Rockets rout defending champion Thunder 119-98 behind Jabari Smith Jr.'s 30 points

The Houston Rockets blew past the defending NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder 119-98 at Toyota Center on Saturday night, improving to 6-1 to open the season as Jabari Smith Jr. scored a season-high 30 points and Marcus Smart added 24 off the bench. The nationally televised game on NBA TV was never close in the second half, with Houston building a lead as large as 27 points, according to the league's own box score.

The numbers

Smith Jr. shot 10 of 18 from the field, including 6 of 12 from 3-point range, and grabbed nine rebounds in 33 minutes. Smart was nearly as efficient, going 7 of 10 overall and 7 of 10 from deep for his 24 points. Center Alperen Sengun nearly posted a triple-double, finishing with 16 points, nine rebounds and 10 assists, and Kevin Durant added 14 points with three blocks in 27 minutes. As a team, Houston shot 46 percent from the field and 44 percent from 3-point range (18 of 41) while committing only 10 turnovers.

Oklahoma City got 26 points from reigning Finals MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander on 10-of-20 shooting, according to ESPN's recap of the game, but no other Thunder player reached double figures to match him; Kenrich Williams and rookie guard Bennett Stirtz each scored 11, and Isaiah Hartenstein and Jared McCain had 10 apiece. The Thunder actually won the battle in the paint, outscoring Houston 44-30 there, and made 14 of 15 free throws. But the Rockets dominated nearly everywhere else: Houston out-assisted Oklahoma City 29-20, out-blocked the Thunder 7-4, and committed only 10 turnovers to Oklahoma City's 13, while shooting a far better 44 percent from 3-point range to the Thunder's 31 percent (10 of 32). Houston held the lead for 93 percent of the game after building its 27-point cushion; Oklahoma City's largest lead, by contrast, was only four points, early on, per the game's official play-by-play log.

A title defense off to a shaky start

Oklahoma City enters the 2026-27 season as the reigning champion after beating the Indiana Pacers in a seven-game NBA Finals in June 2025, the franchise's first title since relocating from Seattle. The loss in Houston dropped the Thunder to 4-2, a record independently confirmed by CBS Sports' box score of the game, and marked their second consecutive defeat — an unfamiliar position for a team that rolled to the league's best record a year ago. Oklahoma City was also just 1-2 on the road entering Sunday.

The skid began two nights earlier, when the Thunder lost 120-96 on the road to the Dallas Mavericks, snapping what had been an unbeaten 4-0 start to the season. The back-to-back losses to Dallas and Houston mark the first time Oklahoma City has dropped consecutive games since winning the title, and they came in the same week the Thunder opened their title defense on the road for the first extended stretch of the new season.

Houston's start looks like validation of an offseason overhaul built around Durant, whom the Rockets acquired from Phoenix in a seven-team trade completed last summer that sent Jalen Green, Dillon Brooks and several draft picks to the Suns. Durant has anchored a Rockets roster that already featured Sengun and a deep rotation of wings and shooters. The Rockets are now 3-0 at home and have one of the better records in the Western Conference less than two weeks into the season. Houston's only defeat so far came two nights before the Thunder game, a 116-111 loss at Dallas — the same Mavericks team that had just beaten Oklahoma City — and the Rockets have otherwise outscored opponents by an average of better than 15 points a game while scoring at least 111 in every outing this season. Smith Jr., a former lottery pick who has battled inconsistency in previous seasons, has emerged as a reliable scoring option alongside Houston's two All-Star-caliber frontcourt pieces in Durant and Sengun. Durant, who turned 38 in September, did not need a heavy workload to be effective on Saturday, finishing efficient and disruptive on defense with three blocks in just 27 minutes. Smart, a former NBA Defensive Player of the Year now playing a veteran bench role in Houston, has given the Rockets another ball-handler and perimeter defender to pair with their younger core.

Saturday's result was also the second lopsided win Houston has taken from Oklahoma City in three weeks: the Rockets routed the Thunder 116-89 in both teams' preseason finale on October 15. Preseason results do not count in the standings, but the lopsided margin in both meetings has fed a budding storyline about how Houston's retooled roster matches up physically with the defending champions less than two weeks into the regular season, as the NBA's own video recap of Saturday's game highlighted.

What's next

Both teams play again Monday night. The Rockets host the Boston Celtics, who enter at 4-1 after four straight wins following an opening-night loss to Detroit, in a measuring-stick game against another fast-starting team. The Thunder, meanwhile, travel to face a Cleveland team that improved to 4-2 by routing Milwaukee 136-111 on Saturday night, part of a stretch in which the Cavaliers have alternated statement wins with narrow losses but have generally outscored opponents by wide margins when healthy. For Oklahoma City, snapping its first multi-game losing streak of the new season will be the immediate priority as it tries to show the Houston loss was an aberration rather than the start of a slide. For Houston, the win is an early signal that its retooled roster can hang with the league's best when healthy, and a win over Boston would push the Rockets to 7-1 heading into the second full week of November.