Rockets get short-changed in recent ranking of NBA's three-year outlooks

Every team in the NBA has plans. They have contingency plans for those plans. Teams have three-year plans, five-year plans and decade-long plans. The Houston Rockets are no exception.

Any team's plan is only as good as the next team's plan. The Rockets have big plans over the next three years. Unfortunately for them, every team in the NBA is hoping they've got a better one.

Bleacher Report feels the Rockets have the 16th-best three-year outlook in the NBA. Are they selling them short?

Who has a better outlook than the Rockets?

In our opinion, a little bit.

Let's not put the cart before the horse. In fairness, Bleacher Report's Dan Favale is appropriately high on the Rockets.

"Depth and flexibility are a bedrock of the Houston Rockets' trajectory—so much so that, at first glance, this comes across as too low. Perhaps it is. But three years is a semi-immediate window, and the Rockets are still playing a longer game"

-Dan Favale, Bleacher Report

That's perfectly valid. This logic isn't difficult to track. The Rockets (almost) certainly won't win an NBA title over the next three years, so that limits their ceiling in this exercise.

So we aren't outraged. At the most, we're a little bit miffed. There's at least one team on this list that the Rockets should have been ranked over.

Arguably, there are two.

Rockets should have ranked a spot (or two) higher

Let's talk about the Sacramento Kings. They were the 14th-ranked team on this list.

They won 46 games last year - five more than the Rockets. They are locked into a core featuring De'Aaron Fox, Domantas Sabonis, DeMar DeRozan, and Malik Monk.

The Kings are light on draft picks. If they wanted to make a meaningful win-now deal, it wouldn't be an option. By contrast, the Rockets have a myriad of options.

Moreover, it wouldn't be surprising if Alperen Sengun surpassed Sabonis as early as this season. Fox will likely remain the best guard between these teams, but the Rockets are deeper. With the assets required to broker a blockbuster, the Rockets are likely to make a deal in the next three years that makes them distinctly better than Sacramento.

That sounds like a better three-year outlook to us.

How about the 15th-ranked Phoenix Suns? We're less bullish on this one. The Suns have Devin Booker and Kevin Durant. That automatically gives them an outside shot at winning an NBA title.

Still, that's an awfully long outside shot. The Suns woefully underperformed in 2023-24. If they have a similar result next year, they may be forced to make sweeping changes.

Bradley Beal is on one of the worst deals in the league. Durant is nearing retirement. The Suns have an even more bare cupboard of draft picks than the Kings.

Who owns a large share of their future first-round picks? Why, it's the Houston Rockets! The Suns need to have a strong 2024-25, or else their two-year outlook is suddenly much bleaker than Houston's.

The Suns will have to pivot to a different plan.