Signs this team needs a lot of maturing before contending

I have to say in the 10 weeks since I posted this, IMO the Rockets have vastly matured. Not only do they have an 8 game winning streak, but they took the Lakers game last night seriously, and not only seriously for the first quarter, but for every minute of the entire game, all the way to the end. They challenged shots, Harden even blocked a three, and threw themselves at loose balls, like T Jones on one rebound. They finally beat a team by more than 25 - in the end, not during the game.

The main sign of maturity for me is that they set a record for largest margin of victory against the Lakers, not because they beat up on a team that was missing their five best players with injuries, but because they didn't care they were missing their five best players with injuries. In the past, they would have been embarrassed to blow out such a crippled team, subconsciously out to prove they were too good to put in such effort to beat such a 'lowly' team.

I created a thread 11 years ago here: http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=52223 that showed how the Rockets of that year had larger margins of victory against good teams, smaller margins of victory against lesser teams - an obvious sign of immaturity. I'll bet if I spent the time to do the same now, we'd see similar results, though until lately. That team in 2003 was lead by Yao at 22, Steve Francis at 25 (3rd year), so immaturity came, well, naturally. Hopefully age isn't the only factor in maturity, but I assume we'll make a trade soon to add some of that 'maturity' onto the roster. I can see what happened with the Thunder, crumbling to the Heat in their first finals, then pretty much giving up completely when they lost Westbrook last year - you can see they've matured by the way they've become an even better team without him this year. Maturity is a factor.