Ben DuBose

And so if you take all of them out of play and you're just looking primarily at guys making closer to the minimum and...

you know, at that point, you're looking sort of bottom of the barrel moves at the margins and the Rockets can't really aggregate salaries because they're hard capped at the first apron.

The likely scenario, in my opinion, is that you just wait until after the deadline and you get someone via the buyout market.

And I don't want to speculate on who that is yet because we don't know who's going to get traded and who isn't.

But I do think that conceptually, the buyout market is likely to be where the Rockets go for a player of that stature.

And as far as who that is, we can talk about that in a week once the deadline passes.

This was as much of a schedule loss on paper as you'll ever see.

Night two of a road back-to-back against the second-best team in the NBA by record, and they won without too much drama.

I mean, I know when the Pistons got it to four in the fourth quarter, it got a little tight, but honestly, the last two minutes, I feel like the Rockets were 99% plus the entire time, so hard to complain about that.

And

To me, it goes right up there with the Denver game in December as the best wins of this entire season.

And Dave, there's a clear common thread between that Nuggets game right before Christmas and tonight.

And it's the look in Kevin Durant's eye.

He went out there tonight just playing with a purpose.

And I think it started with the way last night's game ended.

The postgame interview that he did, I'm quoting from Big Sarge on Twitter.

It was a lot of bullshit I was doing tonight.

He took accountability.

He put it on himself because of the eight turnovers, including the one in the final minute that was just a killer when the Rockets had the ball up to with 50 seconds left.

Lazy pass to Shingun.