Up by 20 with less than two minutes left in the Rockets series-clinching win over the Portland Trail Blazers, Ron Artest found himself in a familiar place: The stands.
Artest dove into the Toyota Center stands trying to save a loose ball and didn't re-emerge until finally stumbling back on to the floor 20 seconds later after the Rockets had called a timeout, though the reaction he got was quite different than a half decade before in Detroit.
"I've been in the stands before," Artest joked in the postgame press conference, with Yao Ming sitting next to him laughing hysterically.
"This time at homecourt," Yao said to Artest while laughing and holding his left shoulder.
"I wanted to soak it in," Artest added "I had to sit down. Actually, a guy offered me some beer. When he did that I said I'm going to sit down and enjoy this. He's not throwing it at me, and I was going to take a sip but there were too many cameras."
The Rockets closed out their first series win in 12 years that night at Toyota Center and advanced to take on the big, bad Los Angeles Lakers, a 65-win juggernaut who had won the Western Conference a year earlier. Without the injured Tracy McGrady the series wasn't expected to be close and only one ESPN analyst picked the Rockets to win.
LA won all four regular season, drubbing the Rockets by 29 in November at Staples Center, even after the Rockets led by 12 after 12 minutes. The final three regular season games played out the same way, the Rockets would have the lead or be within striking distance after three quarters, and then the Lakers would dominate the fourth, but this wasn't the regular season.
Houston entered the fourth quarter of game one leading 70-67, and while the Lakers rallied to take a one-point lead less than four minutes in, but recovered to win a game that will always be remembered by Yao's demand to return to the game after he banged knees with Kobe Bryant. Yao finished with 28 points and 10 rebounds in what would wind up being the last great game of his career.
Bryant scored 40 in a Lakers game two win, and even though it came by double digits, it showed the Rockets were for real. The Lakers tried to bully them, but they wouldn't back down.
The Lakers took control of the series with a game three win at Toyota Center behind a 33-point night from Bryant. Yao left the game in the fourth quarter and the next day the Rockets announced that a stress fracture in his foot would keep him out the remainder of the series, and it felt like the Lakers would coast and finish off the Rockets in five games. That didn't happen.
Toyota Center felt dead going into game four, but the Rockets livened it up. Without Yao they destroyed the Lakers with Aaron Brooks and Artest connecting for a buzzer-beating alleyoop at the end of the third quarter, putting the Rockets up by 29. The Lakers were so bad in the game, LA Times columnist T.J. Simers asked Lakers head coach Phil Jackson if he was embarrassed.
Normalcy returned when the Lakers scored a 40-point win in game five, but the Rockets pushed the Lakers to the brink by taking a 17-1 lead early in game six and scoring a wire-to-wire win. The Rockets lost game seven, but they were the only team to force the Lakers to an elimination game during their 2009 title run and they were the only team in the West to do that from 2008-2010.
The 2009 Rockets won't down in history as a great team, but it was a tough, scrappy group that while shorthanded, stood toe-to-toe with an all-time great Lakers team and pressured them in the playoffs like few teams could.
