Houston Rockets likely to be fifth best team in Western Confernce

The Houston Rockets had a chance to make strides this summer and add Chris Bosh to their already great core of players. But they didn’t add Bosh, they failed to lure Carmelo Anthony and their pursuit of LeBron James was laughably non-existent.

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What they did do was lose Chandler Parsons to the Dallas Mavericks, traded Jeremy Lin and first round pick to the Los Angeles Lakers and dumped Omer Asik on the New Orleans Pelicans. Basically, the Rockets fumbled away this offseason where they could have gotten so much better in the West.

According to Alex Kennedy from Basketball Insiders, despite all the hype about what the Rockets could have done this offseason, the team got no better this summer and are still just the fifth best team in the Western Conference.

"I made it clear in another answer that I think Houston will take a step back. My point is that the West has way more teams with the potential to be elite than the East does. Houston is maybe the fifth-best team in the West, but they’d be in the mix for best team in the East. I was trying to show the disparity between the two conferences."

The argument that teams would be so much better in the East is a crutch. The Rockets could very well be runaways in the Eastern Conference but they’re not in that conference, they’re in the West and that’s something that they’re going to have to deal with.

Be sure to check FanSided.com’s official NBA page to keep up to date on the latest news and rumors from around the league all summer long.