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Even though he missed the dunk, that crossover Jordan Poole hit Wes Matthews with last night was filthy
⭐ OFFICIAL 2020-2021 NBA Off-Season Thread: Olympics begin 7/23; NBA Draft 7/29⭐
- Thread in 'Sports & Training' Thread starter Started by MVP,
- Start date
- Status
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Who TF taking on Wiseman for an established star?
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When he retires will he follow in Magic's footsteps and be one King Twitter?LeBron really getting more and more annoying as he ages. His takes are only gonna get worse when he retires
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- Feb 5, 2013
who was the winning team ?
- 25,005
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Good game warriors fans.
- Lebron came thru in the clutch
- Shoutout to Alex ******* Caruso and Wes ******* matthews.
- Game changed when the lakers went small. Think this is too big of a stage to try and work Drummond in. He’s simply not a winning player.
- love Draymond and he played amazing in the first half but that 2nd half was ugly. Idc how good you are defensively, 6 turnovers and 2 points means you’re a detriment to your team.
- as the game got close in the 2nd half, a lot of the warriors players got that lemon booty. Too young and never been in that stage before.
- Wiggins did a great job on bron but I knew he would fold in the 4th. He threw up some bs shots.
- Steph needs MORE HELP. He’s amazing and I love him but 3 assists to 6 turnovers is super ugly. He and Draymond threw that game away in the 2nd half. Of course the lakers deserve credit for going small and ramping up the defense but steph & Dray had a lot of careless passes
- Vogel almost lost us the game with the Drummond minutes. This isn’t a 7 game series, you can’t use game 1 as a feel out game in this circumstance. Thankfully he came to his senses in the 2nd half cause the warriors and Dray can’t do **** against ad at the 5.
- this game reminded me a lot of blazers / lakers game 1 last year. We were lucky to pull this out but in a 7 game series I think we win in 5.
- German rondo was ******* TRASH. I know he was out for Covid but he went -20 in a 3 point win lmfao. Man is not getting anywhere close to 100Ms.
- my favorite play of the game was that sequence when Caruso bricked the 3 off side of the backboard, sprinted back on defense and forced a Steph turnover off his leg near the right sideline. He didn’t sulk off the miss at all and made another game changing play immediately.
- another play that was critical was when the warriors were up 12 on a fast break but they immediately turned it over and we hit a 3 to cut it to 9. The lakers were in the danger zone before that turnover.
I love basketball man. I was screaming at my tv all night. Me and my brother went crazy when bron hit that 3 and the final buzzer went off.
- it was also hella funny when Steph had the ball near half court, stared right at Dray and didn’t pass him the ball because he knew Dray would brick lol. BACKPACK man really can’t do **** offensively. If he was more of a scoring threat, the lakers easily lose that game.
- Lebron came thru in the clutch
- Shoutout to Alex ******* Caruso and Wes ******* matthews.
- Game changed when the lakers went small. Think this is too big of a stage to try and work Drummond in. He’s simply not a winning player.
- love Draymond and he played amazing in the first half but that 2nd half was ugly. Idc how good you are defensively, 6 turnovers and 2 points means you’re a detriment to your team.
- as the game got close in the 2nd half, a lot of the warriors players got that lemon booty. Too young and never been in that stage before.
- Wiggins did a great job on bron but I knew he would fold in the 4th. He threw up some bs shots.
- Steph needs MORE HELP. He’s amazing and I love him but 3 assists to 6 turnovers is super ugly. He and Draymond threw that game away in the 2nd half. Of course the lakers deserve credit for going small and ramping up the defense but steph & Dray had a lot of careless passes
- Vogel almost lost us the game with the Drummond minutes. This isn’t a 7 game series, you can’t use game 1 as a feel out game in this circumstance. Thankfully he came to his senses in the 2nd half cause the warriors and Dray can’t do **** against ad at the 5.
- this game reminded me a lot of blazers / lakers game 1 last year. We were lucky to pull this out but in a 7 game series I think we win in 5.
- German rondo was ******* TRASH. I know he was out for Covid but he went -20 in a 3 point win lmfao. Man is not getting anywhere close to 100Ms.
- my favorite play of the game was that sequence when Caruso bricked the 3 off side of the backboard, sprinted back on defense and forced a Steph turnover off his leg near the right sideline. He didn’t sulk off the miss at all and made another game changing play immediately.
