Houston Rockets: How good will Kevin Porter Jr be?

The Houston Rockets 2021 NBA Draft has the chance to be one of the great drafts in history. Jalen Green and Alperun Sengun both want to win the Rookie of the Year award, and Usman Garuba and Josh Christopher have All-Defensive team potential. As exciting as the Rockets rookie class is, they had already brought in a talented youngster to spearhead their rebuild, Kevin Porter Jr. 

In some circles of Rockets’ fandom, Kevin Porter Jr is a future MVP and, in others, a future All-Star. While projecting the career of a player with 76 career games and 26 career starts is a fool's errand, there are clear signs that Porter has tremendous upside. 

On April 29th, 2021, Kevin Porter Jr had the greatest game of his life. Against the eventual champion Milwaukee Bucks, he scored 50 points, dished 11 assists, and snagged five boards as he led the worst team in the League to an upset of one of its best. If this was the only basketball game you had ever seen, you would believe, without a shadow of a doubt, that Kevin Porter Jr is the greatest basketball player ever.  

Spoiler, Kevin Porter Jr. is not the greatest basketball player ever. In fact, he isn’t even a good one or an average one. Kevin Porter Jr, is a bad NBA basketball player, which isn’t a surprise. He was the 30th pick in the 2019 draft, he’s 21, he has only played 76 games across two seasons, and he’s already on his second team. Good NBA players simply don’t have that resume. 

Just because Porter has been bad, doesn’t mean he can’t improve and become the future All-Star or MVP that Rockets fans dream of. Here’s how Kevin Porter Jr can live up to expectations in the 2021-22 season. To fully capture where he’ll be in 2021-22, we need to understand where he was in 2020-21.