Here’s tonight’s Rowdy Rumination: What are our Rockets doing for their New Year’s Eve celebrations? Here’s how we see it: Battier’s drinking sparkling grape juice, Bonzi’s not drinking sparkling grape juice…and he’s been doing it since before tonight’s tip-off, Rafer will be making nine perfect passes at a tipsy Keith Jones, Van Gundy’s watching gametape, Yao’s eating ice cream and playing video games, and Novak’s grabbing a late bite at Applebee’s. Put your ideas in the comments section.

Former Texas A&M basketball coach Tony Barone was recently named the interim coach of the Memphis Grizzlies. As products of Tony Barone’s Summer Basketball Camp in College Station, we’ll be the first ones to tell you that Barone doesn’t know basketball talent. One Rowdy was snubbed for the camp All-Star team in consecutive summers. Barone’s firing a few years later was nothing short of poetic.

One day after a 27-point game against Toronto in which he was a starter, Mike Miller came off the bench tonight and scored 13 points in his first five minutes of action. We’re not sure if there’s a story behind Miller’s status as a reserve, or if it was just another of Barone’s oversights.

Anyone who thought that the Rockets and the Grizzlies, two of the NBA’s most defensive-minded teams, would combine to score 117 points in the first half gets a boatload of irredeemable Rowdy points.

Dikembe Mutumbo leads the NBA in rebounds per 48 minutes. Funny, considering if he actually played close to 48 minutes a game, he’d be on the other end of that list.

AIG must have intervened, because the “AIG Big Man Watch” no longer features epic battles between Dikembe Mutumbo and Jason Collins. “Big Man” now applies to a player of any size, as long as he’s having a good game, evidenced by McGrady’s inclusion tonight. We couldn’t be more disappointed. We were dying to see Bill and Clyde bumble through the analysis of Wednesday’s highly anticipated Deke/Johan Petro match-up.

Patti Smith did a sideline interview with Houston Comets coach Van Chancellor in the third quarter. When Smith asked Chancellor what his New Year’s resolution was, Chancellor said something about beating Bill Worrell in a game of golf, when what he really meant was getting his cup size back down to an A. Suffice it to say, Van Chancellor should have slipped in to the Comets locker room and borrowed a bra from the starting center before his interview.