- another play that was critical was when the warriors were up 12 on a fast break but they immediately turned it over and we hit a 3 to cut it to 9. The lakers were in the danger zone before that turnover.
I love basketball man. I was screaming at my tv all night. Me and my brother went crazy when bron hit that 3 and the final buzzer went off.
- it was also hella funny when Steph had the ball near half court, stared right at Dray and didn’t pass him the ball because he knew Dray would brick lol. BACKPACK man really can’t do **** offensively. If he was more of a scoring threat, the lakers easily lose that game.
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Some of you guys are incapable of having an objective thought or opinion. Where did y'all go to school? 
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South Harmon Institute of Technology
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Some guys in here were determined to let take outs no matter how the game went.Some of you guys are incapable of having an objective thought or opinion. Where did y'all go to school?
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I said SOME. Not all of you
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- Jan 20, 2002
man spent his whole career trying argue fouls for his playersJVG really loves when LebLeb is able to punk certain refs into changing calls.
hell, even caught 100k fine for calling out the officiating
bron can go up and harass these officials and sway their calls
lawdog1
Supporter
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- Sep 14, 2000
Yeah, Caruso really robbed us of potentially epic slander opportunities by making that hustle play after the backboard shot.
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- May 17, 2007
Alex “more than a meme” Caruso
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- Feb 7, 2016
Did they win with his defense or did they lose because he can't help on offense?
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- May 19, 2004
Thanks for posting that
DCAllAfrican
, Jalen was spot on about Kwame being a serviceable, rotation player considering how long he was in the league. Far worse 'scrubs' and 'busts' before/after him but he stays getting heat due this draft position and playing with MJ & Kobe.
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JVG is a *****. Man couldn’t root for the warriors and hate on the lakers any more than he was doing. Get the **** outta here.
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- Feb 8, 2009
- 13,286
- 10,781
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- Feb 7, 2016
Even Steph knows that they are missing 1 player on offense. But Dray says they don't need KD. Mr. Triple is more valuable and better.
HOU$TON
formerly convertibleburt
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- Apr 14, 2016
Wiseman + the Minnesota pick for C. Wood
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- Jun 9, 2020
Inside James Harden’s beautiful mind, the tool that could lead the former MVP — and the Nets — to an NBA title
As mesmerizing as his handles, footwork and jumper are, Harden's mind for basketball is the most special gift of all.
theathletic.com
No sooner would practices end at Arizona State than James Hardenwould set out to apply what he just learned. His mind never slowed down. It’s why the most formative moments of his college hoops education began well after dark.
They called themselves “The Rec Boys,” a group of teammates who ran pickup against all comers at ASU’s Student Recreation Center. Most days, they took the floor around 8 p.m. Sometimes, after Sun Devil home games, it was whenever they could make it onto the floor. It was Harden’s chance to test out the concepts he learned in practice, treating the games as science experiments and frat boys as lab rats. The late-night sessions became so popular that Harden’s teammates remembered students memorizing the Sun Devils’ schedule, knowing that home games meant a chance to play against the most talented player to step on campus since Byron Scott. That only widened Harden’s experimental group.
The extra work diversified his game and sped up his development. Harden hasn’t played in college in over a decade, yet he still deploys Rec Boys tactics when he can. He’s spent recent offseasons in Phoenix and has ventured over to ASU to pluck a random Sun Devils player out of his workout to post him up or try other new moves on. It’s within those rec walls where Harden’s basketball mind began to grow — the place where he fully fed that creativity that established him into the generational talent he is today. He hasn’t stopped pushing the boundaries since.
Harden’s game has made him a generational talent. But as mesmerizing as his handles, footwork and jumper are, it’s his mind that is the most special gift of all. His basketball brain spots impossible angles and adopts concepts at breathtaking speeds. It seamlessly blends individual talents together just as it helps his singular hoops genius stand apart.
Now, entering the most important postseason in franchise history, the Nets are betting on that mind to take them where he and they have never been: an NBA championship. And those who know Harden believe he’s built to do just that.
Harden has always been a fast learner. At Arizona State, Harden would regularly spend film sessions with Scot Pera, his high school coach who arrived in Tempe a year ahead of him to join Herb Sendek’s staff. Pera and Harden watched tape together, looking for ways to exploit defenders. Harden preyed on poor technique. If he spotted the slightest hint on film that a defender was off-balance, even for a second, he’d blow by him for a basket once they were matched up in a game. He developed a knack for correctly applying those lessons in his next game.
