Houston Rockets: Key takeaways from the 2020-21 season

The Houston Rockets 2020-21 season was a wild roller coaster ride, to say the least.

It all started before a single regular-season game was played as the Rockets had the most tumultuous offseason of any NBA team.

From swapping Russell Westbrook for John Wall to adding in one of the biggest free-agent names in Christian Wood to the roster, it appeared that Houston would once again be a competitive force in the West with the threat to make some noise in the playoffs.

But things quickly derailed as three-time scoring champ, nine-time All-Star and former league MVP James Harden, the face of the franchise, publicly said he no longer be a Rocket and repeatedly requested to be traded.

The Houston Rockets 2020-21 season was a wild roller coaster ride that was very hard to watch at most times. Here’s what we learned this season.

While the Rockets tried to reconcile things with Harden and convince him that the roster had the pieces to be legitimate title contenders, ties between the two sides completely shattered just nine games into the season.

Harden was shipped to the Nets in a blockbuster trade that brought Victor Oladipo, a few other players, and a boatload of future draft picks and swaps. By ending the Harden-era, it appeared as if the Rockets were going into full rebuild mode.

But not so fast.

The new look Rockets went 8-4 in their first 12 games post-Harden, sending a beam of hope throughout the city of Houston that the team could still be competitive and possibly find themselves in the playoffs come the end of the regular season.

But in the blink of an eye, things took another 180-degree turn for Houston as Wood went down with a right ankle injury and had to be taken off the court in a wheelchair in the Rockets win against Memphis in early February.

It all went downhill from here, as the Rockets lost 20-games in a row. On top of the massive losing streak, Houston was bit even harder by the injury bug as guys like John Wall, Eric Gordon and Danuel House all missed a significant portion of the season due to injury.

By the trade deadline, the Rockets added a few more picks and veteran players, most notably Kelly Olynyk, by shipping P.J. Tucker to Milwaukee and Oladipo to Miami.

From this point on it was all about developing the young guns and getting them familiar with Houston’s first-year head coach Stephen Silas’ system. As expected by giving the majority of the minutes to inexperienced, young players, the Rockets continued to lose and finished with a league-worst 17-55 record.

While it is easy to focus on the negatives, which were far too many, from the 2020-21 season, there are many positives storylines that came out of the year which should give Houston hope for a bright future and an expedited rebuild process.

Here are three positive takeaways from the season: