Jabari Smith Jr. closed his first NBA season with his 12th 20-point game in the Houston Rockets’ 114-109 victory over the Washington Wizards on Sunday. Five of those 20-point performances came in the Rockets’ final 20 games of the 2022-23 season, including the former Auburn standout’s career high of 30 points in a 134-125 loss to the Indiana Pacers on March 9.

In the final 20 games, Smith averaged 15.8 points, 7.7 rebounds and 1.5 assists after averaging 11.8 points, 7.1 rebounds and 1.2 assists in his first 59 NBA games.

Smith’s scoring climbed as his shooting improved. He had made 38.3 percent of all his shots and 29.1 percent of his 3-point attempts before sinking 47.2 percent of all his shots and 36.5 percent of his 3-point attempts in the final 20 games.

“I really enjoyed Jabari’s year,” Rockets general manager Rafael Stone said, “because it’s visceral sitting down to dinner with him before the season started and thinking to myself, ‘Man, is he not ready for this.’ But in a good way. Not in a like it’s going to kill him, because he grew up in the NBA, and he thought he was ready a little bit. I’m thinking in my head, ‘Yeah, no.’

“And then he went through it, and watching the second half of the year, him really come on. And to me the really impressive thing with him was just owning it the whole way. It was never like, ‘You need to do this more for me. This guy needs to do that.’ It was always ‘I need to do better,’ and because of that, he did do better.”

Smith, whose father played in four NBA seasons, will turn 20 years old on May 13. Smith and the Dallas Mavericks’ Luka Doncic are the only teenagers in NBA history to record at least 500 rebounds and 1,000 points in one season.

Stone said Smith “took that challenge on” to become a better player after joining Houston as the third pick in the 2022 NBA Draft.

“You can’t control how good you are today,” Stone said. “You are however good you are. But you really have a lot of control over how much you improve.”

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Smith will have a new coach in his second NBA season. The Rockets’ 22-60 record in the 2022-23 season was tied for the worst in the Western Conference, and in its three seasons under coach Stephen Silas, Houston posted a 59-177 mark.

“We thought it was time for a new voice,” Stone said on Tuesday. “It has absolutely nothing to do with Stephen actually. It’s more about, OK, we’re kind of exiting one stage, entering another, what’s the optimal way to go forward?”

Of the seven players who had at least 1,000 minutes of court time with the Rockets in the 2022-23 season, only one was older than 22 for the bulk of the campaign.

Stone said Houston wanted a coach “who has a dynamic presence and vision” for the next step in the Rockets’ rebuilding process. Houston was the best team in NBA’s Southwest Division for three consecutive seasons. But during the 2020-21 campaign, Stone traded James Harden and Russell Westbrook as the Rockets stockpiled draft picks.

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“I think we’re kind of at the end of Stage 1,” Stone said. “Looking back at my tenure when we took over, it was very much in a time of flux, and I had no idea which way we were going – up, down. It was very much about what’s going to end up making the most sense. A couple years into that, we made some huge trades and our direction became pretty certain, and at the end of that year very certain. And so at that point I think I laid out for you guys kind of a road map. We’re going to rebuild. We’re going to be very young. We’re going to be exciting. We’re going to jump very high. We did those things. But that’s not going to be infinite. It’s not going to last forever, and I think we’re reaching the end of that stage.

“Not to say we’re somehow going to become the oldest team in the NBA next year. In terms of minutes played, I think we might have been at the end of the year like the youngest team ever. We’re not going to be that next year, and so I think we’re kind of hitting in a natural way the next stage of the rebuild, which is adding in veterans, trying to be materially more competitive, and I think that’s where we’re going. It feels very much to me like we’re on track.

“But you got to do it. And so this offseason is going to be very important to us.”

Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter at @AMarkG1.