With a tough three-game road trip in the books, the young Houston Rockets begin a stretch of four home games out of their next five, starting with Saturday’s visit from the New York Knicks.
It’s a slightly earlier-than-usual tip on Saturday evening at Toyota Center, owing to the New Year’s Eve holiday. As a tradition dating many years, Houston regularly hosts a New Year’s Eve home game with a 6 p.m. start, which allows fans plenty of time to reach their midnight destinations following the game.
Both the Knicks and Rockets enter with ample incentive to snap their recent slides. New York has lost five straight games, while Houston has dropped seven of its last eight. Neither team is on a back-to-back, so expect both teams to aggressively chase a win to close out 2022.
It’s the first matchup of the 2022-23 season between the teams. Houston pays its return visit to Madison Square Garden on March 27. Because the Rockets play in the Western Conference and the Knicks in the Eastern Conference, they meet only twice per season.