Game 5 Recap: Floored

There are some losses that should be talked about. There are some losses that can even help a team. You analyze them, see what you did wrong, make the necessary adjustments and come out better than before. Game 5 was not one of them. Game 5 was what happens when a more talented team that has underachieved for the length of the series plays up to their potential against a team that has been exceeding expectations for the better part of a year and finally slips up. The result was a massacre. A brutal, embarrassing, ruthless slaughter of the Houston Rockets at the hands of the Lakers. And quite frankly, I don't want to talk about it. To put it simply, the Lakers played the way people have wanted them to play all year, and the Rockets played the way our talent says we should. All year we have done more with less, and Tuesday night in Los Angeles we just couldn't keep it up. This is not a knock on the Rockets. We have done more than anyone not living in Houston even dreamed we could, and I'm proud that we were able to maintain it for so long. But the fact of the matter is, if you take the best two players of any team in the NBA they are going to suffer. It may not be immediately, but at some point in time, the team is going to struggle. Take Kobe and Gasol off the Lakers, they don't make the playoffs. Remove Pierce and Garnett from the Celtics, they lose to the Bulls in the first round. Take Carmelo Anthony and Chauncey Billups off the Nuggets and you have another lottery-bound team. Take Lebron and his chalk off the Cavaliers and they probably don't even win 20 games. The point I'm trying to make here is that as Rockets fans, we should have seen this coming. Don't let Billy or anyone else tell you otherwise. A game like this was to be expected. When you don't have a go to player on offense, there will be nights when you struggle to score. When you play a ticked off, almost-unfairly talented team on that same night, 118-78 happens.

And I know it may not seem like it, but nothing in my recent memory has hurt more than typing that score, than watching that game. Nothing is more painful than watching your team get the life sucked out of it and hardly putting up a fight, but not because they don't want to, because they just can't. The Rockets as a team were dead by the end of the second quarter on Tuesday night. The effort and energy we put into each minute of every game finally caught up to us, and it was evident from the way we played. What resulted was something that I'm going to remember for a long, long time. It takes a lot for a game to make me feel the way I did after Game 7 of the first round of the 2006 playoffs, but Game 5 was able to take me back there. Seeing my team get beaten senseless, its face shoved into the dirt repeatedly with its opponent only stopping to gloat was able to take me back to that abyss, that continuous blackness, that feeling of sickness, hopelessness and utter depression all rolled into one, and I hated every moment of it. But deep down, I knew that I should have seen this coming. Which is why I have nothing to say about Tuesday night. I've said before on this very blog that no matter what happens from now until the end of the postseason, I'm proud of the Rockets for all we've been able to do with seemingly every break (a bad pun, I know) going against us. And that's not just this year, but last year. And the year before. And not the year before that, because we admittedly choked away the Dallas series, (with the help of some poor, poor refereeing. Enjoy your prison cell Donaghy) but the year before that as well.

But the point of all of this is that I'm not going to talk about what happened last night. I'm going to focus on another game against the same team tomorrow night, when we get another shot and the golden boys (get it? it's funny beacuse they actually wear gold) of the NBA. Tthat's the beauty of the playoffs. You're down one second and given new life in the next. And that's exactly how it should be. But back on topic, the question on our hands is a simple one: what do we do now? Do we lie down, admit that the Lakers are the better team and let them finish the series at the Toyota Center on Thursday? Or do we pull together for one last run, one last, confusing, logic-defying victory over a more talented, better coached, and honestly, luckier team? Knowing these Rockets, I believe it's going to be the latter. Now, more than ever, we need to feed off the doubts. The whispers, the "I told you so's," the previews of a Lakers-Nuggets Conference Finals. I don't care what happens in Game 7 if and when it happens, all I'm asking for is another "upset" tomorrow night. If for nothing else, just because I don't want to go back to that dark place in the back of my head just yet. For at least one more night, I want to feel the pride I get when our undersized, undermanned, under-respected, (I think I just made up a word) team beats a team it should have no business even having a close game with. And I know I'm not going to be saying this once we actually get there, but right now, screw Game 7. I just want to win Game 6. And by doing so, move on past Game 5. I don't want to think about what happened last night, I want to hope for what's going to happen tomorrow night. I want to Beat LA, even if it's for the last time this year. And I know I say this a lot, but I promise that I can't remember a time when I've felt it more than I do right now. Go Rockets.