Rockets have a pair of superstar trades that could force them into an immense gamble

The Rockets are not a feel-good League Pass team anymore. They’re a problem. Top-4 offense. Top-2 defense. Second in Net Rating. A 15–6 start, bludgeoning teams on the glass with a 40.8% offensive rebound rate that’s literally off the historical chart - the all-time mark is the 91-92 Nets at 39.1%.

They live in the paint (4th in points in the restricted area), play at a glacial Pace (27th), and still hang 120 a night. They guard without fouling (top-10 opponent free-throw rate), run back well enough (4th in opponent fast break points allowed), and grind you down possession by possession.

And yet, as they climb, one reality keeps getting louder in the background: the Oklahoma City Thunder exist.

The defending champs are starting this season like a basketball horror movie. They’re 24–1, riding a 16-game winning streak, tying the 2015–16 Warriors for the best 25-game start ever and sitting on a net rating in the +16 neighborhood - a number normally reserved for 2K on rookie difficulty.

Their offense is top-tier, led by an MVP-level Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Their defense is even better, anchored by Chet Holmgren and a forest of arms. Their advanced metrics say “greatest team of all time?” with a straight face. Their future pick chest says “and we’re just getting started.”

That’s the context for Houston’s rise. Not a normal West. Not a soft top. A conference already warped around an all-time level juggernaut in OKC.

So the question hanging over everything the Rockets do this season is brutally simple: is this Rockets core, as currently constructed, good enough to beat this Thunder team four times in seven games?

If the answer is “probably not,” then we’re not just talking vibes and good progress anymore. We’re talking about timing, windows, and whether Rafael Stone should pull the kind of all-in trigger that turns a good era into a banner - or into a cautionary tale that gets revisited in documentaries 20 years from now.

The Case for Going ALL-IN Now

The Thunder aren’t just a super talented team, they’re the nightmare version of what every rebuild is trying to become. They have a bonafide superstar and two developing stars as a Big 3 foundation, complimented by a sea of two-way wings and depth everywhere.

And then there’s the cruelest part: they’re doing all this young and under contract, with a future pick war chest that looks like Sam Presti swallowed an entire draft. In the 2026 lottery alone, they’re likely to have three picks. This isn’t a one-year supernova, it’s the foundation of a decade-long shinning star.

That is the bar set for a Houston team that’s flying high already. Only a few months from acquiring an all-time great Kevin Durant, they’re already in rare-air, positioned strongly as the second best team in the league, whilst having the fourth easiest remaining schedule.

This is not the first time in this century that the Rockets have faced a historically great team. In 2018, they got as close as anyone from dethroning a healthy, and seemingly invincible, Steph+KD Warriors. Those Harden-CP3 teams had the star-power but lacked the all-around roster depth. This Rockets team is different.

This team is deeper, has elite level defense and is not built on top of a predictable heliocentric offense. But with two up-and-coming All-Star hopefuls in Alpi and Amen, plus a still great, yet past his prime, KD, they lack the superstar ceiling required to win it all. Landing the right player at the right price moves them into OKC’s tier in a way internal growth alone probably can’t, at least on the timeline where Durant is still elite.

Which brings us to the two names that matter.

The Obvious Swing: Giannis Antetokounmpo

If you designed a “Thunder antidote” in a lab, you’d probably land close to Giannis. He's a top-five playoff engine who lives at the rim, generates foul pressure, and collapses elite defenses. A one-man wall against drives, post-ups, and gap threads - exactly the sort of presence that can bother Shai’s paint game and Chet’s unicorn offensive mobility in one body. Furthermore, his prime still overlaps Durant’s but also extends past it, giving Houston both this window and the start of the next one.

Giannis is under contract with Milwaukee for two more guaranteed seasons, with a player option after that. The Bucks have every incentive to keep him, but the league grapevine is already whispering about what jersey he’ll be wearing by the All-Star break. His desire to compete for a championship doesn’t match the current or future possibilities of the team. All major media outlets are already heat-mapping hypothetical packages.

Houston, in spite of not coming at the top of the list of likely destinations, is one of the few teams that can look Milwaukee & Giannis in the eye on both assets and competitiveness. They have blue-chip prospects, hold multiple unprotected picks from Phoenix & Brooklyn, and just as importantly, they’re already an aspiring contender that Giannis can put over the hump.

