In the previous twenty-four installments of this series we traced the first half-century of the Houston Oilers basketball beginning with their relocation from Rochester, New York in 1957 and continuing up the start of the franchise’s 50th anniversary celebrations during the 2006-07 NBA season. In this chapter we’ll take another look at the 50th anniversary hoopla and follow the Oilers’ 2007 playoff run

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For one week around Valentine’s Day of 2007, Houston became the center of the basketball world. That week marked the fiftieth anniversary of the original contract signing by Les Harrison that cleared the way for the former Rochester Royals to pull up stakes and move to Texas to become the Oilers. Although the oil tycoons with whom Harrison had negotiated the deal were long since dead, their presence would be felt just as keenly as if they were still alive and kicking-- the fortunes they’d left to their descendants were helping to pay for the festivities marking the anniversary, and at least two streets in the downtown Houston area were named in honor of those tycoons. For that matter Harrison himself, in spite of the fact that he’d passed away nearly a decade earlier, would loom large over the anniversary commemorations; in fact, a memorial service honoring Harrison’s life and sports career would be held at Houston’s largest Jewish synagogue at the close of the anniversary week.

Indeed, it seemed like you couldn’t throw a paper airplane without hitting a reminder of just how long the Oilers had been a part of the city’s athletic scene. The city’s largest art gallery devoted one of its showrooms to a photography exhibit displaying five decades’ worth of pictures of the Oilers at both their best and their worst on the court; the original contract that arranged for the erstwhile Rochester Royals to relocate to Texas was put on display at City Hall as a memento of the beginning of the long relationship between the Oilers and their new hometown. Houston’s other major professional sports teams were also doing their part to mark the anniversary: the Dynamo MLS soccer club presented an official team jersey bearing the number 57 to the Oilers’ general manager, the Astros baseball franchise decked out their spring training complex in Florida in the Oilers’ team colors, and the Texans NFL expansion club hosted a rally at Reliant Stadium to honor the surviving members of Houston’s first NBA championship squad.

And as if that wasn’t enough to generate some serious hype where the anniversary was concerned, the franchise had one other highly important thing working in their favor: they were in the thick of another Western Conference playoff hunt that week, tied with Dallas for second place in the overall conference standings. Many sportswriters thought the team was just one or two wins away from vaulting itself into the top spot, and most fans in Houston were inclined to agree with that viewpoint.

On the eve of Valentine’s Day, in fact, the Oilers were just coming off a spectacular victory over the San Antonio Heat which had put them in a dead heat with Dallas not only for the second seed in the Western Conference playoffs but also for the top spot in the NBA Midwest Division. Yao Ming was the primary weapon in the Oilers’ offensive arsenal that season, leading the franchise in average points scored per game and third place overall in the league in that category. On Valentine’s Day itself Ming racked up 41 points and 19 rebounds to help boost the Oilers to a 99-87 win against the New Orleans Bobcats at the Sonic Center. Yao and his teammates then adjourned to the Houston Marriott for a meet-and- greet with alumni from the ’57-’58 Oilers club.

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The Oilers media department swung into full gear to promote the impending release of the team’s 50th anniversary commemorative DVD set, which neatly distilled all of the franchise’s greatest and worst moments on the court into one impressively wide-ranging four-disc package. The team’s historical research staff had spent months combing through thousands of hours of video and newsreel footage to find the right material for the DVD set, and when the first reviews of the collection came in it was clear the staff’s efforts had paid off handsomely. The collection was released to almost unanimously five-star reviews, one of which came from(of all places) the sports pages of the Dallas Morning Herald: “Any basketball fan who wants to get to know the history of the NBA in Texas should buy this video set immediately.”

