rand wrote:
Haha came to post this too!
Harden is a tragic player for me, he is clearly one of the most skilled players ever, clearly has a great bball IQ in terms of seeing things before they happen and understanding whats going on, clearly loves basketball and works hard to improve...
but at the same time I think his absurd usage and basically only playing offense, make him little more than a iverson type player without the charisma and entertaining style.
The picture is just a block, harden did a lot more for his team and has much better raw numbers over the series and in their careers, but IMO its kind of perfect- harden admired manu coming into the league, both lefty SGs with several stylistic similarities, but where manu accepted a smaller role, stats and contract to win, harden left OKC to be the man and while its been great for him in terms of stats and money, he still couldn't win and when I say that I dont only mean winning a championship, harden's rockets had several embarrassing flameouts and that loss to the spurs, with kawhi missing the end of the 4th + OT and game 6, with 39 year old manu and danny freaking green outplaying him badly, even when they lost to the warriors 0-27, their losses were pretty much all embarrassing with him flaming out AND one of their best wins in his tenure was with him sitting out! A lot of people will say harden will and should be rated higher than manu anyway but I think its a good Rorschach test for the people who say intangibles dont matter and what players actually do sacrifice to win... It will be interesting to see what happens with the nets but I dont see 3 high usage players, two of them only offensive, winning a championship together unless one of them makes a manu-esque sacrifice (or like curry accomodating durant too..)