f4p wrote:MyUniBroDavis wrote:I probably pick harden as a player but it’s hard to get a peak season for him, he took the KD Warriors to 7 sounds great until you think about the series and remember why the harden got clowned for it instead of being praised after, their defense was incredible that series but their offense let them down and harden was a big part of that, whereas 2019 wasn’t as impressive in general
and thus the insanity of the james harden narrative. he can't even get credit for stuff like this. when kevin durant joined the warriors, everyone said it ruined the NBA and they were an unbeatable juggernaut. and then in 2017 and 2018, they seemed to prove it, going 28-3 in the playoffs in the 7 series that weren't against the rockets. 8-1 against this fairly good lebron fellow. 28-3! their record against the healthy rockets? 2-3. a team that loses less than 10% of its playoff games being down 2-3. with the other teams best player putting up 28/6/6 against the warriors #1 playoff defense. with a +15 on/off in the series. take the name harden off that accomplishment and people are raving about it. the response for harden? awful. atrocious. typical james harden choke job. like seriously. something no one could have even imagined 18 months prior, then it damn near happened and harden was a loser for not pulling it off, with his best teammate hurt!
in a lot of ways, it reminded me a lot of the 2015 finals and lebron. the cavs because their best offensive players were hurt and the rockets because some of their better offensive role players (ryan anderson, nene and gerald green) were atrocious defenders who could never be on the court with the warriors, knew they weren't going to beat an overwhelming warriors team 130-128. they would have to win ugly and try to win 98-96. pile as many hard-nosed defenders on the court as possible and have your best players just iso iso iso, run clock, try to slow the game down and win ugly. it's why nene played 6 minutes, ryan anderson played 29 garbage minutes, and green got 18 mpg but still a decent amount of garbage time. if you think the rockets could have tried ryan anderson, well he played 8 minutes in game 7 and more than provided the margin of victory for the warriors with a -12.
and in both cases for the cavs/rockets, it worked as much as could possibly be expected. it tanked the best players' offense, and their own team's offense, but it worked. lebron supercharged it compared to harden, because, well, he's lebron, but he was actually less efficient than harden (48 TS% vs 54 TS%) and just went crazy on the volume (36/13/9 vs 28/6/6), but it was the same principle. chris paul put up only 20/6 on 52 TS% while also iso'ing as much as possible. and both teams ground out some ugly close games and damn near won series no one expected them to win. lebron gets praised to the end of the earth for taking a lesser warriors team to 6 and harden gets clowned for taking a better team to 7 and maybe winning if cp3 is actually healthy. and it's not like anyone is saying you have to say harden is as good as lebron, just people have to stop being ridiculous that the best player on a team almost beat an unbeatable team while putting up very respectable numbers with good on/off numbers was somehow terrible.
also, it would be funny if someone described 2019 with the name taken off. yeah, this guy had arguably the greatest scoring season ever, scored the most points per 100 in league history, went on a historic scoring streak while his team started winning a bunch, then in the playoffs he played an absolutely stacked all-time great team and took them to 6 super-close games while averaging 35 ppg.
oh man, is that like 1987 jordan? i'm telling you, he's the GOAT for a reason.
nah, it was 2019 james harden.
trash.
I’ll respond more in-depth later, but the main thing rotation wise was Ryan Anderson leaving the rotation and then shortening it, they didn’t go all defensive no offense all of a sudden lol.
The “rockets had to play it tough!” Narrative has always been absurd considering their offense was literally the exact same as they played it all season. The rockets offense is based on 5 out or 4 out 1 in iso, and hardens ability to score effectively off of that. (Well harden and Paul).
I think it’s fair to say harden was good on D that series, sure, but I don’t think anyone can watch it and say he was a game changer defensively vs being a good part of an elite defense. Sum of its parts type energy, like a good shooter on a heliocentric offense. PJ Tucker was the main guy that made the switching D possible, but while I think his defensive impact was great +49.4 and the 2nd rockets player with a Positive net rtg doesn’t mean he had the GOAT defensive series for example.
Offensively I don’t think that lebron being +51.6 on that end means he had a GOAT tier offensive series, when the boost is more so how bad the offense was with him off the floor than the team being good with him on the floor.
Offense and defense have some overall but that doesn’t mean that deciding to suck on one end of the floor means you’ll be better at the other when you are doing the exact same damn thing on the court lol.
At the end of the day, impact should be seen as performance driven, and over long samples that holds true. Over a small sample like a series it can be a signal, in terms of, hey this guys box score numbers weren’t that great but their offense popped off, or this guy scored so well but the team didn’t succeed much, but over a series you should be able to come to your own conclusions based off watching what happened
The offensive system is based upon the rockets creating high leverage iso situations for Harden, letting teams defend him on an island so he can dominate 1v1 or make the right read as a passer, and getting switches so he can get favorable matchups.
You control what happens when you are on the court
This is quite literally
exactly what they did during the Warriors series as well. It’s not as if harden wasn’t getting those switches at all either, I would be suprised if less than half of hardens on ball half court plays where he scored or created a shot for a teammate where there wasn’t a super clear breakdown unrelated to the play wasn’t on Curry/bell/looney.
Like it’s ridiculous to say that the rockets defense was possible because harden was missing shots he usually made offensively running the same things he usually did, it’s such an attempt to explain a process through results rather than the other way around because it makes literally 0 sense when you think about it.
Like if the argument for harden that series essentially comes down to that + that a team comprised of one dimensional spacers that will shoot on site if they catch the ball no matter what + 2 iso players struggled offensively when their 2 iso players didn’t play over a 7 game sample, then it’s kind of ridiculous right?
Like we are literally saying
“Yeah so the rockets decided to do the exact same thing they always did on offense but because they are so smart they decided to miss shots so the Warriors would be mentally rattled and miss their own shots”
It’s fair to say, the rockets strength in this series was their switch defense which harden played a good part in as someone that was good defensively on ball during the series, in the sense that they didn’t try to attack him. Sure.
To extend that to, therefore his offensive struggles were actually part of the gameplan is absurd.
When it comes to like, literally a series, what happens on the court might not show up in the impact data. In this case, harden being a +15.5 was more so how bad the offense was with him off the court than how good it was witth him on the court, which makes sense given the construction of the team is based on enhancement and fit vs in a vacuum goodness, and that they aren’t really immune at all to mismatch hunting other than being good at sending help (which the rockets counter well with anyways)
His 2019 series was great, and I do think that I would put 2019 harden over Nash without too much trouble, and he’s probably somewhere in this range for me. But I think we do need to realize his volume is so high because how that team is constructed. He wasn’t scoring that much out of necessity it was by design, it’s probably the most heliocentric offensive team style ever, in terms of isolation slashing 5 out or 4 out 1 in.
I agree he’s a bit disrespected.
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