Tari Eason is the Rockets' franchise player

Its not just the shooting - he has at times struggled with understanding where to be offensively to maximize spacing. He has definitely improved but the freelance thing he does as a defender with his incredible defensive instincts - that doesn't work the same way on the offensive side where his instincts aren't as great, his handles and decision making aren't as polished, and his shooting is inconsistent. If he can fit into the system offensively(at least for now) and then BE the system(with Amen), defensively - I think that works but the pay scale for a "three and d" player is a lot different from a defensive player of his skills who also has a more direct role in creating offense.

I think the problem here is his camp has been saying from the get go that Tari has much more offensive skills to showcase and his on the court play has shown glimpses but not necessarily enough to change his offensive role as a 3 and d player. THAT is really the crux of the issue here - his camp sees a higher ceiling to his offensive game than what the team sees and that misalignment is the difference between MLE money and the extra coin that Jabari got being a high level defensive players but also a deadly 3pt shooter with gravity. Tari has no such gravity.

 

Appreciate the info as usual but respectfully you are probably Kyle Lowry sized wrong.

 

Wrong about what exactly?

I can show you the numbers in detail if you like.

 

lol my bad quoted the wrong post lmao. Was intended for Codman’s post, referring to him not being too high on Tari Eason.

 

Full article: (broken up into 2 parts)


(From Houston Chronicle)

Rockets forward Tari Eason lost his father but found himself
Danielle Lerner

When Tari Eason’s life changed forever, he was thousands of feet in the air.

It was March 26, 2025. Eason, then finishing his third season with the Houston Rockets,was on a team plane bound for Salt Lake City, where the Rockets played a game the next day against the Utah Jazz.

The previous week, relatives had told the Rockets’ forward that his father and namesake, Tari Timothy Eason, was missing. The man he called Pops, known to most people as “OG” or “T-Money,” was beloved for his vivacious and confident personality. He was devoted to Eason’s 4-year-old sister, Talia, and it was unlike him to disappear while looking after her.

Eason tried to remain even keeled and focus on basketball, to keep himself from thinking the worst.

Five days later, New York authorities discovered the body of Tari Timothy Eason. He was 41.

The Rockets’ flight to Utah had just gone wheels up when Eason’s brother texted him that their father was gone. As family members attempted to call him, all Eason could do was stare at his phone and try to keep his hands from shaking.

“That was probably one of the longest plane rides of my life,” Eason said.

There was no time for Eason to process his grief. Eason played in Utah on March 27, flew to New York for his father’s memorial service and was back with the Rockets to play the Lakers in Los Angeles on March 31 and finish out the final weeks of the regular season. Then, he was in the throes of his first NBA playoffs.

Whenever Eason was feeling down, he had reached out to his dad for help. Suddenly that wasn’t an option anymore, and it left him feeling unmoored. On the court, he tried to play the way he always does: a ball of energy, giving every ounce of effort on every possession.

Off the court, though, there was an undeniable hole.

“Whether I was sad, whether I was happy, whether I was too up, too down, he always knew how I was feeling,” Eason said of his dad. “He was someone who I reached out to a lot in times of need, when things got tough. He was one of the only people who I feel like really understood me.”

In a locker room interview immediately following the Rockets’ elimination from the playoffs in a Game 7 loss to the Warriors,Eason described the 2024-25 season as “By far, the toughest year I’ve ever had.”

“Playing basketball, coming back from injury, unsure of myself,” Eason said. “Not to make excuses or anything, (but) I’m dealing with that, with my father passing last month. Just a lot of stuff. It’s a lot of emotion going through my head right now.”

It’s been eight months since his father died and that hole is still there. Nobody anticipates losing a parent so young, and so unexpectedly.

But sitting courtside after the Rockets’ shootaround in Memphis this week, Eason said he’s learned to stop running from the pain. He faces it head on, cherishes the good along with the bad, just as his father would have wanted.

“I try to just keep his name alive, keep his spirit alive,” Eason said. “That’s all I can do, is hold it down for my little brothers and little sister.”

A family's ‘heart and soul’

Teroya Eason will only call her oldest son by his nickname, Peso, or his middle name, Jordan. She reserves his legal name for when he’s in trouble, because in her mind it belongs to someone else.

“His father was Tari. The only Tari I ever knew,” Teroya said.

Tari Timothy Eason was only 19 when Peso was born. Teroya likes to say that as young parents, they grew up together with their firstborn son. They chose to give him the middle name Jordan not because of Michael Jordan, but just because they liked it.

