can’t always see.
In this sense, the Rockets’ Summer League team has provided some clarity, insofar as any mid-July exhibition game means anything. The third overall pick in last month’s draft, Sheppard, has looked like an undisputed star in Vegas; through three games, Sheppard is averaging 20.0 points, 4.7 rebounds and 4.7 assists and also chipping in 4.3 stocks per game for good measure. The only thing that can stop him from winning Summer League MVP is the possibility that he gets pulled for being too good to play in Summer League.
More, Sheppard has showcased an expansiveness that he never got to demonstrate at Kentucky. During his year in college, he was forced to dim his sparkle by necessity; Kentucky was so loaded with guards that there wasn’t room for Sheppard in the starting lineup. Within this circumscribed context, Sheppard thrived so comprehensively, it became hard to envision him doing anything else. He was such a good shooter that it felt counterproductive to ask anybody else to provide spacing. He was such a handsy help defender that moving him to the point-of-attack seemed like a waste.
As a Rocket, Sheppard has proven that he wasn’t hiding his game from the world, but rather hiding the world from his game. No longer tasked with self-auditing his game to cater to his teammates, Sheppard is looking to do damage, not just limit mistakes. He’s more aggressive hunting his own shot, which, in turn, has added some much-needed grease to his stiff ball-handling; he creates space by preying on his defender’s desperation to not cede it in the first place. Despite taking just 59 non-layup twos at Kentucky, he sports a canny, deadly mid-range game, incorporating a fresh batch of pull-up jumpers and floaters into his shot diet. Even his turnovers are encouraging, evidence that he’s daring to chance the kind of high-risk, high-reward passes that he scorned in college.
At the risk of getting carried away, Sheppard’s star-turn has made the whole Sengun-Green debate feel dated and unnecessary, like trying to decide between a Blackberry and Palm Treo on the eve of the first iPhone. If Sheppard is really, truly this good, it matters less how he complements the Rockets’ existing roster than how they complement him.
In particular, Whitmore has found instant success as Sheppard’s summer fling, scoring 45 points over their first two games together. Like Green, Whitmore is a dynamic scorer and breathtaking athlete, but he’s at his best as a gatherer, not a hunter; he’s a terror against out-of-sorts defenses, even if he’s not able to unknot them himself. There’s a real economy to his game—all that hesi tween mumbo jumbo seems silly when you can manufacture points simply by running in a straight line to the rim. Accordingly, he’s been the T-Man to Sheppard’s Tax Man, providing a welcome degree of muscle by barrelling through the creases that Sheppard creates.
Similarly, Amen Thompson should find safe harbor alongside Sheppard. As a rookie, Thompson was relegated to a utility role as an undersized big since his crooked jumper made it impractical to play him on the perimeter. Sheppard’s marksmanship, however, will unlock lineups that allow Thompson to be more than just a souped-up Bruce Brown.
Chalk this up as another win for nominative determinism: Reed Sheppard reads the game and shepherds in success. While Green and Sengun require their teammates to play on their personal terms, Sheppard isn’t as dyed in the wool—he’ll help facilitate stardom for his teammates, regardless of whether he achieves it himself. His all-around smarts can turn a one-note scorer like Whitmore into an unstoppable force; his shooting can turn Thompson’s quirks into strengths. There’s not a lineup that he doesn’t make better, nor a player that he doesn’t enhance. As such, Sheppard’s ultimate strength is that he unlocks paths towards greatness beyond Houston’s previous ceiling of some level of amorphous goodness. Consider the rest of the league flocked.
