Ready To Roll

They had to scramble a little, but the Houston Rockets did gather their usual troika of Top 50 talent by tip-off. Hakeem Olajuwon, Charles Barkley and now, in place of the retired Clyde Drexler, Scottie Pippen. You've got to hand it to the Rockets: When it comes to restocking, they go big-ticket. For that matter, when it comes to superstars, they go redundant. How many of the NBA's greatest players does a team need, anyway?

Based on the early returns, either one more or one fewer. After losing its opener to the Lakers in Los Angeles and then escaping with a road win over the Golden State Warriors, Houston looked a little confused, as if there might not be room for everybody. Maybe after just two weeks of preparation for this lockout-shortened season, everybody was out of whack. But what's the sense of putting three surefire Hall of Famers together if the game is going to fall into the hands of Cuttino Mobley?

Mobley hasn't even been in the NBA long enough to be called Moms, and the best thing Rockets coach Rudy Tomjanovich can say about him is that "he's the most-talked-about second-round pick we've ever had in camp." Yet it was Mobley, a rookie guard out of Rhode Island making his NBA debut last Saturday night, who saved Houston from the most expensive 0-2 start in league history. With two of the three Top 50 guys disappearing into the floorboards, Mobley took a pass from Barkley down low to hit a 25-footer with 19.1 seconds left that ended up beating the Warriors 86-84. " Mobley?" said Barkley after the game. "I didn't know it was Mobley I was passing to. I'd have kept the ball if I'd known that."

Barkley was kidding, sort of, but you have to wonder how the Rockets can let the outcome of any of their games depend on a second-round draft pick. Given that one immortal has been swapped out for an improved model, about all that would be acceptable in Houston is total domination. And not by Moms Mobley.

"This league isn't so easy," says Tomjanovich, "that you can just throw guys together and, after two weeks, beat everybody up." Still, what was the point of bringing Pippen into this fold if he wasn't going to at least outplay teammates like Michael Dickerson—a rookie guard from Arizona who scored 12 to Pippen's 10 in the 99-91 loss to the Lakers last Friday—and Mobley, who got the clutch baskets on Saturday?

O.K., maybe Pippen had an off night or two, maybe it really isn't that easy, after a decade of playing in the free-flowing triangle offense with the Bulls, to come to a team with established low-post stars like Olajuwon and Barkley and figure out your role. Nobody's writing off Pippen, who helped Michael Jordan to six NBA titles. Talent is always the way to go, and Pippen has it in every dimension. As it is, his aims are modest: "I bring some defensive character to this team—they already have two Hall of Famers, remember—and maybe some energy." But this isn't a season (How many games are in it? Fifty?) when anybody's going to be patient, or settle for modesty.

To be even fairer, it wasn't just Pippen who vanished from the lineup. Olajuwon had games of 11 and 12 points, the latter coming against the Warriors' less-than-formidable Erick Dampier. Remember, too, that Olajuwon's scoring average has dropped in each of the last three seasons, hitting a career-low 16.4 points per game in 1997-98, when he underwent surgery on his left knee and missed 33 games. The combined non-effect of Pippen and Olajuwon in the game against the Lakers—the two contributed 21 points—had everybody putting L.A.'s Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal directly into the Hall of Fame. Bryant, who just passed from teenhood last August, was the more impressive athlete in his matchup with Pip-pen, blocking two of Pippen's shots and generally bedeviling him. Shaq, who scored 30, made everybody forget the Dream.

If it hadn't been for Barkley, who through Sunday had been playing an even bigger game than he talks, the Rockets would have had to go into crisis mode. Relatively slimmed down and with at least one visible ab on him, Barkley played Houston's first two games more like an exuberant rookie than the 35-year-old ball of remorse he actually is. To see him drop 31 points on Shaq and Co. and then, the next night, watch him score eight points in a 15-0 fourth-quarter run that finally got the Rockets the lead (he finished with 18 points and 20 rebounds) is to marvel at his competitive spirit.

Barkley's bluster starts to make sense after games like those. His stabs at humility become more debatable. "Couldn't go three games in three nights," he says, referring to splotches of compressed scheduling ahead. "I don't think I can have sex three days in a row. Not good sex, anyway." That's for some other magazine to decide, but at this point it looks as if he can put together as many good games as he wants.

As Pippen works to put a couple of his own together, it's worth noting that even if his shots aren't dropping, he has already been a huge influence on this team. His arrival galvanized a largely discouraged Barkley, who was seriously considering retirement in the off-season. "Last year's team wasn't fun," Barkley says, referring to locker room tension and injuries to himself and others. "If Hakeem hadn't been hurt, I'd have had surgery in December [for a hernia, rather than wait until last June]." He admits he might never have come back.