When you lose your team's superstar and best player, you're bound to go through a rough transitional period - especially when another top-tier talent can't stay healthy.

For those reason, I see the Houston Rockets, which finished 4th in the West last season, as one of the teams that have played well recently that will struggle through the 2009-10 season.

Houston Rockets
The Rockets made it out of the first round of the playoffs for the first time in 12 years this past spring. The team played admirably in its second round series with the eventual champion Lakers - despite losing center Yao Ming (career averages of 19.1 points and 9.3 rebounds/game) in game 3 of the series. Ming has since been diagnosed with a hairline fracture in his left foot - an injury that is career threatening for a man of his size. Yao will have surgery to repair the broken bone in his foot and has been ruled out for the entire 2009-10 season, leaving Houston with little-used (and little talented) David Andersen as its starting center.

Yao's injury allowed the Rockets to apply for the disabled player disabled player exception, an exception to the NBA salary cap that grants the injured player's team money to sign a free agent. The Rockets were granted the exception, and used about $5.7 million on free-agent Trevor Ariza. That's a solid move, but Ariza will be asked to do much more than he did as a Laker. He doesn't have the game's best player and one of its best big men to play off of now.

Another question mark is Tracy McGrady, who, like Hamilton, I expect to be traded at some point this season. McGrady has never led a team to a playoff series win in his 12-year career. The Rockets got out of the first round last season while McGrady nursed an injury and watched from the sidelines. Since arriving in Houston prior to the start of the 2004-05 season, McGrady has missed 113 games and played in an average of just 59 games a season. He is also in the last year of his deal and has a contract that's an astronomical $23,239,561. McGrady is also currently nursing a knee injury that will likely keep him sidelined until December.

Without Yao - and by making the assumption that McGrady will miss an extended period of time due to injury this season - the Rockets should look at getting McGrady off their books and look to 2010. Houston is in the toughest division in the league (the Southwest with Dallas, New Orleans and San Antonio), so even with T Mac, Houston will finish no higher than fourth in the division and will miss the playoffs. Why not get that huge, bad deal out of the way and pull a Celtics in 2006-07 and tank the season and get in the John Wall sweepstakes?

Part III coming soon