Paulo Alves

And with that loss, they fall to 22-12 and all the way to the number six spot in the Western Conference standings, though we should note that it's very tight between two and six.

So there's a lot of room to climb the standings rapidly if you can just stack some wins together.

And theoretically, you can start that tonight with the rematch against the Trailblazers in that same building.

With that said, I'm struggling to buy in on this idea of a winning streak because they just haven't stacked wins in a while.

And to me, the biggest takeaway from these last few games, and particularly the two against the Suns and the Trailblazers, is that the Rockets just shouldn't have let each game go down to the wire in the first place.

Yet they just did, and it's not really a one-off.

You know, if you look at any one game out of 82 in isolation, you can always find some fluky things that should correct as you get a larger sample.

You know, the Trailblazers game, the Rockets shot 8 of 36 from 3.

They were literally the best team in the NBA at three-point shooting accuracy through a big chunk of December, and now they're literally dead last in January.

So that should correct.

That's fluky.

But even if we account for that, there just hasn't been any consistency for a while.

I would actually argue that the most consistent thing about them is that they're inconsistent.

They're just notoriously playing up or down to the competition.

You know, back in December, they had that stretch where they were awful defensively.

Now for January, they're back in the top six in defensive rating.

They figured that out.

But suddenly it's the offense after being in the top two for most of the season.

Well, now it's completely mediocre.

In January, they're 15th among the league's 30 teams.