The frontcourt rebounding stands alone, compared to superstars high salary + contract renewal, he is the top priority for the Rockets

Since the end of the Rockets' season, almost all of them have been paying attention to what kind of chips the team should use to trade to get a superstar to lead the Rockets to win the championship, but they forgot that a more important player renewal problem in the team, because his frontcourt rebounds are the Rockets' killer moves, so he is very important to the Rockets. He is "Aquaman" Steven Adams, the former Westbrook's sword guard, and now he has become the big brother of the young Rockets.

Adams's net worth this season actually needs to be divided into two sections to analyze. Taking the Rockets' first 60 regular season games as the boundary, Adams has not maintained a high attendance rate due to knee risk management in the early and mid-season. He also "just" played 57 games throughout the season, basically keeping the frequency of playing 2 games a week.

He only played 6 back-to-back games throughout the season, and even if he insisted on playing in these back-to-back games, his condition was quite average (average of only 2.8 points, 3.7 rebounds + 46.5% hits per game), which is far from his average career. His performance in the first half of the season makes people wonder if Adams has entered the tragedy of most blue-collar centers in the NBA after they are 30 years old: their condition is rapidly and cliff-like, especially last year when he was seriously injured in the ACL, which is also particularly worrying.

But in fact, things turned around after the end of February and early March. Adams's condition was probably the watershed in early March. On March 4, he was beaten by this Eastern Conference Finals team most of the time when facing the Pacers. As a result, he almost crushed the Pacers' inside after being replaced by Adams and Shin Kyung. Then, on March 6, Adams won 17 points on the court, especially after he was reused in the second half, the Pelicans only scored 38 points in the second half. In the 29 minutes he ended, the Rockets even lost 5 points. Since then, after the Rockets began to include the double tower tactics in the regular volleyball team, Adams's influence in the game has increased greatly, and even became a part of the Rockets' underlying tactics.

And in the playoffs, his performance went further. In the 75 minutes he and Shin Kyung played, the Rockets beat 39 points. Although Adams averaged 5.7 points and 6.6 rebounds per game in the playoffs, although not dazzling, anyone who has watched the Huo Yong series knows that he provides unparalleled influence, and even let Cole "cut the shark" on him at all costs just to force him to get out. Adam's high-quality performance at the end of the season also added variables to his next contract. In fact, he considered the worrying attendance rate at the beginning of the season, and with Aquaman's worrying attendance rate, he was actually quite worried that the Rockets would "can't think about it" to renew his contract. As a result, after the season ended, he became one of the most popular insiders in the free market. According to current rumors from all parties, 5-6 teams are interested in him. On the end of the season, he also told the Houston Chronicle that he has no obvious future plans and has not made a promise to stay in the team. The only thing that is certain is that his current value is higher than his contract value of 12.5 million last season, and from the market perspective, there should be a team giving him a middle-class contract.

Compared with the impact of foreign teams, there is no doubt that the Rockets must have salary space to match Adams' contract, but considering that the Rockets will be filled with salary space by the renewal of their own rookies in the next one or two seasons, in order to ensure the operability of the next few seasons, every renewal of these non-maximum-paying players has to be carefully calculated. If you are not careful, you may be doomed.