“I feel like I’m watching a scientific experiment every time I watch them,” The Ringer’s Zach Lowe says of Houston and its top-rated offense.
Zach Lowe is loving the Rockets’ offense
“Proving you can do it in a lot of different ways and if you’re big enough and mean enough and have Amen Thompson, & Kevin Durant, & Alperen Sengun, & Steven FRICKEN Adams getting every offensive rebound… you can build an elite offense” pic.twitter.com/t47EkF9p3p
— Steven Adams Stats (@funakistats) October 30, 2025
In the injury absence of Fred VanVleet, the Houston Rockets (2-2) aren’t starting a traditional point guard. The closest thing in the starting lineup, Amen Thompson, has yet to make a single 3-pointer through four games.
And yet, at the moment, they have the NBA’s best offense of the 2025-26 season.
One of the biggest reasons for that success is rebounding and physicality. In Wednesday’s win at Toronto, the Rockets crushed the Raptors on the glass, 64-29.
In a subsequent podcast, The Ringer’s Zach Lowe singled out Houston’s “double big” lineups featuring both Alperen Sengun and Steven Adams. Among his comments:
Who has the No. 1 offense in the entire NBA? The Houston freaking Rockets, who are proving that you can do it in a lot of different ways. If you’re big enough and mean enough and you have Amen Thompson and Kevin Durant and Alperen Sengun, and Steven freaking Adams getting every offensive rebound, you can live at the foul line. You can get second, third, and fourth possessions, and you can build an elite offense despite taking almost no 3s and having no traditional point guard, other than Reed Sheppard coming off the bench… who’s been just okay.
I feel like I’m watching a scientific experiment every time I watch them. With Sengun and Adams on the floor together, they’re +37 in 70 minutes. This continues to be the greatest accidental discovery in recent basketball history.
Steven Adams cannot be kept off the offensive glass. You know what their offensive rebounding rate is with those two guys on the floor? 47 percent. If they shoot and miss, there’s a 50-50 chance they’re getting it back. There was a possession in Toronto where they got two or three offensive rebounds in a row, and on the second one, Scottie Barnes was under the rim trying to box out Adams, I think. And mid-possession, seeing that the Rockets were going to get the ball back, he just slumped his shoulders and kind of stopped playing for a minute, because it’s so demoralizing to play against this big, nasty, physical team.
To Lowe’s point, Rockets general manager Rafael Stone acknowledged earlier this year that he didn’t anticipate the Sengun-Adams pairing working as successfully as it has until very late in the 2024-25 season.
“The double big (success), that did surprise me,” Stone said prior to training camp. “If it didn’t, then it would be shame on me for not doing it at the beginning of the season. But good basketball players can play with good basketball players, and I do think Steven is a very high-IQ player, and Alperen is, too.”
With a limited offensive team in 2024-25, the Rockets found late in the year that leaning into the high offensive rebounding rate of those Sengun-Adams lineups was helping to mitigate that deficiency.
After acquiring Durant in the 2025 offseason, the thought was that Houston’s 2025-26 offense might look a bit more traditional. But VanVleet’s September injury changed the plan, and the Sengun-Adams pairing is once again working its magic to help overcome those perceived limitations.