If, and, but. Three of the most aggravating words in the English language.
If the Houston Rockets had known Fred VanVleet would get injured, they wouldn’t have traded for Kevin Durant. That’s the scuttlebutt, anyway. Who can say for sure?
Rafael Stone is infamously opaque. His tightly managed, unusually small front office is shadowy. Fans complain, but we should be glad to have management that’s not routinely spilling the tea.
All of which makes Ben DuBose’s recent reporting especially intriguing. Ben is a good egg. He doesn’t peddle smut. It’s likely that if he’s reporting this, he heard it somewhere. Let’s assume it’s true:
The Rockets believe in Fred VanVleet
There’s a human tendency to hear something that makes intuitive sense and repeat it without questioning it. The latest jingoism out of the Rockets’ fanbase is “If the team was relying on Fred VanVleet that much, they were never contenders anyway”.
There’s also a false star player/role player dichotomy that a lot of fans subscribe to. VanVleet is, for example, “better” than Zach LaVine, if “better” is defined as helping a team win instead of racking up stats. The question here is, how impactful is VanVleet?
Let’s break open the CleaningTheGlass. VanVleet was running point for four of the Rockets’ six positive lineups in 2024-25. He was part of their best lineup. When he was with Amen Thompson, Dillon Brooks, Jabari Smith Jr., and Alperen Sengun, the Rockets were +30.9 across 130 possessions.
This was all amid something of a down year for VanVleet. He posted a 0.9 Box Plus/Minus (BPM) after hitting 3.4 in 2023-24. It’s been a trend throughout VanVleet’s career: When he’s on the floor, teams tend to play better.
That 3.4 BPM is sniffing star-level production. That’s not to say VanVleet is a star in a traditional sense:
But the Rockets are right to account for his presence.
The Rockets needed VanVleet this year
It’s less about production and more about functionality. VanVleet isn’t the Rockets’ engine. He’s closer to their windshield:
Sure, you could drive without it, but at some point(s) throughout the year, it’s going to be awfully uncomfortable.
The Rockets’ success last year was predicated on winning the possession game. They dominated the offensive glass and kept the turnovers as low as possible. VanVleet is the king of the assist-to-turnover ratio, and neither Thompson nor Reed Sheppard is ascending to the throne anytime soon.
It’s hard to hold this front office accountable for planning on having their starting point guard. One could argue that they should have used Clint Capela’s contract on another point guard, but then, Steven Adams also suffered a season-ending injury, and he’s also essential to Houston’s structural integrity.
Dorian Finney-Smith? Hindsight bias. Tripling down on 3-and-D wings means cornering a market scarcity. Nobody anticipated that Finney-Smith would average 2.9 points on 24.5% three-point shooting in 2025-26 (dear, merciful, God!).
Besides, the Rockets clearly wanted to reserve point guard reps for Thompson and Sheppard. They would have comfortably covered backup point guard duties this year.
So no, it’s not unreasonable that the Rockets would have opted against Durant if they’d known about VanVleet. If you think that suggests too much reliance on VanVleet, you’re misunderstanding VanVleet. The Rockets didn’t think he was the star they were pairing Durant with. They knew he was fundamentally essential to what they do: