Houston Rockets Collectibles and Memorabilia

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There must be something about Texas that produces so much great basketball. The San Antonio Spurs won five NBA Championships between 1999 and 2014, the Dallas Mavericks took that prize in 2011, and the Houston Rockets won back-to-back titles in...
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There must be something about Texas that produces so much great basketball. The San Antonio Spurs won five NBA Championships between 1999 and 2014, the Dallas Mavericks took that prize in 2011, and the Houston Rockets won back-to-back titles in 1994 and 1995. Of those teams, the path of the Houston Rockets has been the most circuitous. When the team entered the league in the 1967-68 season, it was based in San Diego and took its name from that city’s growing aerospace industry. It was an optimistic beginning, but that first Rockets team did the sports equivalent of blowing up on the launching pad as it amassed an embarrassing 15-67 record, the worst in the NBA that year. The silver lining, though, was getting first pick in the 1968 NBA draft, which the team used to acquire Elvin Hayes. In a curious twist of fate, Hayes had been playing exceptional college ball for the University of Houston, and when he was drafted by the Rockets as the first pick in the NBA, he was also drafted by the Houston Mavericks as the first pick in the rival ABA. Hayes, though, would have to wait until 1971 to play again in Houston as a member of the newly relocated team. But Hayes lasted just one season in the city before being traded to Baltimore—he would return to Houston in 1981 to close out the final three years of his career there. In Houston, the Rockets began their winning ways, achieving their first .500-plus season in 1974-75 and acquiring Moses Malone in 1976. With Malone and Rudy Tomjanovich (his uniforms read “Rudy-T”) as forwards and Calvin Murphy in the back court, the Rockets made it all the way to the Eastern Conference Finals, which they lost to Julius Erving and the Philadelphia 76ers in 6 games. The 1977-78 season is best remembered—or forgotten—by Rockets fans for the sucker punch to the face of Tomjanovich from Kermit Washington of the Los Angeles Lakers. The blow required five months of recovery, and although Tomjanovich would join fellow Rockets Malone...
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