In the previous 23 chapters of this series we looked back at the history of the Rochester Royals’ transformation into the Houston Oilers and the Oilers’ subsequent ups and downs as they transformed into one of the NBA’s major powers. In this chapter we’ll look back at Houston’s 2006 playoff run and the festivities that marked the team’s 50th anniversary in 2007.

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The home stretch of the 2005-06 NBA season saw the Oilers playing some of the best regular season basketball Houston fans had watched since the heyday of the Bill Fitch era. Their offense was racking up points like nobody’s business, and their defense was making life uncomfortable for their opponents. Houston was guaranteed at least a number three slot in the 2006 NBA Western Conference playoffs; if all went well they might easily capture one of the top two slots in the postseason. One ESPN analyst had Houston pegged as a heavy favorite to win the 2006 NBA Finals-- or at least the Western Conference championship.

     The Oilers certainly did a great deal to bolster that claim during their final East Coast road swing; they went 8-1 on that sojourn, with the lone loss coming in Boston against the Celtics. And even then they put up a relentless fight before Paul Pierce, Boston’s team captain, nailed a dramatic three-pointer with just a half-second left on the game clock to clinch a C’s victory. On the bus ride to Logan Airport to catch their charter plane back to Houston, the Oiler players and coaches threw what amounted to a rolling impromptu party to celebrate what had been one of their most successful road trips in recent memory.

     In their first game back at the Sonic Center, the Oilers crushed the Atlanta Knights 99-65; seeing the ease with which Houston had dispatched Atlanta, ESPN’s chief basketball analyst basketball analyst predicted their first round playoff opponents would have a tough if not outright impossible job on their hands trying to contain Houston’s go-for-broke offense. The fact that Yao Ming had personally accounted for thirty of Houston’s points in the Atlanta game lent a great deal of credibility to the ESPN analyst’s assessment.  Coach Jerry Lucas was particularly high on Yao’s abilities, touting as a possible league MVP contender once the season had ended.

     The Oilers followed up their demolition of Atlanta with an eight-game win streak that further solidified the perception of Houston as a serious contender to deep in the 2006 NBA playoffs. And when they clinched the number two spot in the first round of the ’06 Western Conference postseason with an overtime victory in San Antonio over the Heat, their odds among bookmakers of winning the O’Brien Trophy improved from 15-1 to 5-1. Talk began to swirl around the NBA blogosphere that this might be the year the Oilers made their long-awaited return to the NBA Finals. The Energy City was abuzz over the prospect of seeing their team get another shot at the brass ring after nearly seven seasons of being left on the outside looking in....

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      ...and the way Houston steamrollered through the first two rounds of the 2006 NBA playoffs did nothing to stifle their high hopes. The Oilers swept the Dallas Mavericks in the first round and trashed the Denver Rockies in five games in the second round. In the Western Conference finals they took a 3 games-to-1 lead on the San Antonio Heat; when the opposing teams hit the court for their pre-match warm-ups in Game 5, the conventional wisdom was that a surging Houston would fry San Antonio like chicken wings on a skillet.

     But Yao Ming got in foul trouble early on and Tony Parker, considered by many as the greatest player the Heat had had since David Robinson, turned into a human cannon, firing three-pointers from every direction as San Antonio went on a 26-5 scoring streak that utterly flabbergasted the Oilers. By the end of the third quarter Houston was on the wrong side of a thirty-point deficit; despite a valiant fourth quarter effort to close the gap, they couldn’t catch up with San Antonio and the Heat won 99-79 to cut Houston’s series lead to 3-2. As bad as things had been for the Oilers in Game 5, however, they would get spectacularly worse in Game 6.

     If ever there were an NBA contest that exemplified Murphy’s Law, Game 6 of the 2006 Western Conference final was it. Whatever could go wrong for Houston, did-- usually at the worst possible time. Houston’s frontcourt missed thirteen of its first fourteen shots; by the time the Oilers finally got their second basket of the game San Antonio’s lead was already in double digits, and as if that wasn’t bad enough Yao Ming fouled out early in the second quarter after getting assessed a technical. By the time the third quarter got started most of the fans at the Sonic Center had got up and sprinted for the exits, not wanting to see the inevitable grim conclusion.

     And grim it certainly was-- the final score for Game 6 was San Antonio 137, Houston 101. Hoop fans in the Energy City were filled with a sense of foreboding that the rug was about to be pulled out from underneath the Oilers; by contrast, San Antonio fans were jubilant at seeing their team rise from the dead like Lazarus. The Heat completed their turnaround with one of the most spectacular conference finals wins in NBA playoff history, a 119- 116 Game 7 overtime victory that ended Houston’s 2006 NBA playoff run and sent San Antonio to the ‘06 NBA Finals, where they would defeat the New Jersey Nets in six games to earn their second-ever league championship in franchise history.

     No sooner had the Heat finished their NBA Finals victory parade through downtown San Antonio than some disgruntled Oilers fans(and Houston sportswriters) began calling for John Lucas to drastically overhaul his player roster; Lucas was reluctant to go as far as his critics suggested he should, but he did agree some changes needed to be made in order to push the team over the top and get it back to the Finals. To that end, he negotiated a trade with the Toronto Raptors in the summer of 2003 which sent third- year forward/center Chris Bosh to Houston in exchange for center Dikembe Motumbo and two 2007 NBA draft picks.

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      The biggest news to emerge from the Sonic Center in the summer of 2006, aside from the Bosh-Motumbo trade, was the launch of the Oilers’ official Facebook page; with the growth of social media as a force in American life, the franchise was working to expand its presence on the Internet as much as possible. It was also laying part of the foundation for what were expected to be massive celebrations to mark the approaching 50-year anniversary of the franchise’s arrival in Houston. The Oilers were sparing no expense to ensure the commemoration of their first half-century in the Energy City would be a grand occasion, and as part of the preparations for the festivities they were extending invitations to every person they could find who had been part of the original Les Harrison-era squad to return to Houston to attend the blowout weekend gala set to take place on Valentine’s Day week. Although Harrison himself had long since passed away, his presence would still be strongly felt throughout the anniversary celebrations-- one of which was the renaming of a street near the Sonic Center in Harrison’s honor.

        Another was the special Legends & Future Stars Gala which took the place of the Superstars Weekend normally held before the start of the Oilers’ preseason exhibition schedule. The Gala was described by one Houston Chronicle sportswriter as “the ultimate class reunion”, and that assessment wasn’t far off the mark-- it seemed like every former Oilers player who still had a pulse had turned up for the event, mingling with the fans and with the top players from Houston’s modern-day roster. There were quite a few strolls down memory lane that weekend as players from each of the Oilers’ great championship squads reminisced about the highs and lows of their respective postseason run; when clips of Houston’s 1962 NBA Finals triumph were played on the Sonic Center’s main Jumbotron screen, they were greeted with a standing ovation by fans and player alumni alike. So was the special retro jersey the Oilers introduced at the Gala to commemorate the team’s inaugural season at San Houston Coliseum.

    In February of 2007 a bronze statue honoring Les Harrison’s contributions to Houston’s growth as a sports city was unveiled outside the Sonic Center. But most hoops fans in the Energy City were thinking about a different kind of metal artwork-- to be a bit more precise, a 14½-pound sterling silver and gold statuette known as the Larry O’Brien Trophy....