Brutal news broke late Monday afternoon that Fred VanVleet had just suffered a non-contact torn ACL, almost certainly sidelining him for the season. That’s a devastating injury for him personally (I’m still recovering from a major knee injury ten months later; it sucks!) and for a Houston Rockets team that just made a win-now trade for Kevin Durant.
Even without VanVleet, the Rockets are simply too good not to go for a championship this season. To get to the promised land, Houston will have to find a replacement for VanVleet, an advanced metrics deity. The two obvious solutions are already in-house: Third-year wunderkind Amen Thompson and draftnik darling Reed Sheppard.
However, they’ll need to consistently show a lot of things they’ve barely flashed so far.