Back in the halcyon days of October, when the Astros were rolling and the city's professional basketball team didn't have a defeat on its ledger, I approached my editors with a relatively simple request: let's make 23 Houston Rockets predictions for the 2022-23 season.
The exercise was innocuous enough in itself, a gimmick designed to preview a purported season of progress at the Toyota Center. Yet after one of the ugliest half-seasons in franchise history, these predictions now look a touch like the happy-go-lucky scenes at the start of a horror movie.