“He knew when he had the ball the guy in front of him couldn’t take him,” said Pera, now the coach at Rice. “If he leans this way you lower your shoulder if he leans that way you do this. And like anything with James, he started experimenting in his own head and he’d just take it to other levels. He did so many things on his own. He was just tremendous at taking the game and finding ways to be creative.”
A year ago in Houston, he started doing agility and football-oriented drills with Justin Allen, a local trainer who frequently works with NFL and college players. Allen expected the 6-foot-5 guard to need a few attempts to get his drills down, which is common even among his best clients. Harden grasped the workouts almost immediately.
“If it was something that he didn’t perfect the first time, that second, third, fourth, fifth time was like he’d been doing it for years,” Allen said.
It’s why, even in an NBA season when teams have limited practice time amid a condensed schedule, Harden expected to adapt to the Nets quickly. During his first practice in Brooklyn, he was pulled aside by Jeff Green, his former teammate in Oklahoma City and Houston, who delivered a simple message: “Do you.” Then Green saw Harden capably following along as first-year coach Steve Nash threw the entire offense at him that day — plus some new sets tailored to Harden’s skill set — and realized there was nothing to worry about. While it helped that Harden had run many of these sets a year earlier when he and new Nets assistant coach Mike D’Antoni were together in Houston, he grasped it so quickly because of who he is.
Harden became the first player in NBA history to average 20 or more points and 10 or more assists per game in the first 30 games with a new team. He notched a triple-double in his Brooklyn debut on Jan. 15 and added four more through his first month as a Net. After his fifth, which came in a February win at Sacramento, Harden reaffirmed what the Nets had seen firsthand: “It wasn’t going to take me a long time.”
His brain moves too quickly for any alternative.
If an offensive possession were a staring contest, Harden would be the last to blink. He likes the opponent to make the first move and then properly punish him as he sees fit. In a Nets win at Phoenix back in February, Harden grabbed a defensive rebound and pushed the ball up court with Mikal Bridges, one of the Suns’ best defenders, trying to contain him. Harden noticed Devin Booker, the Suns’ star guard, out of position, which allowed him to drive right and draw Chris Paul onto him. Paul freed Tyler Johnson, who Harden found, for a wide-open 3.
“He plays off counteraction,” said Antwi Atuahene, Harden’s teammate at ASU and close friend. “So he knows of everything that’s going on. That’s why he can adapt so quickly. He doesn’t force anything. He makes sure everything is in a flow. It’s all about adaptability with James. That’s the thing I think he adds over a lot of people. He knows what he brings to the table and makes everyone else adapt to him.”
Harden’s reaction time is what makes his intellectual horsepower unique. He sees things before they happen and quickly processes a game as it unfolds, which is why one can usually find him talking to a teammate or a coach quickly after a play breaks down to discuss what his mind just filtered.
Occasionally, he operates at a higher level than the coaches on the sidelines. During one Rockets game in the 2018-19 season, Harden was getting inbounded the ball when he saw something downcourt. Rockets interim coach Jeff Bzdelik, filling in for D’Antoni due to personal reasons, thought his lineup could use a break. He called timeout just as Harden fired a 60-foot pass to Eric Gordon with the ball hanging in the air. “Coach, he was gonna be wide open!” Harden admonished him in the huddle. All Bzdelik could do was smile in return.
Harden was no different when Kevin McHale was coaching the Rockets early in his Houston tenure. “He was great at taking a play and watching how they guarded it and making subtle adjustments with the guy that was setting the screen,” said Kelvin Sampson, who was on McHale’s staff and now coaches the University of Houston. “He may say ‘Short roll on this one, long roll on this one. They’re gonna help from this corner so I’m going to throw it to the other corner.’ He was always making his own adjustments. He would change plays because he would see it and thought that was better. It usually was.”
Accordingly, things can often get muddled when he’s off the floor. Brooklyn went 28-7 in the regular season when Harden played and just 12-11 in games he didn’t. Without him, the offense devolved into something isolation-heavy and stagnant when defenses loaded up on co-stars Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving. With him, the disparate parts sync up. Even if it means his numbers suffering — “He’s definitely the one out of the three sacrificing based off the personnel that we have,” said Green — Harden prioritizes the synergy of those around him.
