When Kevin Durant joined the Warriors in the summer of 2016, many NBA fans resigned themselves to a new basketball reality for the foreseeable future: every season would end with the inevitable and anticlimactic Warriors v whatever-Eastern-team-LeBron-is-on Finals. That was the new and future NBA. The Warriors, then LeBron, then everyone else a very distant third.

Enter the Houston Rockets. With Wednesday night’s 110-99 road win over Milwaukee, Houston have now won 17 games in a row and sit a full game ahead of the Warriors in the West with just 16 regular season games to play. There’s a real chance the Western Conference Finals will go through Houston and some have begun to wonder if the NBA Finals may do too.

“I expect to beat them,” Rockets center Clint Capela said back in December of the Warriors, a quote that raised a lot of eyebrows and a few chuckles. But Capela has every reason to be confident. The offseason additions of Chris Paul, Luc Mbah a Moute and PJ Tucker have turned Houston’s defense from a weakness to a strength – with Capela on the back end serving as rim protector with 1.78 blocks per game, sixth-best in the NBA. And while Capela’s quote no longer elicits laughter, the story is the same for the defense played by Rockets star James Harden. Once laissez-faire, his defensive play is now can be graded as, well ... fair. A recent deep-dive into defensive analytics by ESPN graded Harden as an above-average defender at his position this season. You can argue that if you’d like with the eye test, but the volume of video clips of Harden getting blown like his controller is disconnected has waned a bit on social media in 2018. Take that for data.

Harden's crossover floors opponent before three-pointer in stunning NBA play Read more

But it’s Harden’s offense that has elevated him to the top of the MVP race this season. Paul’s ability to make plays and find the open shooter has made Harden even more dangerous and he’s letting the ball fly with confidence. Harden ranks first in the league in scoring, second in field goal attempts and first in three-point attempts with a career-high 10.5 per game. Harden isn’t the only Rockets player firing from long range, however. Houston have taken Golden State’s embrace of the three and literally expanded it to the farthest reaches of the court. The Rockets average an eye-popping 42.4 three-point attempts per game, nearly 13 more per game than the Warriors and seven more per game than the next closest team, the Brooklyn Nets. More than half of the field goals the Rockets take are from three, making them the sole member of that exclusive club.

Houston Rockets (@HoustonRockets) OH MY GOODNESS. 👀#BEARDING pic.twitter.com/wNVNCNFUPo

Such reliance on the three ball presents more opportunities to score points, but also significant risk. If the Rockets go cold in a match-up with the Warriors, they could be dispatched with relative ease. In fact, if they go cold in a match-up with anyone, that could be their fate. But the quantity of quality long range shooters the Rockets have – Harden, Paul, Tucker, Mbah a Moute, Trevor Ariza, Ryan Anderson, Gerald Green and Eric Gordon all shoot 35% or above from three – makes it unlikely everyone will start missing at once. The Rockets shooting threes has both more reward and less risk than any other team. That, and their improved defense, is a terrifying reality to any team they face, including Golden State.

Asked after Wednesday night’s win if the Rockets are now the NBA’s team to beat, Harden succinctly responded: “Nah.” He then added: “I feel like we’re just out there swaggin’ and hoopin’. We’re not worried about wins and losses right now. We’re worried about playing the right way on both ends of the floor and that’s going to carry over into the postseason. More times than not, 90% of the time, if you play the right way on both ends of the floor great things will happen. The result? Get wins.”

That “swaggin’ and hoopin’” approach could even give the Rockets an extra edge in a potential playoff match-up with Golden State. The Warriors have the pressure of being the NBA’s team to beat and anything short of a championship every season from now through the early 2020s will be considered a colossal failure – and Golden State has seemed weighed down by that reality at times this season. Steve Kerr said his team was “mentally fried” heading into last month’s All-Star break. Meanwhile the Rockets are playing with the lightness of a team with zero expectations, creating a real chance to win the franchise’s first title since Michael Jordan was an newly-retired baseball player.

No one is planning parade celebration routes in Houston quite yet. The prevailing sentiment throughout the league is still that the Warriors will simply “turn it on” in the postseason (bookies still have Golden State as heavy favorites to win the title this year with Houston and then Cleveland well behind). Let us not forget that even a mentally tired Warriors team is still just a game back of a team on a 17-game tear. But all that aside, we don’t know with complete certainty anymore that the Warriors will win the NBA Finals this year. Or even make it to the final round. The inevitability and anticlimax is gone. The conference playoffs matter again. That’s something all NBA fans can celebrate.