Houston Rockets fans who were supporters of their 2017 draft pick may see him play a huge role for a championship-level team. Will former Rocket Isaiah Hartenstein help to decide the championship? The big man signed this offseason with last season’s Western Conference top seed, the Oklahoma City Thunder. He could be the postseason difference-maker they needed. But Houston fans will never forget they were onto him first.
Will Former Rockets Rookie Decide The Championship?
Hartenstein and the Rockets Meet Again
The Rockets emerged technically victorious from their preseason encounter with the Thunderon Wednesday night. The main takeaway for Houston fans was that Jalen Green seems like the same player they watched at the end of last season. He’s talented, he’s explosive, and he’s capable of making extremely difficult shots (the difficulty of which he does little to diffuse).
Unfortunately, he’s also highly susceptible to being game-planned against by clogging the lane. Part of that isn’t really Green’s fault. For one thing, without veteran leader Fred VanVleet, the Rockets deployed a starting lineup with fairly egregious spacing issues. It’s worth noting that those are spacing issues that Green doesn’t do much to counteract, but the main contributors were still Alperen Sengun and Amen Thompson.
The other reason Green’s shaky performance against the Thunder wasn’t really his fault is that the Thunder are going to be one of the best defensive teams in the NBA this season. They were already one of the best defensive teams in the NBA last season. Then they went out and added two new defensive game-changers. One is former NBA champion Alex Caruso. The other is someone that die-hard Houston fans know well – Hartenstein, a former player of the Rockets.
Hartenstein didn’t start for the Thunder, which was a slight surprise given how much better he matches up defensively against Sengun than Oklahoma’s second-year big Chet Holmgren. Nonetheless, in only 15 minutes of action, Hartenstein was the only Thunder bench player with a positive plus/minus.
How Hartenstein Helps the Thunder
Hartenstein addresses one of the primary vulnerabilities that saw the Thunder fall in last season’s playoffs to the Dallas Mavericks. They were simply too small in that series. The center rotation of Dereck Lively II and Daniel Gafford, plus the physicality of PJ Washington and Luka Doncic overwhelmed the Thunder’s Holmgren. They were outrebounded in every loss. Hartenstein gives them the size, rebounding, and rim protection they’ll need to survive certain matchups in the postseason. He delivers all that within a package that also includes an effective offensive game. He can finish, he can screen, and he can pass.
Rockets fans were observing all this back when Hartenstein was an occasional backup option for Clint Capela. Of course, at that time, Houston was trying to win a championship with James Harden. They didn’t have time to be developing young players. Even if they did, given the Golden State Warriors matchup and how the Harden era culminated in the six-foot-five PJ Tucker at center, a young big man was definitely not the priority. And so, in June 2020, to fans’ dismay, Hartenstein was waived.
Hartenstein’s Journey Since the Rockets
Rockets fans’ main consolation regarding Hartenstein (besides now having Sengun) is that plenty of other teams passed up on him too. The Denver Nuggets, Cleveland Cavaliers, and Los Angeles Clippers all had him and let him get away. It was only when he played for the mega-market New York Knicks that he started to get major attention. In the end, though, the Knicks let him get away too because they were only allowed to pay him far less than what the Thunder presented to him.
As for why all these teams let such a promising two-way player pass through their fingers, there’s a simple explanation—he fouled too much. Hartenstein averaged a whopping 9.1 fouls per 36 minutes in his rookie season. With Denver in year three, he was still at 7.8. With the Clippers, he addressed it somewhat by bringing the number down to 4.9. Long-time Hartenstein believers would point out that this was the first organization that gave him a consistent role, albeit still only backing up Ivica Zubac.
Has Hartenstein Figured It Out?
Last season, Hartenstein averaged only 2.8 fouls per game playing 25 minutes per game across 75 total appearances. That translates to 4.0 fouls per 36 over a reasonably large sample size. It’s worth noting that that is still a lot. Premium defensive centers such as Anthony Davis and Bam Adebayo were both at 2.4 per 36 last season.
The good news for Hartenstein is that Jaren Jackson Jr can win a Defensive Player of the Year award despite constant foul trouble keeping him under 30 minutes a game in said year. Jackson averaged 4.6 fouls per 36 minutes in 2022-23. The justification at the time was that Jackson’s impact when he was available was sufficient to make up for all the time he wasn’t. The Thunder are in a position of luxury in that regard anyway. They already have Holmgren with a year of experience at center. Hartenstein can be his impactful, somewhat reckless self without completely derailing the Thunder’s game plan.
The Last Word
The OKC rivalry will never replace the rivalry with the Utah Jazz in the hearts of long-time Rockets fans. The intrastate rivalries with Dallas and the San Antonio Spurs may also be considered more fundamental. Nonetheless, Houston and OKC’s fortunes have intertwined in intricate ways since the beginning of the Harden era. Houston still owes OKC draft capital for Russell Westbrook after all. If Hartenstein does prove to be the final decibel for the noise around the Thunder to manifest in a championship, Rockets fans will look back to those quiet beginnings and wonder what might have been.
