The Golden State Warriors have a lot of teams they have to go through if they want to represent the Western Conference at the NBA Finals for the seventh time in the last 12 years. There’s the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder. The perennially-contending Denver Nuggets. The revamped and retooled Los Angeles Lakers. The revamped and maybe but probably not healthy LA Clippers. The team that took them out in May, the Minnesota Timberwolves. The bounceback Memphis Grizzlies and the ascending San Antonio Spurs and whatever you want to call the Dallas Mavericks.
But no team poses as intriguing of a threat as the Houston Rockets. The Rockets and Warriors built quite a rivalry during the early days of the Dubs’ dynasty, when the James Harden-led Houston squad was seemingly always the closest team in the West to unseating Golden State, but could never get over the hump. The rivalry took some time off, but was rekindled last year with an injection of youth. Gone were the Rockets stars of old, in were the youngsters (and a few key veterans) who led Houston to the second-best record in the West, and then pushed the Warriors to the brink of elimination in an exciting and testy seven-game series.
It seemed like we were being set up for a few years of a strong rivalry, and then Houston poured an industrial sized can of fuel on the flames. A few months after making it clear that he did not want to be traded back to the Warriors, franchise legend Kevin Durant gleefully was traded from the Phoenix Suns to the Rockets.
The Warriors’ games against the Rockets will be absolute must-see TV this year, and a playoff matchup seems destined. But unfortunately, before the season even started, the rivalry is going to take a hit. On Monday, crushing news came down for the Rockets: guard Fred VanVleet had suffered a torn ACL, and will likely miss the entirety of the 2025-26 season.
VanVleet is a core part of both the Rockets success and the rivalry with the Dubs. He’s been a starting guard for both of his years in Houston, and has averaged 15.9 points and 6.9 assists during that time. And as a member of the Toronto Raptors, he defeated the Warriors in the 2019 NBA Finals to win a championship.
Houston still figures to be one of the top teams in the West, even without VanVleet. They still have Durant, Alperen Şengün, Amen Thompson, and seemingly endless length and depth. But one of the league’s best rivalries just got a little worse, a month before the season even began., and that’s a bummer.