Rockets' season akin to TV show

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.mpl/sports/2716025

Rockets' season akin to TV show
33 games on 2004-05 schedule viewed by nation
By JONATHAN FEIGEN
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle
RESOURCES

Maybe the NBA knows something. The Rockets can only hope.

Either way — whether the Rockets deserve to be treated as such a glamour team or they merely look good on television — they will find out quickly.

The Rockets will jump into the 2004-05 season, announced Monday, at the deep end.

The season opener will find the Rockets in the champion Detroit Pistons' banner-raising game. It also will begin a stretch of seven games that will reveal much about the rebuilt Rockets.

And when the Rockets are revealed, there will be a bright spotlight, with 33 games (including nine on NBA TV) on national television. Only the Miami Heat and Los Angeles Lakers will be on national TV as often.

The Pistons game Nov. 2 will begin a stretch in which the Rockets face six teams that had better records than they did last season. The seventh team, Toronto, hosts the Rockets in its season opener, which the Rockets play as the second half of a back-to-back. The last game of that seven-game span will bring the Lakers and former Rockets coach and player Rudy Tomjanovich to Toyota Center on Nov. 13.

"You like to get momentum, and it is harder to start with three road games," Rockets general manager Carroll Dawson said. "But you have to play everybody. It can be good. I can remember when we watched the Rangers win the (1994 NHL) championship. The players thought it was a neat deal to watch a city turned on when a team wins a championship. That was on their minds when we came back here. It doesn't hurt to see that.

"Schedules are what they are. There are always some pluses and minuses."


Fewer back-to-backs
The Rockets might not have wanted to begin the season with such a difficult first two weeks, and they surely will have concerns about spending much of March on the road. But there are other aspects of the schedule they had to be happy to see.


The most positive aspect is that the schedule includes just 16 sets of games on consecutive nights. In the previous three seasons, they averaged 20 sets of back-to-backs.

The schedule also includes more long homestands and long road trips. There are five four-game trips. Last season had just one trip of four or more games.

With longer excursions and so few one- and two-game hops out of town, there are fewer road trips, just 18 this season compared to 27 last season.

"As a coach or a former coach, you look at how much time you will spend flying and traveling and how much time you have to work out," Dawson said. "With only 16 back-to-backs, (there's) more time to prepare, which always helps. This is the first time in a long time we don't have to go to Utah both times in a back-to-back. We're flying less than normal."


December at home
Even the March schedule, which has the Rockets playing 11 of 16 games on the road, was not considered all bad.


"When you play that many home games in one month as we do in December — I can't remember ever playing 11 before — you've got to go on the road sometime," Dawson said. "You don't mind if you go out and the games stay spaced out. What hurts you is four in five nights."

The Rockets play four games in five nights three times: in the seven-game stretch to start the season, in mid-January and in late March. But the January and March back-to-backs — as with most of the one-game road trips and stops back in Houston — require only short flights.

The schedule ends with 14 games against Western Conference teams. But even in the West, where the vast majority of clubs are considered contenders, games in that finishing run are against teams not expected to be jockeying for playoff position.

The imbalanced schedule also brought good and bad news. With the expansion of the NBA to 30 teams, with an additional franchise in the Western Conference, teams in the West will face four conference opponents three times rather than four times, as has been done in the East. The Rockets will visit Denver and the Los Angeles Clippers only once and will face the Minnesota Timberwolves and Golden State Warriors in Toyota Center just once.


Magic time in January
While the Rockets study the schedule to determine how it might help or hurt them competitively, the league clearly worked to showcase them. Besides the opener against Detroit on TNT, the Rockets will face the Heat in Miami on ABC on Jan. 30 and will be in the Super Bowl Sunday game a week later against the Lakers.


Tracy McGrady will get his only trip back to Orlando on Jan. 20 in a TNT game. Steve Francis, Cuttino Mobley and Kelvin Cato will make their first trip back to Houston four days later.

With the depth of the Western Conference, many other games could become showcase games. But that will depend on how the retooled Rockets play and perhaps the roster additions to come.

For now, the schedule indicates that if nothing else, the league and television networks consider the Rockets worth watching.

"That's preseason," Dawson said. "We've got to earn it, as they say.

"But it's always good to have people think well of you."

jonathan.feigen@chron.com