If you follow the winds of discussion around the NBA, online and in mass media, you will experience very little of the game itself. Favored in this ecosystem are overexpressed impressions formed from highlights or—more often—purely from imperfect memories and irrational feelings. These utterances, the most animal of human communicative impulses, are very valuable in today’s eldritch, transitioning economy, tying itself to flimsy masts as the digital leviathan tramples over everything.

As a cure to the many spiritual sicknesses that come from living in this climate, I recommend the Houston Rockets and Oklahoma City Thunder. I wrote about the exciting ascendance of both teams three months ago, and deep into the season, they have proved to be sturdy heaths, capable of carrying me through the sport’s dubious winter. Both teams are frenetic, physical, and new in a way that quickly washes the rubbish from your mind when you’re watching them, if you care at all about the real physical pleasures of the sport.

Of these two teams, the Thunder are much more likely to last into June. This is for a number of reasons, but none more significant than Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. The current front-runner for 2025’s MVP award, SGA has stepped up from the All-NBA plateau into the realm of true masters over the past two seasons. He has scored 50 points or more three times in recent weeks, and seems ready to do so in any game that OKC needs it from him. He reads and attacks defenses at a level that you and I can only hope to achieve on a good day of Tetris sessions, and looks at ease making the shots he takes at the end of these virtuousic breakdowns.

Gilgeous-Alexander is elite on the other end, too, where his team overall is doing historic stuff. Consummate harassers who are always moving in concert with each other, OKC are a previously unseen turnover creation machine. Many of their games appear competitive until sometime midway through the third quarter, when the Thunder’s relentless assaults on something as taken-for-granted as possession of the ball result in a cognitive crack in the opponent. That's when the competitive avalanche begins, and it doesn't stop.

You may think, scanning through the many blowouts in OKC’s schedule to date, that this team is producing a lot of three-point bonanzas, but they’re only middling when shooting from deep. Their dominance comes from this ability to consistently out-work teams, turning usually pedestrian strategic moments into bloody trenches that they emerge from, victorious. Advanced defensive performance metrics chart six Thunder players within the league’s top 27 stoppers; with their glut of hard-pressing thieves that goes as deep as ten players, they've established a new set of winning terms.

The Rockets play with similar chutzpah. They aren't far behind OKC in defensive energy or effectiveness. Throughout the turgidity of January and February, Houston’s young men shocked some life into me with their mean hustle, regularly subjecting teams to tests of the will that they weren’t prepared for. Forward Amen Thompson’s development as a scorer, though, is what has elevated the Rockets from a fun watch into a fascinating one. His athleticism and ingenuity are so uncharted that he’s got the sport’s best chance to be an elite bucket-getter without a jumper since Giannis Antetokounmpo.

That is very much a theory for now; despite an uptick in usage and productivity over the past two months—partly related to Fred VanVleet missing most of February—the 22-year-old Thompson is scoring just 14 points per game on the season. Watch the highlights of his 33-point showing in a road win against the defending champion Boston Celtics, though, and you might too become a believer in the Amen postulate. He can dunk ferociously as a lob-catcher, offensive rebounder, or just right over most of the league’s bodies. He can catch the ball on the move at light-speed and do multiple sophisticated basketball maneuvers on his way to a graceful layup. He can dribble his way into the heart of your whole system and slither and jump his way into drop shots and scoops. And if any of these immense skills fail him, he can probably just get what he wants by way of bully ball. 

While Thompson is one of the most important second-year players in the NBA, no one expects that he can take Houston to the next level as soon as this upcoming postseason. The Rockets lack an elite on-ball creator like Gilgeous-Alexander, and will likely hope to acquire one this offseason, pending how Alperen Sengun and Jalen Green do in tight playoff moments. The regular season has given them plenty of opportunities to score their team out of the shoeboxes the Rockets fight games into, though, with the team depending quite a lot on veteran VanVleet’s clutch-time bravura. The 31-year-old, as any strong rememberer of the 2019 Finals will tell you, is rich with moxie, but that only takes a team so far.

But if the only destination you care about is one defined by basketball passion, fitted with athletes young and limber enough to test the boundaries of the game, Houston is already going there every night they play. The Thunder are doing it with even more artillery and a fully developed superstar at the center of their offense, so if excellence is your thing, you can head that way. But, frankly, sometimes the team that can’t lose can become boring to watch if you’re not a native of their fanbase. In Houston, a more imperfect and inchoate group is wrestling their way into territory where they don’t quite belong yet, and seeing how the rest of their inspiring 2024-25 campaign goes will mend many a particularly broken sports heart.