Sometimes a team is more likable when it loses. The Rockets took their beating at the hands of the Warriors, and were more human because of it.
The Hawks took their assbeating as they did everything this season. They took it professionally, but not quietly. Al Horford's elbow-drop on Matthew Dellavedova embodied their fierce but calculated commitment to losing with dignity, but not without some vengeance. Horford plowed the point of his large, uncushioned synovial hinge joint into the side of Dellavedova's head, got his Flagrant 2, and then calmly shook hands with his teammates before walking into the locker room for the remainder of the game. The Hawks lost, but not without a fight, but also not without the results of that fight being totally conclusive.
The Hawks presented a great, just-malleable-enough foil for the Cavs' triumph.
The Houston Rockets did not return the favor for the Warriors, because the general code of this Rockets team does not contain the word "cooperate." That lack of cooperation meant Houston pulling out one thunderous win at home before prolonging the series, opening Game 5 with a giant run, and then forcing the Warriors to break into an emergency stash of Harrison Barnes to close out the series. And even then, the Rockets kept things juuuuust close enough to tantalize, keep you watching, and continue to destroy your sleep patterns.*
*The NBA playoffs give you an idea into just how tired drug addicts must be all the time. The Rockets, with their reliance on drawing free throws and prolonging the game, are clearly in the meth addict category of NBA playoff viewing experience.
Houston, even in loss, had to be annoying. It was in their nature. Their big man, Dwight Howard, is a defensive genius with little ability to play anything resembling polished offense after a decade in the NBA. He takes passes or missed jumpers off the rim from James Harden, whose role in the Rockets offense seems to be best described as the "Leeroy Jenkins" role. He rolls in whenever and wherever he likes, and often regardless of whether anyone else is with him, and always with absolute confidence. Trevor Ariza and Jason Terry are in there somewhere. Sometimes Josh Smith sits outside and waits for an outlet pass. He seems just as surprised about it as you and I are.
The Rockets were baffling and still are, and they made a disappointing, kind of baffling exit. But let's say some kind things about them. The Rockets were assembled by Daryl Morey and his crew of Sloan-ite analysts. They should have been the logical extension of brute math in action: three-pointers, free-throws, and everything else prescribed by the formulas that built them. At times, especially when they were winning, this was exactly what Houston presented. Those times, good as they might be for Rockets fans, could be totally unwatchable for the general public.
Teams all lose in different ways. When they collapsed, the 2013-14 Indiana Pacers fell into the doorframe like a corpse and then refused to move until the Heat stepped over them. (The Pacers getting to the conference finals is the real crime, but the Eastern Division still exists.) That Cavs team that LeBron James took to the 2007 Finals against the Spurs lost honestly because they had one player, and one only, and behaved accordingly in close but exciting losses. (They looked like they knew it, too.) The 2014-15 Hawks handed in a professional, concise submission. The Clippers built an epic neurotic masterpiece for which the proper words and terminologies have not been created yet.
Yet, when the Rockets were losing or struggling, they looked human, fallible, even sympathetic. Not all teams are blessed with personality in loss, but the Rockets had it. Look, there's Dwight Howard playing well, but still playing with every glaring flaw Dwight Howard's always had. There's James Harden singlehandedly keeping the team afloat, and then putting a new hole in the lifeboat, and then plugging it before immediately making a record-setting sized new hole in the boat. There's Josh Smith, caught on camera looking at a pep-talking Dwight Howard from the bench with a look in his eyes somewhere between please stop talking and I can't believe you won't stop talking when I have this look on my very uninterested and unhappy face.
Jason Terry took the ball to the hole last night, looked up, and clearly had the same thought anyone over 30 has had when they get on a skateboard: I've made a terrible mistake, and need to abandon this plan immediately before I am harmed.
It was failure, but compared to what Houston looked like when they won, it was compelling, familiar failure. Loss like that transcends calculating design, or at least makes it something recognizable because ... well, because you've had the Rockets' job before. The workplace isn't bad, but it's not great. Your co-workers are OK to pretty good -- even the one guy no one can clearly stand despite his efforts to be popular. There's a lot of talent, and maybe one transcendent talent on board, maybe some castoffs, maybe some people just hoping to make it to retirement. There's definitely a system -- at least, theoretically there's a system in place, a system that can make things seem kind of rote and mechanical.
Some jobs aren't funny or endearing until something goes wrong, though. I thought about something last night I hadn't thought about in 15 years. I once had this OK-but-mechanical telemarketing job. It worked. The people were fine, but kind of cold and clearly just punching clocks. Calls, if they didn't work out, were supposed to go three minutes or less. Successful surveys could go 30 minutes or so, max.
And I remember nothing about that job except the time it went totally wrong, and this guy on disability from his utility job, high off back pills and coconut rum, simply wouldn't let me off the phone for two hours. My supervisor, listening in, tried to cut it off but simply gave in because ... well, because he was funny, and wouldn't stop talking about his motorcycles and his ex-wife, and the time he had a mountain lion in his yard. ("I think it was a mountain lion? Could have been a cat.") We let him go because the job was clearly over, and we were all clearly over the job, and sometimes only a true disaster can make that indisputable fact.
That's what this Rockets team felt like in defeat: disparate, fallible parts only united by their system, a system so good with such high-quality parts that it got them very, very far. They looked even worse in comparison to the Warriors, a system whose parts clearly have the kind of unquantifiable supernatural cohesion and chemistry no one can really plan for, or calculate. That's not a rebuke of analytics. It's an acknowledgment that sometimes losing can redeem a mechanically successful but ultimately unlikable thing, or at least make it something more human to the viewer. Dwight Howard, in defeat, said "I'm still a champion" after their loss last night, and it almost made you want to hug him. Then again, the robot's always most sympathetic in its final scene.