Clint Capela Believes This Year's Rockets Could Surpass 2017-18 Team

The 2025-26 Houston Rockets are on a near identical pace as last season's team. Last year, the Rockets went 52-30 and became the talk of the league.

NBA experts and analysts viewed the Rockets as the league's up-and-coming squad. And rightfully so, after the team had an 11-win improvement year over year.

The Rockets made the biggest offseason move of the summer, trading for Kevin Durant, in a deal that was considered a bargain by the masses. In total, Houston sent five second round draft picks, one first round pick from the 2025 NBA Draft, Dillon Brooks and Jalen Green.

Houston has won 51 of their games, as of this writing, and hold the fifth seed in the Western Conference, meaning they'll be facing the Denver Nuggets or Los Angeles Lakers in the four-versus-five matchup in the opening round of the postseason.

And according to Rockets reserve center Clint Capela, this year's Rockets team has the potential to be even better than the 2017-18 Rockets team that set a franchise record with 65 wins and made it to the Western Conference Finals.

Capela was speaking with Brandon "Scoop B" Robinson and shared his thoughts.

"We have a chance to do better. I mean, every season is different. The road is different and the style of play is different… I mean, before the swagger was different for sure. We felt like that we were… I don’t want to say Hollywood but it was a lot of guys with that swagger thing that we had that felt pretty special."

Capela is supposed to say this. Players should have confidence in their respective ball clubs.

This Rockets team would get beat in a postseason series by the 2017-18 iteration of the ball club. This year's team is relatively top-heavy.

Granted, that team was relatively top-heavy also. Both teams have three players capable of scoring 20+ points on any given night.

This year's team has Alperen Sengun, Kevin Durant and Amen Thompson. That iteration of the Rockets had James Harden, Chris Paul and Eric Gordon.

However, the skillsets are different. For example, that Rockets team led the league in 3-point attempts and makes. They also ranked second in free throw makes and ranked third in free throw attempts.

This year's team ranks 28th in three-point attempts and ranks 25th in 3-point makes. The Rockets also rank 17th in free throw attempts and rank 20th in free throw makes this season.

Again, there's not anything wrong with Capela having confidence in this year's Rockets team. We want that.

But we can also note that this team isn't quite as good as that 2017-18 team.