The Los Angeles Clippers and Houston Rockets will meet on Sunday to give us the only Game 7 of the NBA’s 2015 Conference semifinals, which seems rather bonkers when you think about it.

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Chicago and Cleveland appeared well on their way toward matching each other fit for fit until LeBron James hit a Game 4 game-winner and Chicago fell apart over the next two games. The Grizzlies and Warriors, the two best teams in the Western Conference for most of the season by record, petered out in Memphis during Game 6. Washington was quite literally a fingernail edge away from sending its series against Atlanta into a Game 6 overtime period that would have been played with all the momentum while on its home court.

Instead, only the Rockets and Clippers series has yet to be decided. It’s the least-likely result from two squads that seemed the most dissimilar after the first four games of the series.

The teams’ architects follow a similar pattern. Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey didn’t have some grand vision of fielding a team with James Harden, Dwight Howard and Josh Smith when Yao Ming went down with his final foot injury in 2009 or when Tracy McGrady was dealt away for assets in 2010, but he has done well to think on his feet while turning that paperclip into a snowglobe into what he hopes will become a champion.

Doc Rivers inherited his four best players, and spent the bulk of 2014-15 being rightfully criticized for a series of shortsighted moves that cost both the Clippers depth and seemingly a chance at letting Chris Paul lead a winner to a championship in his prime. Rivers is a brilliant basketball mind and a fine coach, and it wasn’t as if he took over a team rife with assets to toss around in 2013 (save for his top, untouchable, players), but his rare hits in a series of minor moves has caught up to Los Angeles at times.

Let’s catch up with this series.

How We Got Here

Houston and Los Angeles finished with the same record in the regular season, with both winning 56 games, but because Houston won its division the Rockets earned (?) the chance to run with home court advantage on Sunday. Kevin McHale’s crew did well to salvage some sort of dignity by taking Game 2 at home by a six-point advantage, but the Clippers dominated in Game 1 prior to that and ended up winning both that contest along with Game 3 and Game 4 by a combination of 77 points.

It seemed that the rout was on, but Houston rallied to win Game 5 at home as expected – it’s hard to take down even a disappointing squad like the Rockets in five games. What nobody expected was what took place in Game 6 in Los Angeles: Houston rallied from 19 points down with just 15 minutes left in the contest to pull out a shocking Game 6 victory.

Even more odd was the team’s stylistic approach – James Harden sat down the stretch of what appeared to be a blowout, before Corey Brewer and Josh Smith (who were even terrible to start that actual game, much less the entire series) pell-melled their way toward loping finishes and three-point daggers in the return.

In a span of just four days the Clippers seemed to go from the easy favorites to finish off a lacking Rockets team to one forced into working on the road in order to move onto a Conference final turn that most just assumed was an inevitability. It’s hard to fathom just what could be more destructive to the team’s psyche – the four days that turned its season on its ear, or the 45 real time minutes it took Houston’s reserves to put Los Angeles’ season on the brink.

View photos DeAndre Jordan cheers on the Houston comeback. (Getty Images) More

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