Basketball is the most stylish sport.
There’s no way to quantify this, but it feels too true to include qualifiers. There’s more room for creativity. It’s poetry in motion.
Baseball is played in silos. Football plays like the actualization of two coaches’ strategies. Hockey is on ice, which is dumb, which I’m allowed to say because I’m Canadian.
Basketball, of course, has set plays, but the freedom to deviate is much greater. If the play doesn’t work, improvise. So, there’s more room for stylistic variance:
But ultimately, it’s the substance that matters.
Theory: This accounts for some of the discrepancy between perceptions of the Houston Rockets’ Ime Udoka. If the game were scored by judges, the Rockets would be near the bottom of the league. It isn’t. The game is scored by points vs. opponent points. That’s why Udoka should go back to the double big man lineups in 2026-27:
They work.
Rockets should return to a successful strategy
This is a response to a response. On Media Day, Udoka explicitly said that the Rockets would likely play double-big lineups, and some people were displeased. Sure:
Why would Udoka want to play a two-man combination that was +32.1 in 2024-25 (per DataBallr)?
Granted, they were just +6.3 in 2025-26. That could point to regression. It’s real evidence that opposing teams “figured out” the double-big lineups. Perhaps this was always a gimmick with a firm expiration date.
Counterpoint 1: Adams was hurt for most of the year. The duo shared the floor for 315 minutes, which is a small-ish sample size.
Counterpoint 2: In 2059 minutes together, Amen Thompson and Kevin Durant had the exact same net rating. The Rockets’ best duo was Durant and Tari Eason (+8.0), followed by Thompson and Jabari Smith Jr. (+6.7).
Perhaps Sengun and Adams can’t get back to a world-beating +32.1 mark. The numbers still firmly establish that they play well together.
Why does that make some fans so upset?
Rockets must play to win
Style.
There’s nothing aesthetically pleasing about Sengun and Adams together. Some fans prefer to watch a beautiful motion offense. Others prefer the man-against-the-world ethos of an iso scorer single-handedly dismantling an offense.
Few fans are looking for two lumbering giants to simply muscle everyone else away from the ball.
That’s the thing about being a fan of one NBA team: You may not get what you want. Every front office wants to surround a top-10 player with complementary pieces. The resulting product will invariably be fun to watch, because optimized basketball is fun.
Sometimes, you’re done rebuilding, and you didn’t get the top-10 player. So, in the spirit of the game, you improvise. For example, devise a strategy built on dominating the glass so that those top-10 guys on the other teams don’t get the ball as often as your guys.
It’s also fair to say that this should be used sparingly. It should not be the starting lineup. Hardly anyone will dispute that. Still, there’s no reason to abandon a strategy that works:
Even if it isn’t fun to watch.