A plausible CBA-compliant framework looks something like this:

Bucks receive: Reed Sheppard + Tari Eason + Fred VanVleet + Dorian Finney-Smith + BKN ‘27 unprotected 1st + PHX ‘29 unprotected 1st + HOU ‘31 unprotected + HOU swaps in ‘28 & ‘30.

Rockets get: Giannis Antetokounmpo and Alex Antetokounmpo.

Maybe Eason’s spot on the deal needs to become Jabari. Maybe a third team needs to join in to take on Finney-Smith. Regardless, this package is already strong enough to win the sweepstakes without touching Houston’s core four of Durant, Şengün, Thompson.

Basketball-wise, Giannis in Houston is almost unfair.

Offensively, he and Şengün become a Draymond-Jokić hybrid fever dream. High-low action, screen-and-roll both ways, with KD’s sharp-shooting and Thompson’s off-ball movement making it borderline impossible to overload the ball.

Defensively, the Greek Freak elevates the Rockets in multiple ways. He can be the anchor in the paint, the weak-side beast wreaking havoc at the basket, but more importantly, with his point-forward offensive game, he frees up Amen’s energy to get back to the DPOY level player he was on track to become.

Rotation-wise, he can make the biggest lineup in NBA history even bigger, in a Amen-KD-Giannis-Sengun-Adams jumbo look, or be the center in a not so small-ball Amen-Okogie-KD-Jabari-Giannis quintet.

This is the obvious all-in move because the incoming superstar is all but certain to be traded, and he’d fill in more gaps in Houston’s makeup, whilst doubling down on their strengths of size, defense and paint dominance.

There’re risks, of course, but we’ll come back to that.

The Under-the-Radar Nuke: a Superstar Reunion that Only Houston Can Really Pull Off

While Antetokounmpo is the clear move everyone is talking about, there’s a side-plot that might be an even better fit: Devin Booker.

The Suns have given no indication that they want to part ways with their superstar guard. Whilst an All-NBA talent, he’s not anywhere near the MVP level Giannis is at, but in the right context, he could turnout as much of an impact.

Booker is a top-tier playoff scorer and shot-maker, who’s already dropped big lines in multiple deep runs. He's a legit primary initiator who can run pick-and-roll, punish switches, score at all three levels, and actually hold up defensively when you put good size and scheme around him. In the right ecosystem, he can be your late-game answer without eating 35% usage for three quarters.

Now zoom out to the Phoenix context. They’re one of the feel-good stories in this early-season, with a solid 14-11 record, at the middle of the pack on both offensive and defensive Ratings. 

They’re also more than 50 million over the salary cap. Adding insult to injury, they have more than 20 million in dead cap for stretching Beal’s contract, which will eat at their team salary until the end of the decade.

If cap purgatory was not enough, the Suns are totally depleted in any future assets. They have no control of their draft all the way to 2031. To put it in perspective, the next time the Suns can use their first-round pick, they’ll draft players that are enrolled in the 6th grade today.

Enter the Houston Rockets, who own the Suns’ unprotected 2027 and 2029 first-rounders. Thats the key to the whole thing.

If Phoenix ever decides it has to pivot away from Booker - as it is all-but certain to not be a contender until he’s way past his prime years - Houston is the only team that can repatriate some of their prime picks AND be a contending landing spot to their star guard. Nobody else in the league can sit across the table and say that, turning the Rockets from just another bidder into a uniquely positioned one.

A high-level framework:

Suns receive: Reed Sheppard + Tari Eason + Fred VanVleet + Dorian Finney-Smith + PHO ‘27 unprotected 1st + PHX ‘29 unprotected 1st + HOU ‘31 unprotected + HOU swaps in ‘28 & ‘30.

Rockets get: Devin Booker.

To Phoenix, getting back control over part of their own future is the cleanest way to reset.

For Houston, Booker gives them a different dimension than Giannis. He amplifies Şengün’s playmaking - you can run inverted pick-and-roll, use Booker as the handler, and let Alpi punish mismatched guards on the roll. He can slide next to Durant cleaner than most high-usage guards because he’s comfortable toggling between on-ball and off-ball based on who has it going. Lastly, he is still a lead-guard who can take away the offense-starting responsibilities from Amen, allowing him to invest his full energy on defense and slide back into his off-ball moving menace role on offense.

