Paulo Alves

KD looks absolutely brilliant, and so that always gives you a chance.

And then by the time you get to the playoff, maybe this tendency of playing up or down to the competition, it pays off because there's no back-to-backs.

We know that's been a problem for this team.

And then every game is more meaningful, so hopefully you're playing up.

You can also point out that the Rockets right now are 11-2 at home, 11-10 on the road.

That tells you they've had way more road games.

And so maybe things course correct when they play in Houston a ton more.

So for all of those reasons, I'm not pressing the panic button.

What I mean by resetting expectations, we just shouldn't look at this team as the juggernaut that I think a lot of us wanted to believe when they were heading into December.

When I saw the way they played and their metrics in October and November, I was thinking back to that 65-win juggernaut in 2018, the one that went 42-3 when Chris Paul, James Harden, and Clint Capella all played.

Because for the first six weeks of this season, these guys weren't that far off in terms of the metrics, in terms of the dominance.

But I think it's just been long enough now that I'm calling it.

This is not that type of team.

It's not to say that they can't recapture it later on, at least in spurts.

I hope they can.

It's not implausible.

And in fairness, you can argue that maybe we never should have had those expectations as soon as Fred went down with the ACL.

But even so, I think it's a little bit of a letdown because they did tease us, even without Fred, with that level of dominance for the first six weeks or so.

And now that's pretty much gone.

You see it in flashes here or there, a game once or so a week, but nothing sustained at all.