James Harden Froze Before Our Eyes In An Elimination Match… What’s Up With That?
James Harden didn’t play very well the other day, you might have heard. Game Six, Harden’s Houston Rockets facing elimination on their homecourt against the San Antonio Spurs. The Spurs were without their best player in Kawhi Leonard, who had injured his ankle the previous match. That makes two teams without their best player because whoever that was inhabiting James Harden’s skin, it damn sure wasn’t the MVP candidate we watched all season. Someone check the tape and see if there’s a moment where some alien drains his talent. It’s happened before…
Harden waited close to 18 minutes before he even attempted a shot, this the third leading scorer in the whole playoffs. By then the Rockets were already down by 21 points and looking dead on arrival. Instead he spent the early stages of this game inexplicably passing when he’d usually shoot, turning the ball over when he’d usually fire a perfect pass… mate, he even missed a couple free throws!
The Beard would finish the game with 10 points (2/11 FG), 3 rebounds, 7 assists and 6 turnovers, fouling out in the last quarter, and his season would finish with it. A guy who had two 50-point games this season, who managed 22 triple-doubles, whose only scoring night this bad all season was in a 22 point win over the Kings where he didn’t even need to shoot. There have been plenty of bad games littered throughout these playoffs – that’s what playoffs do to players – but none quite so weird as this one.
He had to have been injured, right? What other explanation can there be? The dude looked sluggish and disinterested from the start – although that’s his normal façade so don’t read anything into that. But by the time he voluntarily fouled himself out with still over three minutes left in a 114-75 defeat it looked curiously like an act of self-mercy.
Except both Harden and his coach, Mike D’Antoni, denied that El Beardo was hurt at all. Seems like something they might have made mention of in the lead-in to the game if they thought it might affect anything – even if only to mess with the Spurs. Harden himself made pointed mention of an ankle knock he’d taken after a tough performance against the OKC Thunder in the first round. He’s hardly known as the fittest fellow out there… but he only missed one game all season.
Hence it doesn’t make full sense that he might have been broken somehow. Where were the ice packs on the bench? Where was the physio testing him at every chance? Where was the strapping or the compression-wear? Athletes play injured all the time, it’s not so much a matter of toughness as convenience, but when they do they take precautions so they aren’t inhibited any more than they have to be.
Obligatory note: The Spurs defence also deserves huge credit for how they handled Harden, making things difficult for him. They dared him to attack out of pick and rolls but they were swift enough and smart enough not to foul him. It was a ruthless strategy and it took a couple games to really get it going but by game six it looked like Gregg Popovich had figured it out. Then again they were also without their best defender so yeah. No excuses there. Harden at full capacity isn’t getting stopped by Danny Green that easily.
There’s a stupid theory out there that he might have been concussed. There was a moment in the fourth quarter of the fifth game where he seemed to take a hit to the face competing for a rebound against Pau Gasol and Kawhi Leonard. The Rockets were down two at the time and through the rest of the game, including overtime, he shot 1/6 with four turnovers and was called for an offensive foul going up for what would’ve been the game-winner at the end of regulation. Diagnose a bloke with concussion from your living room chair sounds like an outrageously irresponsible thing to do though.
Other conspiracy theories include the usuals: he was betting on the game, somebody spiked his Gatorade, probably just hungover from hitting the strippies the night before… actually he did hit the strippies after game six, also taking in a show at a local nightclub beforehand. Other patrons chanted MVP when they found out he was in the house.
The most likely explanation? The dude was gassed. A lot has been made over the outrageous usage rate that Russell Westbrook, Harden’s old teammate and continual bro, had this season. Usage Percentage is an estimated measure of a player’s involvement in plays while on the floor and Westbrook just broke the all-time record (held previously by Kobe Bryant, naturally) with a 41.7% mark. Boogie Cousins was also high on the list, playing largely in Sacramento where if he didn’t do it then nobody did, while coming in third for the season was DeMar DeRozan who really had to carry the load in Toronto while Kyle Lowry was out and is a high-value scorer who doesn’t shoot threes so you know he has to get his hands on the ball plenty.
But James Harden came in fourth. He was also third in minutes played in 2016-17 behind a couple young guns from Minnesota (Andrew Wiggins and Karl-Anthony Towns) neither of whom made the playoffs and he was doing it in a new position. Russell Westbrook is used to running up and down the floor at point guard, initiating everything that his team does. Harden isn’t. He was always a hybrid 1-2 guard type but this was the first season where he took complete control. He ran himself into the ground. He played to exhaustion. In the playoffs, you don’t get away with that.
There was a big debate during the regular season over star players resting. Nobody cares when Jerry Reserve Shooting Guard logs the odd DNP-CD but if LeBron James or Kevin Durant sits out then we get sideline reporters venturing into the crowd to chat with Poor Little Johnny from Outtatown who saved up all his pocket money to see his heroes play only to find out when he got there that the Warriors were on the second night of a back to back. Whoops, shoulda checked the schedule there Little Johnny.
But Harden doesn’t take rest games. Neither does Westbrook. Their relentlessness won them plenty of MVP votes, as did the sheer volume of what they did, while Kawhi Leonard and LeBron James seemed to slide under the radar. By the end of the voting window, that narrative had swung back with Leonard and James getting credit from the hipsters who didn’t wanna vote the obvious candidates but it sounds like it was too late by then. Leonard and James only missed eight games each but they took their rest carefully. A slight injury wouldn’t be risked. A pile-up of games would mean a scheduled sit out. They didn’t miss many games but the way they missed them suggested a deference towards the regular season that also deferred voters.
Mike D’Antoni has already said that next season they’re gonna need to be better with Harden’s minutes. It might not be a matter of sitting him out of full games too often, maybe keeping him on the bench longer in blowout wins/losses would do the same trick. Relying on him less. Trusting the bench to do their jobs. There’s no scientific model that says a player beyond a certain threshold of minutes is gonna break down like Harden did in Game Six but, you know, the more minutes in your legs the more likely it is. LeBron James, with his limited cohorts (after the Cavs had a few injuries, that is), was knowingly taking that risk most of the season.
None of this is ideal. However you get the feeling that if LeBron James or Kawhi Leonard were asked if they’d rather win the MVP or have a better shot at a Championship… that they’d both choose the latter. Westbrook and Harden would say the same thing but there’s a difference between saying and doing.
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