Rockets Having Some Back-to-Back Pains : Pro basketball: Defending champions struggling as Spurs win eighth in a row, 124-103.

SAN ANTONIO —  Where did it all start to go wrong for the defending NBA champion Houston Rockets?

Try right after Commissioner David Stern handed them that gold trophy last June. They’ve been rolling and tumbling since, and Sunday they tumbled into San Antonio’s Alamodome, home of the red-hot Spurs, who wiped the floor with them, 124-103.

The Rockets have lost four in a row, even losing ground to what’s left of the Lakers, still No. 5 in the West. The Lakers are 7-4 since the All-Star break to the Rockets’ 6-5.

The Spurs have won eight in a row and are 32-7 since Dennis Rodman returned. Rodman, a particular nemesis for the suddenly puny Rockets, almost outrebounded their whole team single-handedly. He had 27 to their 32, but he played only 38 minutes, to their 240.

How to handle him?

“We were hoping for the booteroo,” Rocket Coach Rudy Tomjanovich, laughing, said of a flagrant foul call against Rodman.

“I would have been the holder. Kick him out of there.”

Two weeks ago in Houston, Rodman had 30 rebounds to the Rockets’ 37 (he actually led them at the half, 20-19). Team totals for the two games: Spurs 114, Rockets 62.

The Rockets’ starting forwards, Robert Horry and Carlos Herrera, are on the injured list. Sunday Tomjanovich started three guards. Vernon Maxwell, back in the lineup, took 10 shots and missed eight, but maybe this place has bad associations for him. He started his career here before the Spurs sold him to Houston for a few thousand dollars. He has a case pending in a local court, in which a fan alleges Maxwell hit him over the head with a bottle in a bar. This is, of course, in addition to the case pending against Maxwell in Portland.

It has been that kind of season. Repeating, which is supposed to be harder than winning, has turned into a 100-to-1 shot.

“I believe it,” Tomjanovich said of trying to win two in a row. “You reach your goals. You go through the summer with the back-patting.

“Your life changes. I went to Canada and people recognized me on the street. . . . Eye of the tiger, whatever you want to call it. Before it was, ‘We have something to prove, we have something to prove.’

“We went through the exhibition season very lackluster. We addressed it: ‘God, we can’t play this way!’ I think it helped that some negative things were said about us.”

Rising to prove the critics wrong, the Rockets started 9-0. Since, they’re 26-23.

They’re 5-5 since trading Otis Thorpe for Clyde Drexler, and there’s muted grumbling among Rocket players, especially in “the ‘Hood”--the back of the chartered plane where Maxwell, Horry and Mario Elie hang out. Horry, a skinny 6-10, doesn’t want to play more power forward. Maxwell says he expects to go in the next trade.

Said Maxwell: “I’ve just never known a championship team to be broken up halfway through the season.”

Tomjanovich, head of the basketball operation, signed off on the deal and notes the Rockets didn’t recently become bad rebounders. Before the trade, they were outrebounded in 34 of 47 games--suggesting something had gone wrong on a team with the great Hakeem Olajuwon, a powerhouse like Thorpe and a 6-10 small forward.

Sunday, Olajuwon was outscored, 31-25, by David Robinson and outrebounded, 11-6. Tomjanovich watched the Spurs hitting their stride, with all the pieces falling into place, and remembered when.

“It all reminds me of the things that happened last year for us,” he said.

It must seem like a long time ago.