The crowd noise at the Toyota Center grew louder and louder. All teammates were looking to get the ball in the hands of one player.
In the waning moments of the final regular season game in the NBA, all eyes in Houston were on rookie shooting guard Jalen Green. Green continued to shoot until one basket gave him a smile from ear-to-ear.
He scored a new career-high of 41 points to end his first NBA season.
“It meant a lot to end the year strong, especially after the performance I put up against Toronto,” Green told reporters in the postgame press conference. In the second-to-last game of the season, the Houston Rockets lost 117-115 to the Raptors, a game where Green scored eight points in 37 minutes.
“I wanted to come back home and put on a show.”
Green is the face of the new and exciting young Houston Rockets and home is where Green figured out the type of NBA player he could become in upcoming years. He’s the talk of the town from the sports-talk radio stations to the Uber drivers. His face is plastered on billboards and murals throughout the city, especially in the Toyota Center, as a video package of his story comes on the Megatron early in the game.
“I’m happy,” Rockets fan Mascot Bonsu told rolling out. “Every team wanted him and for him to come here and have such a great season, I think the fans and everybody’s happy to see him grow, develop and become better.”
A prodigy whose playing has been viewed by millions since he was a high school freshman was the No. 2 pick of the 2021 NBA Draft after he spent a season with the G-League Ignite. By his side are Kevin Porter Jr., Alperen Sengun, Christian Wood and Kenyon Martin Jr. Coming off the bench are Josh Christopher and two-way guard Daishen Nix. The team is quick, with plenty of exciting dunks and no-look passes, but with the high scoring and offensive highlights also come turnovers, loose ball handling, poor shot selection, next to non-existent defensive effort and a lot of losses.
The squad shows similarities to other young teams in the NBA that are now competing in the postseason like their rivals the Atlanta Hawks and Minnesota Timberwolves.
“It’s a beginning team,” Rockets fan David Burton told rolling out. “I was talking to my homeboy a little while ago about the Timberwolves, and how they’ve been together for the last couple of years and it wasn’t really working out for them it seemed like with D-Lo [D’Angelo Russell] and [Karl-Anthony] Towns over there. But we got people straight from the draft. We’ve got Jalen Green and Sengun. If we keep them boys together, grow together at least for three-four years, [then we should be good].”