Once all of the hoopla surrounding the celebrations of the Oilers’ past had subsided, the team turned its focus towards the future....to be more precise, that portion of the future which included the 2007 NBA Western Conference playoffs. It had been nearly a decade since Houston last appeared in the NBA Finals-- and even longer since they’d last taken home the O’Brien Trophy. That was not a streak anyone in the Oilers front office wanted to see continue; for that matter, the Lucas-Robertson coaching staff was eager to put an end to the title drought. With that in mind, John Lucas called a meeting of his players on February 20th just before a home game against the Charlotte Hornets and gave them a ten-minute pep talk on their potential to add their own chapter to the storied legacy of playoff triumphs their predecessors had been writing over the past half-century.

The pep talk worked: Houston not only thrashed the Hornets by twenty-five points that night, but had an .843 winning percentage the rest of the ’06-’07 regular season and went into the 2007 NBA Western Conference playoffs as the top seed. In the first round they destroyed the Denver Rockies, sweeping them in a three-game rout; in the second round they overcame a 2 games-to-1 deficit to beat the Minnesota Cyclones in six games; and in the 2007 Western Conference finals Houston won over the San Antonio Heat in seven games to advance to the NBA Finals for the first time in nearly a decade.

Instead of a rematch with the Boston Celtics or the Chicago Bulls, the Oilers would find themselves battling for the NBA league championship against the Cleveland Cavaliers, a franchise which historically in the postseason had been more famous for first-round exits than for NBA Finals appearances. The addition of LeBron James to the Cavs’ lineup, however, had done a great deal to improve their playing caliber, and most sportswriters had them as the odds-on favorite to win the ’07 NBA Finals over the Oilers. Lucas was anxious to prove conventional wisdom wrong, and accordingly set to work drawing up a series of offensive plans meant to contain Cleveland’s frontcourt-- in particular LeBron, who’d gone into the NBA straight out of high school and was known throughout the league for having a prodigal scoring touch.

In Game 1 of the 2007 NBA Finals, it looked as though Lucas’ efforts might be for naught. Cleveland cruised to a 115-96 win over Houston, with LeBron leading the way with a 51-point barrage against a struggling Oilers defense. But the Oilers bounced back from that debacle with a vengeance, demolishing the Cavs 127-100 to tie the series as the action shifted to the Sonic Center for Games 3 and 4. The hype touting LeBron as “King James” during the regular season was now starting to ring a little hollow. And when Houston manhandled Cleveland 99-75 in Game 3, the question in the minds of most basketball beat writers in the sports media was not so much if Houston could put the Cavs away as how many more games it would take to do so.

As it turned out, the door would begin to shut on Cleveland for good in Game 4 when they blew a fifteen-point third quarter lead against the Oilers and ended up losing to Houston by eight points in overtime. Suffice to say it was a long plane ride back to Ohio for the Cavs as they returned to Quicken Loans Arena for a do-or-die Game 5. For Houston’s players and coaches, meanwhile, the time just seemed to fly: the prize that had eluded them since Michael Jordan pulled up stakes for Chicago was so close to being won back they could practically feel it in their hands.

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Game 5 may well have been the worst playoff performance of LeBron’s tenure in Cleveland; it was certainly the worst that he recorded in the 2007 NBA Finals. At precisely the moment in the Finals when the Cavaliers most needed consistent rebounding and shooting from James, the high school prodigy found his offensive well running dry as he missed nine of his first ten shots and two of his first four free throw attempts. By halftime the Cavs were trailing Houston by twenty-six points and Quicken Loans Arena had gone as quiet as a mausoleum. But in millions of living rooms and hundreds of sports bars throughout the Houston area, the level of noise was almost deafening as Oilers fans cheered on the imminent return of the O’Brien Trophy to the Energy City.

In the third quarter Houston effectively put away the game, and the Cavaliers, with a 27-3 offensive run that included back- to-back three-pointers from eventual Finals MVP Yao Ming. After the last buzzer sounded to signal the end of the game, a joyful pandemonium erupted on the streets of Houston; for the first time since Michael Jordan donned the uniform of the Chicago Bulls, the Oilers would be officially recognized as the NBA’s best team...