In the previous 27 chapters of this series we traced the history of the Houston Oilers basketball team starting with their relocation from Rochester, New York in 1957 and continuing all the way up to their 2008 NBA Finals defeat against the Boston Celtics. In this chapter we’ll summarize their ’08-’09 season and look back at their remarkable run to the 2010 NBA Finals.

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The melancholy that had overcome the Oilers after they lost the 2008 NBA Finals stayed with them well into the off-season; an ESPN commentator familiar with the team observed in an article he wrote for ESPN.com just before the start of the ’08-’08 preseason that “the team trainers should swap their Gatorade barrels for a Prozac dispenser”. To come that close to the reaching the top of the NBA only to fall short at the last minute was something which Houston’s players and coaches understandably found hard to accept even some months after the fact. At least a few players groused privately-- or in some cases not so privately --that the caliber of officiating in the ’08 Finals had been, at best, inconsistent. Even head coach John Lucas admitted that in the weeks and months immediately after the Finals ended he’d been feeling moments of melancholy at the way things had turned out. But that was in the past, he was quick to add; it was time for Houston to focus its sights on the future...to be more specific, the start of the ’08- ’09 NBA regular season.

       Returning to the NBA Finals was going to be a bit more difficult this time around for Houston than it had been in the past. Besides the drop in franchise morale which had followed the Oilers’ ’08 NBA Finals defeat, there was the small but important fact that the Western Conference had gotten even more competitive over the course of the 2008-09 NBA offseason than it was in other years-- and in other years it had been highly competitive indeed. As for the Eastern Conference, the Celtics had kept most of their player lineup core intact and the Miami Marlins had loaded up on high-caliber defensive players in the NBA’s annual college draft; even the normally inept Atlanta Knights had shown a few signs of making improvements during the off-season.

       Sure enough, the 2008-09 NBA regular season got off to a rocky start for Houston; the Oilers lost six of their first seven games, with three of those six losses by margins of twenty points or greater. And even when they finally did manage to secure their first win, it came at a high price: in a 122-120 overtime victory on the road against the Denver Avalanche, Yao Ming hurt his right ankle and was sidelined for nearly two months. During those two months Houston’s hopes for a return trip to the NBA Finals began to flicker under the pressure of relentless challenges not only by their Western Conference rivals but also by the major powers in the Eastern Conference. In one particularly humiliating road defeat during their first East Coast trip of the ’08-‘09 season, the Oilers would get walloped at Madison Square Garden by a New York Knicks team that was itself going through a rough patch at that time. The blowout was so complete that Houston took most of its starting players out of the game with nearly ten minutes left to play in the fourth quarter.

      Two nights later they traveled up to Boston to take on the Celtics in a rematch of the 2008 NBA Finals. That game didn’t go much better than their Madison Square Garden tilt with the Knicks had; Rajon Rondo set a personal record for most three-point shots made against the Oilers that evening and two Houston starters had the bad luck to foul out of the game with over half of the third quarter still left to play. A visibly irritated John Lucas ended his postgame press conference five minutes ahead of schedule, and his players weren’t that much more talkative.

      Houston fans, on the other hand, had a lot to say about the way their team’s latest defeat at the hands of the Celtics-- and much of what they said couldn’t be repeated in polite company. At social media sites like Facebook moderators were kept busy around the clock cleaning up R-rated vocabulary by Oiler fans from their sites’ pages-- and even the more family-friendly comments posted online could often as not be extremely harsh. The “letters to the editor” sections of Houston’s major newspapers were packed to the brim with letters and e-mails denouncing the way that the Oilers had handled-- or, in the eyes of some people, mishandled --their latest showdown with their traditional league archrivals. But if anyone in the Houston locker room thought the situation was going to get any easier in the weeks ahead, such hopes were about to be thoroughly and embarrassingly dashed....

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       The Oilers’ next East Coast sojourn took them out to the Washington, D.C. area the same week that Barack Obama would be sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. They were set to face the Washington Wizards in a game that could make or break their hopes for returning to the NBA Finals in 2009. If they won, they’d snap a nine-game losing streak and start to build critical momentum heading towards the All-Star break; if they lost, it put yet another nail in the coffin of their playoff aspirations.

