In the previous 28 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 2010 NBA Finals triumph against the Boston Celtics. In this installment we’ll look back at their 2010-11 season.

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With the 2010 NBA Finals in the history books, the Houston Oilers turned their focus to repeating as NBA league champions in 2011. Although their efforts to woo superstar LeBron James away from the Cleveland Cavaliers had fallen flat when he decided to sign with the Miami Marlins, they didn’t spend much time dwelling on it; they had plenty of other talents on their roster already, Yao Ming was in the prime of his career, and the upcoming college draft promised to yield a sizable crop of new players who could keep Houston in the ranks of bona fide league powers for years to come. There were also a number of high school prospects who had caught the eye of Houston's scouts in recent months, and the front office was sure that if just one or two of them could be convinced to sign with the Oilers when they turned pro Houston's prospects of maintaining its place among the NBA's megapower would be bright as the Texas sun.

     It wasn't just on the court that the Oilers were enjoying NBA supremacy; a Forbes magazine survey released just before the start of the league's 2010-11 preseason pegged Houston as the NBA's most financially successful franchise and the fourth most profitable pro sports team in America overall. On the NBA’s official website Oiler merchandise was outselling that of nearly every other franchise in the league with the highly conspicuous exception of the LeBron-led Miami Marlins. And in a sign of the times in the reality TV era, a slew of agents were lining up at the Sonic Center hoping to sign at least one Houston player to a contract for a behind-the-scenes show. The Oilers were on their way to becoming the prototype for the NBA franchise of the future.

      The optimistic outlook for the Oilers’ 2010-11 season grew even brighter after the team won five of its first preseason games; usually preseason matchups aren’t the most reliable indicators of how an NBA team will do during the regular season, but after Houston’s spectacular performance at the start of its exhibition schedule there were few people inclined to doubt that Houston would repeat as the NBA league champions in 2011. Even a three-game losing streak near the end of the Oilers’ exhibition schedule didn’t do much to shake the general consensus that the odds were in Houston’s favor in its quest to repeat as NBA champion.

     The start of the 2010-11 NBA regular season only served to act as further reinforcement of the sense of destiny felt by most Oiler fans: the team won six of its first seven games to kick off their defense of the NBA title and bounced back from their first loss (a 91-87 upset by the Los Angeles Clippers) to reel off another seven-game hot streak as they sought to stake their claim atop the Western Conference standings. But when the Oilers dropped four in a row at the start of their first East Coast road trip of the season, some Oilers fans found themselves starting to have second thoughts; whether the men in the Houston locker room also had them nobody knew for sure, but the four-game skid had to bother them to some degree, because when they came to TD Garden face the Celtics in their only game of the year at Boston, they tore into the C’s like rabid pit bulls and came away with a 124-90 blowout win over their ancient league archrivals.

     A few days later the Oilers came to Madison Square Garden to face a typically underachieving New York Knicks club; this time, though, it was Houston who was on the receiving end of the blowout, getting trounced by their hosts 119-86 in a game which saw Yao Ming miss twenty-eight of his first thirty shots from the floor. If it had been a softball game rather than an NBA contest, the slaughter rule would probably have been invoked before the halfway point of the third quarter. That loss dealt a serious blow to Oilers morale, and as a result self-doubt began seeping into the Houston locker room, which in turn led to more losses, which in turn led to a further drop in club morale.

     By the end of November the Oilers were struggling to avoid falling to third place and a return trip to the NBA Finals no longer seemed like the sure bet it had been at the start of the 2010-11 season. Then, as if things weren’t dire enough from the Houston fans’ perspective, during an early December home contest against the Oklahoma City Storm Yao Ming was sidelined for the rest of the year with an injured quadricep muscle. For many of the Oiler fans it was starting to feel as if the roof was caving in on their season. Others were afraid it already had. The rest of Oiler fandom just crossed their fingers and hoping that Houston could, one way or another, figure out a way to plug the gap left by Yao’s absence.

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     They couldn’t. The Oilers dropped to third place, then fourth as they stumbled towards the Christmas holiday; by Christmas Eve, in fact, they were mired in a ten-game losing streak and looked more like they’d be contending for a draft lottery pick than for a spot in the 2011 NBA playoffs. It seemed Santa had decided to put the ultimate lump of coal in the franchise’s collective Christmas stocking, and it was getting on the Houston coaching staff’s nerves. Fans took to the social media world to voice their displeasure with this turn of events and to offer subtle, or in a few cases not-so-subtle, hints that maybe it was time to have a changing of the guard in the Oilers coaching staff or the locker room-- maybe even both.

      It was definitely not a happy new year for Houston; when the Oilers resumed their regular season they also resumed their losing streak, which ran to sixteen games before it was finally snapped by a 117-110 victory over the Knights in Atlanta. The 2010-11 season, which had started with the promise of back-to-back league titles for the Oilers, now looked like it would end with the heartbreak of not making the NBA playoffs at all. Even the most die-hard optimists in the ranks of Oiler fandom were beginning to lose hope for a return to the postseason. Sure enough, by mid-January Houston found itself five games behind San Antonio in the battle for the final remaining Western Conference playoff slot.

