Is it just me, or would the Rockets have 30 straight winning seasons* if not for injuries?

Canaan's injury got me thinking about how much wasted potential the Rockets have seen even just this season... then recent seasons... then just throughout their history.

http://basketballreference.com/teams/teampage.htm?tm=hou&lg=n

The basketball gods really like watching us squirm. Unless I'm missing something, the year they tanked for Hakeem is actually the last time we put out a team that was bad enough to just not win games no matter what.

*One could argue that we weren't good enough in 01-02, also, but I think most of us agree that Francis' health would have gotten us to .500 that year considering how well the team played in 00-01, and considering that they tanked the last 1/3 of the season. But of course, if we DID have a winning season that year, we probably wouldn't have gotten Yao, so there's no telling how that would affect us afterwards... But the overarching point stands:

1. Injuries suck.
2. I think we take for granted how good management in Houston has been for a long time now. We haven't seen too many of the results we really want to see other than in 94 and 95 [in large part because of injuries], but we are still in so much better of a position than most NBA teams almost all the time.

 

Yeah, yeah, championships are nice, but as I'm sure you know, you're kinda flippantly missing the point.

 

I know they tanked for Sampson the year before, but I had read that it was pretty commonly known they tanked for Hakeem, too. And those consecutive tank jobs is what made the NBA implement the lottery system.

Of course, I wasn't even alive at the time, and I'm not big on NBA history, so I could be wrong.

In any case, still a damn impressive stretch.