“James is just one of those guys where he’s got a unique ability just to manipulate the game in a way offensively where he might come down the floor and he’s thinking in the back of his mind, ‘Well, Blake hasn’t gotten a touch, or Joe hasn’t gotten a shot,’” said Joe Harris. “And he just does a good job of putting guys in a position where he wants to get them going. James just has a very unique ability where he can do that in a way where it’s in the rhythm of the game, too. And there’s very few players who have that ability.”
The same applies to the first-person shooter franchise Halo, which he picked up at Arizona State. He treats the game as if it were an offensive possession, letting the other players go about their business and readying himself for when they make a mistake. Christian Polk, the ASU teammate who introduced him to the game, said Harden will take the least-experienced players in online sessions and coach them throughout to help his team win, just like he does in basketball. By the time they’re done playing, the novices look like veterans.
“He knows the map (of Halo) like he knows the basketball court,” said Jerren Shipp, a fellow ASU teammate and frequent Halo victim. “He knows the angles, he knows where you’re coming from every direction on that map — he knows it. There’s gonna be bombs that you would never expect would be there, but James knows where you’re trying to go.”
The endgame, Polk said, is an outcome that sounds eerily similar to his work on the hardwood: “If you make a mistake in certain situations, he always makes you pay.”
Harden’s personnel knowledge extends far beyond a video game console, however. As a rookie in Oklahoma City, Harden watched the first round of the 2010 playoffs with Ty Abbott, his college teammate who is now a player development coordinator for the Bulls. Abbott said Harden correctly predicted how nearly every offensive set would end for both teams despite having only played against each team a handful of times in his young career.
As Harden’s career went on and his influence within the Rockets organization grew, his knowledge of the league’s personnel helped influence how Houston built its roster. Harden didn’t just know who would fit with the team’s style of play but also with his own, even if he hadn’t played in an NBA game with that player. In 2016, for instance, he knew the Rockets would be better served with Clint Capela as their center instead of Dwight Howard and successfully swayed the organization into supporting it. Despite only playing pickup with Gerald Green, he could tell Green’s ability to play off him would translate in Houston. Sure enough, the Rockets eventually added him in 2017.
Harden unknowingly played a role in the Nets’ roster construction months before he was traded to Brooklyn. In January 2020, Harden lobbied for the Rockets to sign Jeff Green, who had recently been waived by the Utah Jazz, his sixth team in four years. Harden had played with Green in Oklahoma City with Durant, and despite evolving from the sixth man he was with the Thunder into a superstar, Harden knew Green’s game still meshed with his. Houston signed Green and, at age 33, he shot a career-high 56 percent from the field in 18 games. His performance and the familiarity he developed with D’Antoni contributed to the Nets adding him on a one-year deal this year on the veteran minimum. As a Net, Green shot a career-high 41 percent from 3 in the regular season, partly because of the looks he got from Harden and Durant.
It’s a personnel executive’s instincts inside a world-class athlete’s body.
“I think that one of his talents is that he’s able to put together with different players and different styles and use people under these circumstances,” said D’Antoni, who coached Harden for four years in Houston. “I think that’s where he’s unique.”
Throughout his career, Harden has continually reinvented himself, with each iteration bringing even greater success. But nowhere have his past selves coalesced better than in Brooklyn. “I think James Harden as a Net is a total incarnation of himself,” said Greg Howell, a high school teammate of Harden who now coaches with Pera at Rice.
In Oklahoma City, Harden was the sixth man alongside two stars in Durant and Russell Westbrook. In Houston, his responsibilities expanded along with the spotlight, and he pushed the role of a heliocentric creator to its limits, helping change the sport in the process by choreographic an offense that overwhelmingly traded on 3-pointers or shots in the paint. Now Harden is once again alongside two stars on a team but this time on equal standing, with a far more distinguished resume and repertoire to fall back on. To make this work, he has to draw from all of his past experiences while tapping into the creativity that has defined his career.
“He’s always been so good at finding ways to just make the game easier for him,” Howell said. “He’s always been that evolutionizer of let me figure out one step out that you can’t figure out. Let me do something that you just can’t figure out how to guard. Now he can pass, he can play with a superstar, he can play by himself, he’s just so versatile and dynamic you can expect suspense every night.”