      But in early February of 2011 Houston's fortunes began once more to rise as swiftly and spectacularly as they'd gone into decline. Among the key elements in this turnaround was a sharp overhaul of the Oilers' offense; after a 107-103 road win against the Detroit Pistons the Oilers coaching staff decided to lay aside their team's standard uptempo style of play in favor of a slower, grind-it-out type of offense that was less dependent on the absent Yao Ming. This switch in offensive technique was to pay off handsomely for John Lucas and his players as Houston began to reel off multiple win streaks; by the end of the month they were back in the top five of the NBA's Western Conference standings and fighting toe- to-toe with the Dallas Mavericks for the number one playoff seed. In the first week of March the Oilers overtook the Mavericks for the number one slot after a blowout win against the San Antonio Heat and a Mavericks OT loss to the Indiana Pacers.

      The Oilers would finish the 2010-11 regular season as the top seed in the NBA Western Conference playoffs, with Dallas just a hair's length behind in the number two spot. Sportswriters across the basketball world predicted that if and when Houston and the Mavericks faced each other in it the postseason it would be a grudge match for the ages, and as things turned out those predictions wouldn't be far off the mark...

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      The Oilers and the Mavericks made quick work of their respective first-round playoff opponents. Houston swept the Denver Rockies out in the first round while Dallas needed just five games to dispense with the San Antonio Heat. The second round was somewhat harder; the Oilers would need six games to get past the Minnesota Cyclones while the Mavs' series against Phoenix would go down to the wire before Dallas knocked the Suns out with a double OT victory in Game 7. It would be in the 2011 Western Conference finals when Houston and Dallas faced their hardest postseason test yet-- each other.

      The long-running sports feud between the Energy City and the Big D, always intense to begin with, flared up to new heights of ferocity in the wake of Game 1 of the conference finals. Before the end of the first half at least eight players and three assistant coaches would be ejected as a result of altercations between the Oiler and Maverick benches; four fans would be arrested for disorderly conduct; and the Oilers' mascot would get punched out by a particularly belligerent Mavericks fan who'd end up spending the night in jail for his troubles. The enmity between the Mavs and the Oilers nearly exploded into all-out war before Houston finally emerged from the chaos with a 107-101 victory. And the animosity only escalated after the game was over as key Houston and Dallas players traded accusations at their teams' respective postgame press conferences later that night.

      Game 2 didn't do much to cool off the hate between the Oilers and the Mavericks; if anything, it seemed to escalate a notch or two as they battled for every possession on the court. Dallas was intent on evening up the series, while Houston was fighting to increase its series lead to 2 games to 0 before the conference finals shifted to Dallas for Game 3. Units of the Texas Rangers were dispatched to the Sonic Center in hopes of keeping a lid on the mutual animosity Oilers and Mavericks fans felt towards each other. Their presence would turn out to be less necesssary than originally thought: the Mavs jumped out to a 25-point lead early on and kept the Oilers at bay the rest of the night, eventually winning by a slightly smaller but still healthy margin of 19 points. The blowout of Houston by Dallas in Game 3 prompted a New York Post columnist to joke: "If these Texans had been at the Alamo Santa Anna would've hot-footed it back to Mexico as fast as his horse could carry him."

      Houston avenged this embarrassment by inflicting a blowout of their own on the Mavs in Game 4; they jumped out to a twenty-five point lead midway through the first quarter and left Dallas in the dust from that point on. Despite a number of valiant Maverick rally attempts and at least one ejection of an Oilers assistant coach early in the second half, Houston came away with a 119-94 victory to tie the series at two games apiece and stir Oilers’ fans hopes that Houston might take control of the conference finals with a Game 5 win. But as Robert Burns-- or was it Phil Jackson? --once said, the best laid plans of mice and men can go astray...

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       ....and for Houston they went astray with a vengeance when the Western Conference finals returned to the Sonic Center for Game 5. What most Oilers fans thought would be a cakewalk instead turned into what can most succinctly be described as an alley fight as the Oilers managed to blow a commanding lead not once, not twice, but five times during the first half. Their second half performance was only marginally better; at the end of the third quarter the Oilers trailed Dallas by twenty points. In spite of valiant efforts to close the gap with Dallas during the late minutes of regulation Houston fell short by eleven points, losing to the Mavs 99-88. Now the Oilers found themselves trailing three games to two in the Western Conference finals and staring elimination squarely in the face.

      It was in this frame of mind the Oilers took to the court for Game 6 in Dallas. Nothing less than the fate of Houston's 2010-11 season rode on its outcome; John Lucas' players went at their pre-game warmups with an intensity even the most grizzled veterans of the Houston sports media found mind-blowing. That intensity only escalated when the game started, and for a while at least it seemed to carry the Houston players forward as they staked out a respectable first half lead over the Mavericks; as the second half got underway, though, Dallas slowly reasserted itself to pull even with the Oilers and then take a 10-point lead over them at the midway point of the third quarter.

     As the game headed into the fourth quarter and Dallas stretched its lead out to twenty points, the contingent of Oiler fans who had braved a hostile American Airlines Center crowd to support Houston began chanting for Yao Ming to get in the game and bail his team out. But not only was Yao still sidelined by the quadriceps injury he’d sustained early in the regular season, he was also out of the country-- he’d gone home to China to continue his recuperation. So there was not much Oilers fans could do except watch as their team’s hopes of an NBA Finals repeat slowly washed down the drain.

      The final score: Mavs 132, Oilers 119. Instead of triumphantly coming back to the Sonic Center for a winner-take-all seventh game, the Oilers roster was dejectedly heading home to clear out their lockers and contemplate what might have been while Dallas geared up for what would be a victorious NBA Finals rematch against the Miami Marlins. The last jerseys had barely been packed up in their owners’ duffel bags before a host of rumors started swirling that John Lucas might soon quit, or be fired from, the franchise which his name been synonymous with since the days of whitewall tires....

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