LOS ANGELES — For nearly seven minutes, Houston Rockets coach Ime Udoka lit up his team after a late-game collapse in Game 3 against the Los Angeles Lakers. It was for good reason. The Rockets, up six with less than 40 seconds left, had the game in the bag. What transpired from that point on was a combination of late-game heroics by the Lakers and an equally gut-wrenching collapse from the Rockets that put them in a 3-0 series hole.
The general message from Udoka’s afterward? His team needed to grow up.
“Horrendous mistakes,” Udoka said after Game 3. “I don’t know if you want to say youth or scared of the moment or whatever the case.”
Fast forward to Wednesday night at Crypto.com Arena, and it appears that Udoka’s message resonated. The momentum in this series has suddenly flipped back in Houston’s favor after defeating the Lakers 99-93 in Game 5 to cut the series deficit to 3-2. The pressure is right back on the Lakers, less than a week after Houston’s season was on life support.
Udoka was right, too. The Rockets, on paper, are not that young anymore. Houston’s young core experienced the highs and lows of an intense seven-game playoff series last year in an eventual loss to the Golden State Warriors. If this young core didn’t respond without Kevin Durant in the lineup, their season would be over. Durant missed Game 1 with a knee injury. He then injured his ankle in Game 2 and hasn’t played since.
No team in NBA history has come back to win from a 3-0 deficit. The Rockets are the 16th team in NBA history to force Game 6 after trailing a series 3-0. The last team to force a Game 7 after falling into that hole was the Boston Celtics in the 2023 Eastern Conference finals against the Miami Heat. There’s still work to be done on Houston’s part to reach a win-or-go-home scenario in the first round for the second consecutive season.
But for the first time since it was announced Durant would return for Game 2, the Rockets have hope.
“We have a resilient group that plays hard and is very competitive on every night,” Udoka said after the win. “Rarely do we get blown out, we fight back. We might’ve lost some leads, but that’s kind of our DNA. That part I wasn’t worried about. We had a hard-fought series last year, down 3-1, it got to Game 7. We are going to battle.”
Can the Rockets make history?
When Durant was ruled out for Game 4 last weekend, Houston’s hopes of a comeback seemed dashed. Durant missed four games total during the regular season — with only one of those games being due to injury — but has now missed four of the five games of this series due to knee and ankle injuries.
It’s unclear when Durant will return this series — if he does at all.
Durant, 37, played his most regular-season minutes in 13 years but had to sit on the sidelines to watch his team fall behind in the dreaded 3-0 hole. With the win in Game 5, Houston improved to 6-2 without Durant in the lineup, with the losses coming in Games 1 and 3. Wednesday night’s outcome was the gutsiest. Lakers star LeBron James had won 16 consecutive close-out games at home and Austin Reaves was back in the Lakers’ lineup after missing the last nine games with an oblique injury.
The Rockets’ offensive deficiencies are well-documented. The biggest reason Houston lost the first two games of the series in Los Angeles was a simple one: shot-making. The Rockets had the advantage in almost every other statistical category, but it didn’t matter because shots weren’t falling.
Houston shot 12 of 30 (40%) from the 3-point line in Game 4 and 14 of 40 (35%) on Wednesday. The Rockets took 27 more field goal attempts than the Lakers in the opening game of the series and 17 more in the second game. But the difference was the quality of those shot attempts. It’s why the Lakers won both of those games.
But after leading by as many as 11 points in the first half on Wednesday, the way the Lakers won is the way they lost. The Lakers couldn’t buy a bucket. Los Angeles finished 32 of 76 (42.1%) from the floor.
Despite the Lakers’ poor shooting, they made one last run in the fourth quarter by cutting what was once a 13-point deficit down to three, 88-85, with 2:59 to play. That’s when one of the lone Rockets players who didn’t play much in last year’s playoffs, Reed Sheppard, made two critical plays to ultimately force a Game 6.
Sheppard knocked down a mid-range jumper with 2:37 left and then stole the ball from James and threw down a dunk on the other end to extend the lead back to seven. Just as the Los Angeles crowd started to get back into the game, Sheppard brought that energy to a halt.
Sheppard, the No. 3 pick in the 2024 draft, wasn’t even born when James made his NBA debut in the fall of 2003. He played 10 minutes in that playoff series against the Warriors and is now coming up clutch just over a year later.
Sheppard, like his team during the last week, is growing up.
“He can get to his spots as long as he sets up and creates a little separation,” Udoka said of Sheppard. “Love the fact that he got the ball and handled the pressure. Obviously, he made a big shot.”
Sheppard said the Rockets were going to make sure they wouldn’t lose another late lead.
“When they made their run at the end and cut it to a one-possession game, we definitely remembered what happened in Game 3 and we didn’t want to let that happen again,” Sheppard said. “So just being able to stick together, make the right play and getting the right offensive sets and getting good shots, that’s what we were able to do.”
Call it conventional or unconventional, Udoka’s message resonated. And after looking dead in the water, the Rockets have life.