This is the under-the-radar all-in move: less two-way gravity than Giannis, but arguably more additive to your late-game offense. Similarly to the obvious trade, this one also comes with its own peril.

When the Same Logic Says “Don’t Do It”

Everything above is the “Thunder are too good, so you have to swing for the fences” argument.

Now flip the script 180 degrees and look at the same landscape from the other side. OKC is too good… therefore there’s no win-now reach for the sky move for the Rockets.

If the Thunder are really building a 68-win-per-year, +15 net rating monster with a decade of runway and a lottery pick pipeline, then there’s a very real possibility that you cash in everything for a star, maybe squeeze into their tier for a couple of seasons, and then what?

If you still lose, because their top-end is just that insane and their depth and age curves are unfair, you're done. Now you don’t have the draft assets to reload. You cashed in your youth and hampered your ability to ride out Durant’s eventual decline. That’s how “all-in” turns into “stuck.”

The same reality - OKC’s supernova - that justifies trying a big swing is also the best argument for extreme discipline on price. You can’t win a bidding war that leaves you without any rings now and with no future to build for.

Non-Negotiables: Amen and Alpi stay. Let’s write the line in permanent ink: if Amen Thompson or Alperen Şengün have to be in the deal, the answer is no. Full stop.

Şengün is already the offensive hub of a top-four offense, a big who passes like a guard, scores like a 20-plus PPG wing, and bends defenses in ways you can build entire systems around. Inch-by-inch as he grows, his “baby Jokic” comparison becomes less of an exaggeration and more of a reality. 

Amen just walked into All-Defensive 1st Team as a sophomore, joining a club as small as there is in NBA history. He projects as the perimeter anchor of a top-five defense for a decade and has yet to scrape the edges of his offensive potential.

You don’t trade out of that to chase a slightly different version of the same tier. You build on top of it to be a true rival to the reigning Champs.

We’ve seen this movie before. While trading for a late 20s or early 30s star can get you to the promised land - as it did for the Lakers acquiring AD or the Bucks cashing in for Jrue Holiday - more often than not it can go south. KD himself has starred in such thrillers twice: in Brooklyn and in Phoenix, with D-Book as a co-star by the way. Sidenote: needless to say, any Booker deal must start by ensuring the bad vibes in the Valley of the Sun were not related to the Durant-Booker relationship.

The great irony here is that OKC’s dominance is the product of the very thing Houston has been flirting with: Patience. Draft asset compounding. Internal development.

Sam Presti didn’t cash in for a star the first time the Thunder looked feisty. He let SGA, Chet and J-Dub stack reps, then layered the perfect fit of players around them. He weaponized their timeline instead of rushing it.

Irony is still in play, with another KD led team being the cautionary tale to patience. And the Thunder are still the team to learn from as far as windows closing way faster than anyone expects.

The Durant-Westbrook-Harden OKC felt like a decade-long inevitability. In reality, they had: one Finals run where they were too young, one brutal West Finals loss to a veteran Spurs juggernaut and one 3–1 collapse against the Warriors that likely still haunts a now Champion Presti.

Then it was over. One contract/trade decision here, one injury there and suddenly you’re on a rebuild reminiscing of what never really was.

Houston has lived on both sides of this already. They made a blockbuster deal for Clyde “The Glide” Drexler that landed them the second ring of their back-to-back titles in the mid-90s. They doubled-down by pushing their chips in for Barkley and got one last West Finals with the Hakeem-Drexler-Chuck Big 3 before the bill came due. They pushed them in again for Pippen in an ill fated attempt, which lasted a blink of an eye and then left them years rebuilding from the rubble.

Big bets are in this franchise’s DNA. So are the scars.

That’s why this moment is so delicate. You can’t be passive forever - because windows are always shorter than they feel in the moment - but you also can’t treat a historically great Thunder team like a mid-90s Jordan-less field you can brute-force your way through.

So, where does that leave Houston?

They absolutely should aggressively chase Giannis or Booker-level acquisitions at the right price. Their hot-start is the ignition. Their second layer of young talent stock rise is the fuel, as Sheppard, Jabari and Eason are looking as good as they ever had.

If the market wants more than that, you walk. You keep your young up-and-coming core, you trust your infrastructure, you hope for some lucky bounces on those future Suns and Nets picks and form your own version of the Thunder blueprint.

History will judge this front office on whether they read the moment right. Only time will tell if they played well the thin line between a window and a wall.