Sengun Shot More, Made Less, and Houston Called It a Surge

Start with the divergence, because it's the one number that reframes everything else: 12.4 percentage points. That is the gap between Alperen Sengun's field goal percentage in the final ten games of the season — 46.9% — and the 59.3% he posted in the preceding stretch. His shot attempts went up, from 14.5 to 16.0 per game. His efficiency cratered. And yet Houston scored 123.6 points per game in that closing window, up from 112.0 in the prior 20 contests. Those two facts are not in conflict. They are, in fact, the whole story: the Rockets' most celebrated stretch of basketball was built on a foundation that was quietly cracking underneath them.

What makes this worth examining now — heading into training camp — is that the surge became the narrative. The 9-1 finish, the plus-15.2 scoring margin, the sense that this team had finally found its identity at the right moment. I wrote about the efficiency collapse back in July, and the question I left open then is the same one that matters most heading into next season: was the offense actually better, or did everything else accelerate enough to paper over Sengun's deterioration? The honest answer is both, and that distinction carries real weight. When your center is shooting 46.9% on 16 attempts a night, you are not running a sustainable offensive system. You are running hot.

The structural problem is that Sengun is not a luxury piece you can redistribute load away from. He accounts for 91% of Houston's center production by the depth chart numbers, with Clint Capela — 3.8 points and 4.5 rebounds per game in 12.2 minutes — representing the entirety of the backup. That is not a depth chart; it is a single pillar with a decorative column beside it. When I laid out that math last week, the day-to-day designations for Durant, VanVleet, and Adams made the scenario feel acute. Those designations have since cleared from the injury report, which is good news. But the structural reality at center does not change with a clean bill of health for the guards.

Here is what I think actually happened in those final ten games, and I want to be clear this is my read rather than anything the box score can prove directly: defensive coordinators made a choice. They let Sengun shoot more and dared him to beat them at volume. His field goal percentage tells you how that went. Meanwhile, Kevin Durant — 25.7 points per game on 52.2% shooting for the season — and Amen Thompson, who shot 53.1% from the field across 88 games, were likely the actual engines of that 123.6-point output. Sengun's volume spike may have been a symptom of defensive attention shifting elsewhere, not a sign that Houston was leaning on him more effectively. The wins came. The efficiency numbers kept the receipt.

The reason this matters heading into 2026-27 is the close-game record: 14-12 in games decided by five points or fewer. A 54% win rate in those situations against a 63% overall mark. Playoff basketball compresses into exactly those margins, and the Rockets could not consistently execute in them. If Sengun is being forced into high-volume, low-efficiency possessions in the fourth quarter of tight games — because the offense has no reliable secondary creation at the five — that 14-12 record is not a fluke. It is a preview. The front office locked in Tari Eason on a long-term extension and added guard depth in Marcus Smart and Bogdan Bogdanovic, moves that address the perimeter. My read is that none of those moves solve the center depth problem, and that problem is what the late-season numbers were quietly flagging all along. The surge was real. The foundation it was built on deserves a harder look before camp opens.