How They Got Here

• Houston: Well, the Rockets hired Mike D’Antoni to mesh Seven Seconds or Less with Moreyball and run it through James Harden, trimmed a roster that wildly underachieved in 2015-16 and added complementary players around their All-NBA de facto point guard in this paced-and-spaced pick-and-roll system. There wasn’t a misstep along the way, and the result was an historically great offense.

Those are the beats.

This is the rhythm: After Houston followed its 2015 Western Conference finals appearance with a first-round exit last season, Morey hired D’Antoni during the 2016 NBA Finals and set about constructing a roster that fit both their styles. They plucked offense-first free agents Ryan Anderson and Eric Gordon from the New Orleans Pelicans, giving Harden two more penetrate-and-kick options on the perimeter, in addition to Trevor Ariza and Patrick Beverley. They replaced a plodding Dwight Howard with an appropriately paid Nene, allowing the more mobile Clint Capela to move into a starting role. Sprinkle in the evolution of 2015 draft picks Sam Dekker and Montrezl Harrell, add more shooting (hello, Lou Williams!) at the trade deadline and voila — one of the 10 greatest offenses in NBA history.

The Rockets may be perfectly suited to fit a D’Antoni-Morey system helmed by Harden’s considerable offensive skill-set, as his record-breaking 2,356 points and 2,198 assist points created attest, but they’re far from a perfect team. They rank 18th in defensive rating, allowing 106.4 points per 100 possessions — or the same as the Philadelphia 76ers. The All-Defensive caliber play of Beverley, Ariza’s declining but still solid wing defense and Capela’s 7-foot-5 wingspan can only protect you so much when you’re playing Harden, Gordon, Anderson and Williams a combined 120 minutes a night.

Still, that offense — the one with the shot chart that makes it seem like Morey threatens to release the hounds if you attempt a mid-range jumper — is so freakin’ good that the Rockets returned to 55-win territory and Western Conference finals contention with the relative ease of a James Harden drive.

• Oklahoma City: I feel like you know how the Thunder got here, but I’m happy to tell you again, because it’s a vengeance saga unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the NBA. OKC’s 2016-17 campaign was more like a Marvel Comics script, and Russell Westbrook played the role of Punisher to precision.

A month after the Thunder blew a 3-1 series lead against the Golden State Warriors in their fourth Western Conference finals appearance in six years, Kevin Durant left Westbrook in Oklahoma City to join those same Warriors. No phone call. Just a text. And while Durant repeatedly insisted everything was copacetic between the two, Westbrook initially laughed off questions about and took veiled shots at his former teammate before making it abundantly clear he didn’t like the “b**** a**” Warriors.

This left us with a vengeful Russell Westbrook alone atop a Thunder roster originally constructed around two stars, and it was for that reason we all understood he was about to set the NBA on fire.

And did he ever.

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Playing like John Wick avenging his puppy combined with Liam Neeson recovering anyone who’s been taken, Westbrook logged more triple-doubles than anybody in NBA history, joining Oscar Robertson as the only other player to average one across a full season. Oh, and he did so acting as arguably the league’s most clutch performer. It was a masterpiece painted on copious amounts of speed.

As for that Oklahoma production built around two stars, it has been recast with a single leading man. Thunder GM Sam Presti had already sent Serge Ibaka to the Orlando Magic for under-appreciated guard Victor Oladipo and rookie big man Domantas Sabonis in a draft-day deal before Durant left, and then OKC swapped backup point guard Cam Payne (since one-man shows don’t need understudies) for reliable throwback power forward Taj Gibson and Doug McDermott’s much-needed wing shooting.

Save for brief appearances by Spanish rookie Alex Abrines off the bench, the Thunder are a poor shooting team (the NBA’s worst, actually, at 32.7 percent on 3-pointers for the season), carried by Westbrook’s high-volume flame-throwing, and they rank as a middle-of-the-pack offense as a result. What they lack in efficiency on that end, they make up for in guile on the other, with ‘Stache Brothers Steven Adams and Enes Kanter clogging the paint and Andre Roberson covering the edges.