      So of course the Wizards beat them like rented mules. The Oilers fell fifteen points behind Washington before they’d gotten halfway through the first quarter, were trailing by twenty-five points by the start of the third quarter, and ended up losing the game by nineteen points; while Houston’s frontcourt couldn’t make a three-point shot that night for love or money, Washington’s was making treys with ridiculous ease, including a bomb from midcourt just before the buzzer sounded to end the first half. The Houston sports media’s verdict the next day about the Oilers’ performance was far from kind-- one well-known local TV sports commentator in particular bluntly suggested John Lucas should step aside as head coach of the team and let a new man right Houston’s sinking ship.

      The Oilers were officially eliminated from NBA postseason contention in late February by way of a seven-game losing streak against their Western Conference brethren. By the time the 2008- 09 regular season ended with a desultory loss to the New Orleans Bobcats at the Superdome, the Houston TV sports anchor who’d been the first to suggest John Lucas be replaced as head coach had a great many people agreeing with that suggestion. But just a year later, Lucas would be the toast of the Energy City...

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      The first hint that the 2009-10 NBA regular season would be better for the Oilers than the ’08-’09 season had been came right before the end of Houston’s preseason exhibition schedule. In Las Vegas to play the Oklahoma City Storm in Houston’s second-to-last game before the regular season commenced, the Oilers exploded out of the gate and walloped the Storm in a pasting that was, even by exhibition game standards, an utter embarrassment to the visiting team. The second hint came when Houston reeled off ten victories in eleven games to start the ’09-‘10 regular season, five of said victories coming against potential Western Conference postseason foes.

      But perhaps the biggest sign of things to come was a road game in Miami against the Marlins in early November of 2009. Both Miami and Houston were riding nine-game winning streaks when they met at American Airlines Arena and were leading their respective divisions to boot; a win for either team would mean a huge boost to its fortunes for the rest of the season-- and possibly even a leg up on rival teams in the quest to secure a berth in the 2010 NBA playoffs. So naturally both squads came out with guns blazing right from the opening tip-off, and the matchup saw each team set itself a franchise single-game record for most total fouls called on it during regulation.

      But when the smoke finally cleared, it was Houston that had emerged the victor, edging past Miami 101-97 for its tenth win in a row and assuring itself of no worse than a second place spot in the Midwest division standings going into Veterans’ Day weekend. By Thanksgiving, some of the more optimistic fans in Houston were beginning to envision a return trip to the NBA Finals...and a 42- point drubbing of the New Orleans Bobcats at the Sonic Center on the first weekend in December only served to heighten those lofty expectations. Not even an overtime upset loss against the lowly Los Angeles clippers on the Friday before Christmas could dampen such hopes; in fact, some Houston players would later credit it as a crucial motivating factor in their drive to reach the Finals that season.

       New Year’s Day saw the Oilers start to pull away from the rest of the Western Conference pack for keeps in the race to get the top seed in the 2010 playoffs. That afternoon they handed the Dallas Mavericks a thirty-point pasting in their own building, an embarrassment that made the Mavs and their fans fuming mad; from there the Oilers proceeded to run roughshod over San Antonio, the Clippers, Oklahoma City, Miami, and Portland and rally back from a 12-point fourth quarter deficit to beat the Knicks at home on a last-second three pointer. By Valentine’s Day they were ten games ahead of the Mavericks in the Midwest Division standings; at the All-Star break that edge had increased to fifteen games. At that point it was less a question of if Houston would earn one of the top three seeds in the 2010 Western Conference playoffs than when they’d earn it and which seed it would be.

