AS COACHES AND players trudged into the locker room at halftime of what would become yet another dispiriting loss — one of 62 for the 2021-22 Houston Rockets, a team built to lose in its first full season since the end of the James Harden era — they heard an unusual voice command attention.
“You’re supposed to lead by example,” Jalen Green, then a 19-year-old rookie and No. 2 overall draft pick, chastised one of the few veterans on the team — a player Green and others present won’t identify today. Other players and coaches had noticed that veteran playing with a halfhearted selfishness. Only Green spoke up. “We need you to be better,” Green continued. “You’re supposed to show us how to do this.”
Green was calm and measured, witnesses recall.
“He did it from a place of, ‘I’m seeking knowledge,'” John Lucas, the longtime Rockets assistant coach who now works in the front office, told ESPN. “It made Jalen a leader among the younger guys.”
There was no retort, no heated back-and-forth. “The truth has no feelings,” Lucas said.
“It was about showing everyone needs to be held accountable,” Green told ESPN.
Eighteen months later, Green is the highest draft pick and headliner of one of the NBA’s deepest pools of young talent — the product of three straight losing seasons in which the Rockets won just 59 combined games and prioritized their own first-round picks.
In Green, Alperen Sengun, Jabari Smith Jr., Amen Thompson, Tari Eason, and Cam Whitmore, Houston has six high-wattage prospects — including three top-four picks in Thompson, Smith, and Green. The Rockets have surrounded them with veterans in Fred VanVleet, Dillon Brooks, Jeff Green, and Jock Landale. (They nearly snagged Brook Lopez from the Milwaukee Bucks, sources said.)
The veterans are around to teach habits and help the Rockets win more; Houston owes its 2024 first-round pick to the Oklahoma City Thunder, protected for the top four draft slots — the first of two painful debts stemming…