“We knew that name carried basketball power. We had no idea how far it would go,” Teroya said. “But it was a gamble that we both won. He went as far as one can go in the sport and he continues. For that, I know his father is proud.”

Among the things Tari Jordan Eason inherited from his dad, besides his first name: a playful nature, a cutting sense of humor and an ability to talk to anybody.

“He could go into any room with any people and just light up the room,” Eason said. “Everybody enjoyed being around him. He was a little more cocky than me. He was super cocky. To let him tell it, he’s the reason that I’m in the NBA. He’s athletic, all these things, but really it was my mom.”

When Eason was a kid, he lived with his mom and three brothers in Los Angeles before they moved to Seattle during his freshman year of high school. For most of his childhood, his father was in and out of his life. They didn’t have a great relationship until Eason was 17, when he decided to choose forgiveness.

“I ultimately realized that life is short,” Eason said. “When I got to the NBA I was like, ‘I’ve accomplished a lot that I wanted in life despite this relationship not being there, so why not try to really push that and have a relationship with my father? ’ Some people don’t have that opportunity and maybe some people don’t want to, but I just knew that I wanted one, at least before it was too late.”

Eason worked to repair his relationship with his dad while playing college basketball at Cincinnati and LSU. By the time Eason was drafted by the Rockets with the 17th overall pick in the 2022 NBA draft, he viewed his dad as his best friend. They loved to watch classic American crime films together, like “State Property” and “King of New York.” They listened to 1990s and 2000s music. They didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but they were there for each other.

When Eason underwent season-ending surgery to remove a lesion from his left legin March 2024 — a procedure that involved performing a bone graft and inserting a metal rod into his tibia — his father came to stay with him in Houston and helped him through his recovery. Last season, Eason’s dad traveled frequently back and forth between New York and Houston.

“He loved his kids, especially my little sister Talia,” Eason said. “He’s kind of the heart and soul and bodyguard of my family.”

So, when his father died, Eason felt a responsibility to be strong for his three younger brothers and his little sister. He called himself their security blanket.

Eason’s mom watched him step up for his siblings even as she could tell that he was carrying a heavy burden.
“That was the most tremendous loss my sons have ever known,” Teroya Eason said. “From the moment I had to tell them their father was gone, they have never been the same. They went to bed the night before something completely different than I know now. I can’t explain it, but they are different. They grew up right away. … Peso has been poised through all his pain. And their father was raising their 4-year-old sister and now my son has taken on a part of that responsibility. I’m genuinely very proud of him.”

It was also the home stretch of the NBA season, the most pivotal season yet of Eason’s career. The Rockets earned the No. 2 seed in the West and secured homecourt advantage for the 2025 postseason.

In the first-round series against Golden State, Eason averaged 7.6 points, 4.3 rebounds and 1.1 steals as Houston’s sixth man while shooting 47.7% from the field, 36.8% on 3-pointers. He now says he was just “moving through things,” trying to stay in a routine to keep from going completely off the rails.

Basketball has always been an outlet for Eason to channel his emotions. That was the case in the aftermath of his father’s death, but basketball was also a necessary distraction.

“When Peso was little and he would be frustrated or upset, he would go play basketball for hours,” Teroya Eason said. “He never really wanted to talk. He would just go play basketball. He’s turned into that. It has been his therapy since he was a child. This time is no different.”

A chance to reset

It wasn’t until the Rockets’ season ended that Eason really let the tragedy of his father’s death sink in.

Eason used the offseason to confront his grief and to work on himself. He read self-help books, trained diligently in the gym, and spent time with his family in Los Angeles and Houston. The summer served as a hard reset.

“It helped prepare my mental just because there were so many unanswered questions and so many things I wanted to figure out, and in the offseason I was able to actually have that time and answer those questions and find those answers myself,” Eason said. “That was huge. This game, it’s really like 90% mental, 80% mental. So when your mental’s not right, it really affects you. So I got into a place to identify my problems and figure out how to solve them and realize why I feel the way I feel about certain situations, why I react that way in certain situations.”

 

Doing so, he said, has better equipped him to navigate adversity on and off the court. That includes not reaching an agreement with the Rockets on a rookie-scale contract extension, which set Eason up to become a restricted free agent next summer.

In the first few weeks of the 2025-26 season, Eason is playing some of the best basketball of his career. He leads the Rockets with 22 made 3-pointers through eight games played and is averaging career bests in points (12.1), assists (2.0), field goal percentage (52.2) and 3-point percentage (57.9).