      The Oilers would end up clinching the number two seed in the playoffs, getting narrowly edged out by the Kobe Bryant-led Lakers for the top spot. Conventional wisdom said that the 2010 Western Conference championship would come down to a battle of Los Angeles vs. Houston, and in this case at least conventional wisdom would turn out to be right. The Lakers and Oilers would steamroller their respective opponents in the early rounds of the postseason to set up what one ESPN commentator described as “Ali vs. Frazier on the hardwood”. Who was Ali and who was Frazier, of course, depended on one’s perspective.

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       As tipoff time for Game 1 of the 2010 Western Conference finals approached, the Staples Center might have been more aptly dubbed the Sardine Can Center given the huge crowd that had shown up to watch Houston and Los Angeles go toe-to-toe in the opening round of their battle for a spot in the NBA Finals. In fact, for a while there were rumors the L.A. County fire marshal was going to cancel the game due to safety. But the show must, and did, go on.

       Just as the experts had predicted, the Lakers and Oilers went at each other like combatants in a barroom brawl. In fact, before the end of the third quarter a literal brawl would erupt in midcourt as the Lakers bench, incensed over what they viewed as a blown foul call against Houston, confronted several Houston players and began throwing MMA-style punches at them. Naturally the Houston players were quick to retaliate, and before the dust settled eleven players and two assistant coaches had been ejected along with an unruly Lakers fan who’d thrown a paper beer cup at one of the referees. But while Houston may have won the fistfight it was the Lakers who prevailed in the actual game, holding off a desperate Oilers fourth quarter rally to win 111-103. As might be expected, this didn’t sit with either John Lucas or his players-- they came out buzzing like angry hornets for Game and extracted a large measure of payback, demolishing Los Angeles 131-97 in what one Dallas Morning News sportswriter dubbed “the biggest beatdown a Texan has inflicted on an opponent since Lyndon Johnson trashed Barry Goldwater”.

    There were no bench-clearing brawls in Game 3, but the play in that contest proved to be just as intense as it had been during the previous two matchups. In fact it nearly went into overtime before Yao Ming buried a jumper with just 2.5 seconds left in regulation to clinch a 102-100 Houston victory. What might have been Los Angeles’ best chance to steal a win from the Oilers on their own court would go by the boards when Kobe Bryant had to leave the game late in the third quarter with a sprained right knee. Some sportswriters at the time suggested the Lakers might have lost the series right then and there; certainly their fortunes took a sharp turn for the worse with Bryant on the shelf.

    In Game 4 the Oilers started to really put the screws to Phil Jackson’s team, running them ragged en route to a convincing 137- 106 win that gave Houston a 3-1 edge in the ‘10 Western Conference Finals. Jackson and his players walked off the court after the game with a nervous feeling in their collective gut that their window of opportunity to dethrone Houston as conference champions had not only been shut but locked. That anxiety was justified: the next night, in Game 5, John Lucas’ crew sent the Lakers packing for the season with a 141-140 double overtime victory with Oilers reserve swing forward Jared Jeffries sealing the deal by blocking a three-pointer attempt from Los Angeles center Pau Gasol which might otherwise have given the Lakers the W and forced a sixth game back in L.A. at the Staples Center.

    With the Lakers safely dispatched it was time for Houston to get going on the task that had been their number one priority for nearly two years: avenging their 2008 Finals defeat by the Boston Celtics and reclaiming the NBA league championship. After missing the postseason completely in 2009, the Oilers welcomed the opportunity to once again battle for the NBA’s most prestigious prize; the prospect of settling old scores with their most bitter arch-nemesis added extra sizzle to the steak.

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    When the Celtics and Oilers took the court for the opening contest of the 2010 NBA Finals, it would have been hard to notice two minutes had passed since their last Finals showdown, let alone two years. The boos which greeted Houston were just as loud as they had been in 2008; the glares exchanged between the rival head coaches were every bit as intense; and the predictions by the competing teams of ultimate success were every bit as brimming with self-confidence. The level of intensity with which Boston and Houston played Game 1 of the 2010 Finals was most certainly undiminished; if anything, it seemed to have gone up a notch or two, with at least four players from each team fouling out before it was all over and two others limping back to the Celtic locker room with icepacks strapped to their kneecaps.

