Houston Rockets have no incentive to rush rebuild in 2022

The NBA is about to enter a tanking fest of magnificent proportions as everyone tries to land Victor Wembanyama. The Rockets are surely in the mix.

The next year of NBA Draft discourse is going to center solely on Victor Wembanyama. Every team in the NBA, especially the Houston Rockets, would love to land this prospect, but that is a slippery slope.

The NBA Draft Lottery has made it so that going after players through the process of tanking is a risky endeavor that doesn't usually pan out.

Sure, you can increase your odds of getting a good prospect as your record gets worse, but Wembanyama isn't just a good prospect.

Anyone who gets compared to Lebron James as a draft prospect immediately perks up the ears of every team in the NBA with picks next year, but only the lottery-winner will get their chance at this young superstar.

The good news for Houston is that the team shows little chance of making any monumental jumps towards being out of the running for Wembanyama in the 2023 NBA Draft.

The bad news for Houston is that a lot more teams are going to try to do worse for this very reason.

The race to the bottom is on. Even the chance of seeing those small odds in your favor can be enough to push a team to rest their starter for one more game or to trade a veteran, and those are real options for the Rockets.

Houston wants to develop youth and get their younger guys more minutes in the NBA. Rushing back to being in contention for the playoffs helps very little, and in this case, it'll hurt the team even more in the long run if they even had a shot at landing the top pick in the next class.

Rockets fans should know that the odds are heavily stacked against them in this regard, but taking the rebuild slow and going about it in the right way certainly doesn't hurt if this option is on the table.

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