Kevin Durant honeymoon phase with the Rockets comes to an abrupt close

As the Houston Rockets prepared to enter the 2025-26 NBA season, almost nobody must have been more excited than Kevin Durant, who will get the chance to solidify his legacy and take a young core onto his shoulders as the ascendant team works their way into championship contention.

Yet, with the recent news of injuries to Fred VanVleet and Dorian Finney-Smith, an unexpected wrench has been thrown into the team's plans, and, now, Durant must quickly acclimate into the team's system in order for them to maintain any sort of early season success.

While their title hopes are not necessarily dead, their chances have admittedly greatly diminished, and Durant now has a much tougher task and a much larger workload in store for him as he joins the fifth organization of his career.

Kevin Durant has an exceedingly tall task in front of him in order to fulfill the Rockets' hopes

In trading for Durant, both the coaching staff and the front office knew that, despite the gamble they were taking in bringing in a player of Durant's caliber with only one year left on his contract, this was the move they needed to make in order to launch this team into championship contention.

Last season, through 62 games with the Phoenix Suns, Durant averaged 26.6 points, six rebounds and 4.2 assists, and, now, he will bring Houston the go-to scoring they need in clutch minutes, providing their offense with almost everything it needs to be among the best in the league.

However, the team's outlook has changed drastically with the injury news that the past few days have brought in. VanVleet, the team's most important veteran presence, tore his ACL in a team mini-camp and is likely to miss the entire season.

Finney-Smith, who the team signed in the offseason as a 3-and-D threat and even a potential starter, will likely need to miss time at the beginning of the season to recover from an ankle surgery he underwent this offseason.

Before, Durant would have been, in essence, a complimentary piece: a superstar scorer that served as the cherry on top to transform one of the best defensive teams in the league into a viable offensive unit.

Now, however, this leaves Durant with the task of putting an offense with relatively poor spacing and no bona-fide ball-handler on his back, and, until Finney-Smith returns, he will also be essentially the team's lone outside shooter.

While this likely does not affect Durant's excitement to join the Rockets too directly, it does mean that his role has already changed drastically before he has even played a game for Houston, and his job has just become much, much tougher.