“We had four guys who had surgery during the course of the year. I asked Cassell back in 2013 about the trade. Many still feel that the Rockets messed with a formula that wasn’t broken. But in the 1997 West Finals, the Jazz eliminated Houston in just six games. During the title years, the Rockets, with Horry and Cassell, handled Utah twice, and in 1994, rather easily.
What critics of the trade remember is what came next: the Western Conference Finals loss at the hands of the Utah Jazz. I still vividly remember a possession late in the game where Barkley snared consecutive offensive boards to help put the Sonics away. And in the deciding Game 7, he scored 20 points and grabbed 14 rebounds, including five on the offensive glass. In the pivotal Game 4, Barkley scored 26 points and grabbed 15 rebounds to put Houston up 3-1 in the series.
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In the seven-game Western Conference semifinals series in 1997, Barkley averaged 19.1 points and 13.4 rebounds in 38.7 minutes per game. The thinking behind the Barkley trade was to make Seattle pay for diverting so much attention to Olajuwon. Olajuwon averaged a pedestrian 18.3 points per game in the four-game sweep in 1996. Payton tormented the Rockets’ point guards and the Sonics’ defensive scheme allowed them to swarm Olajuwon without leaving the Rockets’ 3-point shooters open. The Sonics, featuring All-Stars Shawn Kemp and Gary Payton, were a matchup nightmare for the Rockets as composed during the title years. The 1996 defeat was particularly humiliating: a four-game sweep where it felt like the Rockets never really had a chance after a 33-point beatdown in Game 1.
Rockets fans remember all too well that the team’s back-to-back championships were bookended by painful eliminations at the hands of the Sonics. But I have maintained all of these years that the trade was a success and the right decision because it got Houston past Seattle. They did not even obtain their highly anticipated meeting with Michael Jordan’s Bulls in the NBA Finals. The Rockets did not win a title as a result of the trade.
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