Who Would be the Rockets Most Entertaining Opening Matchup?

On Monday morning, NBA fans started to get a better idea of the league's opening week. Shams Charania of The Athletic reported earlier in the week on the teams that will be playing opening night.

Opening Night of the 2024-25 NBA season on TNT October 22, per sources:

🏀 Knicks at Celtics, ring night
🏀 Timberwolves at Lakers pic.twitter.com/RGWFglVZ9F
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) August 12, 2024

Home	Away
Los Angles Lakers	Minnesota Timberwolves
Boston Celtics	New York Knicks
Philadelphia 76ers	Milwaukee Bucks

Unsurprisingly, the Houston Rockets will not be part of opening night. Despite turning things around last season and finishing 41-41 the previous three seasons, the Rockets had one of the worst records in the league during that period, and it will take another huge jump this season to distance themselves from those basement-dwelling years.

We also received news of who the Rockets will face in the in-season tournament group play, but we haven't received the full schedule yet.

However, we should know the Rockets schedule sometime this week, which raises an interesting question: who would be the most entertaining matchup for Houston's first game of the season? In the last four seasons, the Rockets have faced the Portland Trailblazers, Minnesota Timberwolves, Atlanta Hawks and Orlando Magic, losing every single game.

In the 2024-25 season, many people expect the Rockets to take that next step and become a playoff team, and an opening night win would be a significant step in the right direction. Regarding possible opponents that would make for an exciting opening night, you have past rivals like the Golden State Warriors, Dallas Mavericks and Los Angeles Lakers. However, one team — and more specifically one player — would make for a great matchup in game one: Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs.

The Rockets will face the Spurs in the preseason, but that won't always involve the best players for each team, as organizations are becoming increasingly cautious about the number of minutes they play their main guys. The real test, of course, comes in the regular season.

We saw a glimpse of the rivalry being reborn last season when Alperen Sengun had the game of his life, scoring a career-high 45 points and a season-best 16 rebounds. All while holding the eventual Rookie of the Year, Victor Wembanyama, to 10 points and 11 rebounds.

The Rockets went on to win the game 114-101, and all the talk after the game was about the rematch set for a week later in San Antonio. Unfortunately, we never got a chance to see it, as Sengun would suffer a season-ending injury vs the Sacramento Kings a few days later.

The Rocket and Spurs rivalry goes back to the early 1980s, when the Rockets made their first-ever NBA Finals in 1981, knocking the Spurs out of the playoffs on their way to the finals. It continued again in the 1990s as the Rocket knocked out the Spurs, this time in the 1995 Western Conference Finals, on their way to back-to-back championships.

The tide started to turn in favor of the Spurs and hit a low point for the Rockets when a Kawhi Leonard-less Spurs team embarrassed the Rockets in the 2017 playoffs. The rivalry had cooled off after that playoff series up until last season.

With both teams boasting two of the best young players in the game and being in the same state and division, an opening-night tilt would add another chapter to this long and heated rivalry.

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