All of that added up to 47 wins, just eight off their mark from last year’s run with Durant. That drop-off was enough to make them the road team this time around in the 3-6 matchup, but if we’ve learned anything today, it’s that you don’t want to be in Russell Westbrook’s path when he’s out for revenge.

Head-to-Head

The Rockets took the the season series, 3-1, but the first three meetings were all photo finishes. The Thunder won the first when Westbrook delivered a dagger dunk over Capela and declared after a 105-103 win, “I don’t worry about other people. My job is to worry about what I’m able to do, and hopefully they can stop it.” Houston managed to do just that in the next two meetings, overcoming Westbrook’s seventh straight triple-double and a 49-point outburst in narrow victories, 102-99 and 118-116.

OKC should hope the most recent meeting on March 26 was an anomaly. Williams led the Rockets with 31 points off the bench, Gordon and Ariza added 24 apiece, Nene and Capela combined for 28 and 13 rebounds, and Harden orchestrated it all with 12 assists to go with 22 points of his own. Houston shot 51.3 percent on 39 3-point attempts and never trailed on its way to a 137-125 win, all without an injured Ryan Anderson (ankle). Westbrook’s 39 points, 13 assists and 11 rebounds were merely an afterthought, and if this was Houston finding its stride, the Rockets will walk all over the Thunder.

Likely starting lineups

For Houston: The Rockets opened 2016-17 with a starting lineup of Harden, Beverley, Ariza, Anderson and Capela, and they closed the season with the same five-man unit on Wednesday. In between, injuries forced D’Antoni to plug holes left by Beverley (groin) and Capela (leg), but we should expect to see that group starting together when Houston takes the floor for Sunday’s series opener.

Those absences also meant we only saw that lineup once against the Thunder, for 11 minutes in December. They played Oklahoma City to a 26-26 standstill in a 102-99 victory keyed by Houston’s bench outscoring OKC’s by 20, but that’s too small a sample size to judge a group that scored 122.7 points and outscored opponents by 15.4 per 100 possessions over 505 minutes for the season.

In fact, not one of Houston’s lineups played more than 18 minutes against the Thunder over their four meetings, and the only unit that had any notable success — Gordon working in Beverley’s stead with the starters — held a 36-23 advantage in 18 minutes across three games, despite shooting a combined 31.6 percent. So, it could take a game or two for D’Antoni to find the right matchups against OKC, now that he’s got all hands on deck for the playoffs, save an injured Dekker’s 18 reserve minutes a night.

For Oklahoma City: The Thunder began the season with Sabonis working alongside Adams, Roberson, Oladipo and Westbrook, and have since replaced the rookie with Gibson post-trade deadline. The latter group has tripled the starting unit’s success in a third of the minutes, improving the starting lineup’s net rating from plus-3.5 in 631 minutes with Sabonis to plus-11.8 in 208 minutes with Gibson.

That group also worked at an 11.6-point surplus per 100 possessions with Jerami Grant working in that forward spot. Actually, the quartet of Westbrook, Oladipo, Roberson and Adams outscored opponents by a respectable five points per 100 possessions in a whopping 1,188 minutes together this season, so we should expect to see them an awful lot against Houston, given OKC’s lack of depth.

For what it’s worth, the Thunder had more success against Houston in three games with Sabonis alongside the starters than one with Gibson in that spot, and as a whole the Westbrook-Oladipo-Roberson-Adams foursome was a minus-11 in 86 minutes opposite the Rockets. But again — relatively small sample sizes. It will be interesting to see, if Thunder coach Billy Donovan believes Sabonis or Grant can defend the perimeter better than Gibson against Anderson, what happens with that 4 spot.

Matchups to Watch

• James Harden vs. Russell Westbrook. I mean, c’mon. We won’t find out who wins MVP until after the playoffs, but one of these two should take home the honor. Even if votes will already be cast, the former teammates will scrap to the end to prove their value to each other and whoever’s watching.

Harden and Westbrook will have the ball in their hands for more than a third of the game, and between them they average 61 points, 22 assists and 19 rebounds a night. They operate differently — Harden more controlled and Westbrook more ferocious — but their box scores are both historic. They rank 1-2 for the league in points, assists and Valuable Over Replacement Player, they essentially play the same position and they’ve just submitted two of the greatest individual seasons in NBA history.