    One thing that was different about Game 1 of the ’10 Finals was the outcome. In sharp contrast to 2008, this time it was Houston who pulled out the victory in the Finals opener, rallying from a 16-point hole late in the third quarter to top Boston 121-117. Celtics fans were stunned to point of speechlessness while Oilers fans were cautiously optimistic it might be the first step on the final leg of their journey to regain the NBA league championship. Going into Game 2, there was a distinct if only slight feeling of disorientation in the Boston locker room-- it was rare for the Celtics to be on the losing end of a playoff series against the Oilers, so much so that most of Boston’s 2010 player roster and coaching staff could barely even remember the last time it had happened.

    The Celtics managed to shake that disorientation off long enough to win Game 2 in overtime 98-97, but for once it wasn’t a given that Boston would seize the momentum from the Oilers. In fact, at least one veteran Boston Herald sports columnist suggested the Game 2 victory might easily have been the last gasp for a Celtic team exhausted by a highly grueling Eastern Conference playoff run. And in truth, many of the Celts’ first line players had looked somewhat drained in the latter stages of Game 2. Some of the Boston media even speculated that fatigue might be a factor in the outcome of Game 3.

    Sure enough, when the Celtics took to the court at the Sonic Center for Game 3 of the 2010 Finals they came out looking listless in spite of the day off they’d had after Game 2. Before the first quarter of Game 3 was half over the Oilers had rolled to a twenty-five point lead and were showing signs of extending that lead even further. Boston made a valiant effort in the second half of the game to close the gap, but couldn’t get any nearer to Houston than eight points and when the final buzzer sounded the Oilers walked away with a 126-117 win and a 3 games-to-2 series lead over the Celtics. For only the second time in nearly half a century, the C’s found themselves on the losing end of a Finals series with Houston, and for Boston fans it was an unpleasant feeling to say the least. Only two years removed from their seventeenth NBA league championship, Boston was in the rare position of trailing their Finals opponent-- and it was a position they didn’t particularly like being in.

     Accordingly the Celts came out with figurative guns blazing in Game 6, matching the Oilers shot for shot and scratching their way to a 111-99 win which tied the Finals at three games apiece and laid the foundations for a blistering winner-take-all Game 7. Most bookmakers gave Boston the nod at 6-3 odds, but a surprisingly large number deemed the Oilers to be even money or better to take Game 7 and the series in spite of the harsh drubbing Houston had taken in Game 6. This only added to the drama which surrounded the Celtics and Oilers as they took to the hardwood at Sonic Center for what promised to be one of the wildest conclusions to an NBA Finals series in the league’s history. There was hardly a single fan on either side of the action who didn’t think it was going to be a genuine nail-biter; one Boston Herald NBA beat correspondent went on record with the prediction the game would go into at least one overtime and possibly as many as three.

      The overtime predictions came within a micron of becoming reality. The Celtics and Oilers went at each other like two bighorn rams fighting for a mate; the largest lead of the night for either team was a 10-point edge by Houston three minutes into the fourth quarter, and there were so many substitutions made by each team the scorer’s table could barely keep track of them. A missed shot here, a foul called(or not called) there, an adjustment on defense made somewhere else, and sunrise the next day might well have found the Oilers and Boston still going at it on the court. But in the final seconds of regulation, Yao Ming officially slammed the door shut on the Celtics with a bitterly contested layup that gave the Oilers a one-point lead just as the clock was winding down; the final buzzer was barely even audible over the ecstatic collective scream that erupted from the Sonic Center crowd as soon as the shot went in.

      For only the second time in franchise history the Oilers had beaten the Celtics in the NBA Finals. The fact they had turned the trick at home served to sweeten the pot considerably; more than four hours after Game 7 officially ended Houston players were still at the Sonic Center basking in their team's first NBA league championship in over two decades. A few days later, as the victory parade wound its way through the streets of downtown Houston, predictions were already being bandied about of an Oilers repeat. And there was little doubt among most hoops experts that those predictions could become reality. But the course of back-to-back crowns has never run smooth...

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