Eason’s evolution into a high-volume, knockdown 3-point shooter is a major development for a Rockets team that badly needed perimeter production in the wake of Fred VanVleet’s ACL injury and with offseason acquisition Dorian Finney-Smith sidelined indefinitely due to ankle surgery. Coach Ime Udoka is also trusting Eason with increased ball-handling responsibilities and allowing him to sometimes initiate offense even when primary playmakers Amen Thompson and Alperen Şengün are on the court.

Eason has embraced his elevated role and said he is willing to take whatever shots the defense gives him, an open-mindedness that he attributes partly to his mindset shift this summer.

His dad’s death was not fair or easy. But that’s life, Eason said. All he can do is stay the course.

“There’s so many unexpected things and so many outside voices, so many things that happen over the course of the season,” Eason said. “So being able to not listen to discourse, being able to stay confident, being able to stay level-headed, are all things that are bigger than anything that has to do with athletic ability.”

 

For those that forgot his father died and kept questioning why he didn’t smile.

 

Is he dense in the head?

 

Dude consistently burns us at the end of games yet Ime keeps leaving him in.

 

Just watched the end of OT in the Kings game. This is why I would not overpay for Tari. It's not the injuries, it's the foolishness. We had four smart guys on the court, and then we had Tari. And of course he's the one who left his man open at the arc, with us down 2, to come in gratuitously and overload the middle.

He's talented and he plays hard — hell, he was the only guy really giving it his all last night — but he's just not smart. He's scatterbrained with the ball and impulsive in his decisions. And he's too old to be writing this off as inexperience.

For a reasonable amount, we could probably keep Okogie, who plays just as hard, is an outstanding defender, and makes the right decision nearly every time. Not that they're equivalent, but when we're thinking about who to trade or who to spend money on, brains matter.

 

Anyone see the play where he steals the ball from Kawhi then fumbles it out of bounds only to SAVE it under the basket with none of his teammates nearby so it's a 4 on 5 defensive for us that ends up conceding a wide open corner 3?

yeah that's the Tari Eason experience in a nutshell.

 

Tari Eason fan club has been so weak this season.

This man is shooting 47% from 3 at the highest volume of attempts he's ever taken in his career (4.6 attempts in just 24 minutes per game for 26 games). That's of course not sustainable at all, but as long as he's clearly above average now it changes his ceiling as a player. For his 4 years and 187 games in the NBA, Tari is shooting 37.5% on 2.8 attempts from 3.

Let's hope he plays more than 60 games this season (i.e. healthy for the rest of the season) because we need his shooting, rebounding and aggressive defense. He's starting to settle in a little as a starter.

 

His three point shooting has been awesome. But his defense has actually been pretty terrible. He gambles to much goes for fakes Flagg absolutely schooled him yesterday. He’s more for chaos than a good 1 on 1 defender.

 

Give him some time to get used to the pace of starting. From college until very recently, he's been asked to be a high-octane sparkplug. It takes a little time to adjust to the rhythm of a starter. I think he's doing really well as a starter overall despite the occasional bad or risky choice. Flagg toasted everyone but Durant I believe. Tari has always been a net positive defensively, he rebounds well, his stocks per 36 are really good, hustles in transition.

Only problem with Tari is his health. Hope we're over that. I think he'll be a HELL of a player (after injury issues) in his prime when his skills are more polished. He's trending in that direction.

 

Been a great shooter this year even though I expect regression.

Defensively, he's having to guard guys maybe too good for him to guard because JSJ and Durant aren't as good at the POA, but are playing often with Tari.

 

Tari almost has his career 3pt % to 38%. Almost 50% for the season. Granted, he’s still the 2nd best shooting PF to Durant on the team when taking into account difficulty.
Above average scoring efficiency.
Despite not guarding guys he’s most suited to guard, playing above average defense despite accusations that he wasn’t versatile defensively.
Been clutch this year.
Not just a statue on offense.
Doesn’t take many long 2s early in the clock.
Gets to the rim. Not sure why fans prefer tons of midrange misses, but freak out about a guy making 60% at the rim on a ton of rim shots.
One of best non center offensive rebounder despite playing with a ton of offensive rebounders.

Health is only issue.

 

Im a believer in the shot, his form looks so good every time.

 

He came up lame last game, but shook it off. The guy could be an all-star if it wasn’t for his injury issues. I kept telling people the Rockets know more about his injury concerns than all of us and it is the biggest factor in why they didn’t extend him. They are not going to pay him Jabari money so If someone does he is gone.