We just aren’t treated to a first-round matchup like this very often, so take it all in.

• The bench mobs. Earlier this season, Gordon and Williams were the NBA’s two leading Sixth Man of the Year candidates, with the former pouring in 3’s for a West contender and the latter scoring in droves for the lottery-bound Los Angeles Lakers. Since the Rockets acquired Williams for a first-round pick at the deadline, the two have combined for 28.9 points per game. They, along with Nene, are the reason Houston scores more points off the bench (39.0 per game) than any other team in the playoffs.

The Thunder have a Sixth Man candidate of their own in Enes Kanter, who averaged 14.3 points and 6.7 rebounds in 21.3 minutes per game as a backup during the regular season. But while Houston’s bench has increased leads or sliced deficits by 3.5 points per 100 possessions, OKC’s reserves have been outscored by about the same amount. That gap will force Donovan to rely heavily on a short rotation, and even with more days off between games, that might catch up to the Thunder in a longer series.

• The ‘Stache Brothers vs. Houston’s stretch bigs. Adams and Kanter wreaked havoc in the 2016 playoffs, crashing the glass and bullying opponents, and now they have Gibson and Sabonis in tow. The Rockets aren’t a great rebounding team, and they just don’t play traditional bigs together, so if the Thunder’s bigs are banging, Anderson will have to crash the glass, and that’s not a reliable solution.

Conversely, OKC’s bigs will be chasing Anderson (40 percent on seven 3’s a game) out to the perimeter all night, and that’s no picnic for the Thunder, either. So, the cat-and-mouse game between small-ball lineups raining 3’s and bully-ballers earning extra possessions will be a fascinating one to watch.

• Billy Donovan vs. Mike D’Antoni. Donovan had himself an admirable playoff coaching debut, spanking the 67-win San Antonio Spurs in the second round and snaring a 3-1 lead against the 73-win Warriors in the 2016 conference finals, before Golden State laid a torch to the series no coach could extinguish. He relied only on Kanter and Dion Waiters off the bench and turned the keys over to Westbrook and Durant, which is about as simple a game plan as you can get. This series will require more tinkering.

Meanwhile, D’Antoni hasn’t won a playoff game in almost a decade. His career playoff record is 26-33, and that includes two straight conference finals appearances with the Phoenix Suns before a first-round exit for his 55-win team two years later led everyone to theorize whether Seven Seconds or Less could work in the playoffs. His New York Knicks and Lakers teams were swept out of their only playoff appearances in six combined seasons under D’Antoni, and that’s done little to prove the theory wrong.

How Houston can win: Houston should win. They’re an historically great offense, breaking records for 3-point attempts and makes, they’re deeper than the Thunder, and they’ve got home-court advantage. Their best defender, Beverley, can defend Westbrook and has actually been quite good against him this season. They’ve also won three of their four meetings already and were widening the gap as the season wore on. So long as they play some semblance of defense and don’t go cold from the outside when Harden is firing penetrate-and-kick passes all across the arc, the Rockets should be just fine.

How Oklahoma City can win: Westbrook could find one more gear, go full supernova and titanically explode, leaving catastrophic destruction in his wake. There’s that. Or the defense of Oladipo and Roberson neutralizes Houston’s wings, OKC wins the battle of the bigs, scoring second-chance points in bunches, and Westbrook merely has to win a death match with Harden by the slightest of margins.

Best Reason to Watch: Seriously, if you can’t bother to watch ex-teammates who just submitted a pair of the best offensive performances in the history of the sport go head-to-head in a series that will be a referendum on this year’s MVP decision, then what are you doing reading this anyway? In terms of offense — and who doesn’t like offense? — James Harden vs. Russell Westbrook is basketball nirvana.

If that’s enough, Beverley and Westbrook have beef that goes back to Beverley diving into Westbrook’s knee and knocking him out of the 2013 playoffs with a torn meniscus. Turn the vengeance up to 11.

And if that’s not enough, there will be multiple mustachioed foreign 7-footers who love puppies.

Prediction: Rockets in 7.

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Ben Rohrbach is a contributor for Ball Don’t Lie and Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach