It was a typical NBA mid-February weeknight, roughly two-thirds of the way through a long season, roughly one-third of the league in action. One of the four tilts on tap for the evening featured the defending Western Conference champions hosting the team who’d won two of the prior three … it also turned out to be a preview of an up-coming playoff match-up.
But what was about to happen in Houston, though hardly unprecedented in the annals of the NBA, would not be duplicated for more than a quarter of a century (Kevin Love in 2010, then Dwight Howard in 2018).