NBA Christmas Morning is here, Rockets fans

Note - In a throwback to Ye Olde Dayes O’ Thee Bloggins I will be live blogging the draft, and also doing some talking in The Green Room (with Professor Plum.)

This is historically unusual. The Houston Rockets have gone from being the family that goes looking for Chinese food and an early movie on the NBA’s Christmas (aka Draft Day), but winds up bringing home a large foreigner hanging around on the sale rack at the drugstore, along with some discount candy; to one of staying up all night, lying very still in bed, but never sleeping.

The Rockets are now kids who keep looking at the clock, wondering if 5:30 AM is really too early to get parents and various relatives up, just this one time. It’s a very big day. and it can’t start soon enough! That’s a feeling to treasure, if you’re not used to doing it every year. If the magic lasts as long as it should, but not longer.

Doing this past a certain point loses its charm, becomes something unhealthy, unseemly (cough, Sacramento). There’s a kind of arrested development, failure to launch, sort of thing going on there. You have to ask yourself why you are still wearing purple footie pyjamas at 38. Nobody wants to get you still more oddly specific Japanese stuff. You have enough. For real. Maybe it’s time to move on, and stop drafting guards who can’t shoot?

Anyhow, the Rockets currently have the third, seventeenth and twenty-sixth pick in the 2022 NBA draft. That’s a lot of presents under the tree. Will we open them all? It remains to be seen. Right now it looks like the wink the elf at Santa’s Workshop got from your folks is confirmed, and is likely to be The One. The one present you have hopefully wanted at #3, and at worst, expected there, is the one you’re getting.

It’s really more fun if you want what you’re getting. You don’t want to be one of those people who goes through life unsatisfied with generosity, because it wasn’t precisely what you specified.

After all, how many kids get a 6’10”, 250, power forward with point guard skills? You don’t want to be the one complaining that well, it’s cool that the Incredible Hulk can dance like that, but he can’t quite jump as high as I wanted, and maybe his arms could be longer? (Again with the arms. Maybe you should see if the hands are any good. at things like dribbling, first?)

After the big present from Santa (you’re pretty sure what it is, you’ve been peeking), the rest is a total surprise. Your grandmother, who kept giving you tiny undrafted point guards has seemingly woken up. It might be a Playstation (last generation, but still). It might be one of those learning kits that you have to do a bunch of stuff, but you learn something about circuits, or whatever. At any rate, you have no idea. You were surprised last year when you got a Josh Christopher, which you’d never heard of, but turned out pretty cool.

Then there’s your weird uncle, at pick 26. Who knows what he’s bringing? Hopefully no weird horror movie memorabilia, like even weirder Uncle Daryl used to get, back when he was really, really, into undersized power forwards. Or those books about negotiation that even your dad thought were odd. Daryl has been “out east” for a while, and you never see him much anymore. Your mom had a talk with Uncle Rafe. She left broad hints about defensive wings, and point guards.

In a throwback to Ye Olde Dayes O’ Thee Bloggins I will be live blogging the draft, and also doing some talking in The Green Room (with Professor Plum).