D’Antoni agrees. In Houston, the Rockets had to lean on Harden in many different ways because that’s what was needed of him. The Nets, on the other hand, ask him to sacrifice alongside Durant and Irving while also balancing when to take over a game against when to defer — all while developing a rapport on the fly.
“It’s a different puzzle to solve,” D’Antoni said. “The skill set is the same. The way he plays the game is still the same. It’s just that the pieces around him are different. He’s really good at figuring things out and being able to get the most out of it. I think he plays the way he has to play to win with that particular group of players.”
History isn’t on the Nets’ side. Super teams rarely win a championship in the first season of the stars being together, and the ones that have had endured far less attrition than Brooklyn has this season. But Harden was able to keep the Nets winning and competitive without having Durant or Irving regularly in the lineup. Now they need him to take them to the top together.
Unlike in college, Harden doesn’t have a rec center to experiment with. There are no lab rats in the postseason; only the best competition the NBA has to offer. But he still has access to his mind. That might be all the Nets need.
They called themselves “The Rec Boys,” a group of teammates who ran pickup against all comers at ASU’s Student Recreation Center. Most days, they took the floor around 8 p.m. Sometimes, after Sun Devil home games, it was whenever they could make it onto the floor. It was Harden’s chance to test out the concepts he learned in practice, treating the games as science experiments and frat boys as lab rats. The late-night sessions became so popular that Harden’s teammates remembered students memorizing the Sun Devils’ schedule, knowing that home games meant a chance to play against the most talented player to step on campus since Byron Scott. That only widened Harden’s experimental group.
The extra work diversified his game and sped up his development. Harden hasn’t played in college in over a decade, yet he still deploys Rec Boys tactics when he can. He’s spent recent offseasons in Phoenix and has ventured over to ASU to pluck a random Sun Devils player out of his workout to post him up or try other new moves on. It’s within those rec walls where Harden’s basketball mind began to grow — the place where he fully fed that creativity that established him into the generational talent he is today. He hasn’t stopped pushing the boundaries since.
Harden’s game has made him a generational talent. But as mesmerizing as his handles, footwork and jumper are, it’s his mind that is the most special gift of all. His basketball brain spots impossible angles and adopts concepts at breathtaking speeds. It seamlessly blends individual talents together just as it helps his singular hoops genius stand apart.
Now, entering the most important postseason in franchise history, the Nets are betting on that mind to take them where he and they have never been: an NBA championship. And those who know Harden believe he’s built to do just that.
Harden has always been a fast learner. At Arizona State, Harden would regularly spend film sessions with Scot Pera, his high school coach who arrived in Tempe a year ahead of him to join Herb Sendek’s staff. Pera and Harden watched tape together, looking for ways to exploit defenders. Harden preyed on poor technique. If he spotted the slightest hint on film that a defender was off-balance, even for a second, he’d blow by him for a basket once they were matched up in a game. He developed a knack for correctly applying those lessons in his next game.
“He knew when he had the ball the guy in front of him couldn’t take him,” said Pera, now the coach at Rice. “If he leans this way you lower your shoulder if he leans that way you do this. And like anything with James, he started experimenting in his own head and he’d just take it to other levels. He did so many things on his own. He was just tremendous at taking the game and finding ways to be creative.”
A year ago in Houston, he started doing agility and football-oriented drills with Justin Allen, a local trainer who frequently works with NFL and college players. Allen expected the 6-foot-5 guard to need a few attempts to get his drills down, which is common even among his best clients. Harden grasped the workouts almost immediately.
“If it was something that he didn’t perfect the first time, that second, third, fourth, fifth time was like he’d been doing it for years,” Allen said.
It’s why, even in an NBA season when teams have limited practice time amid a condensed schedule, Harden expected to adapt to the Nets quickly. During his first practice in Brooklyn, he was pulled aside by Jeff Green, his former teammate in Oklahoma City and Houston, who delivered a simple message: “Do you.” Then Green saw Harden capably following along as first-year coach Steve Nash threw the entire offense at him that day — plus some new sets tailored to Harden’s skill set — and realized there was nothing to worry about. While it helped that Harden had run many of these sets a year earlier when he and new Nets assistant coach Mike D’Antoni were together in Houston, he grasped it so quickly because of who he is.
Harden became the first player in NBA history to average 20 or more points and 10 or more assists per game in the first 30 games with a new team. He notched a triple-double in his Brooklyn debut on Jan. 15 and added four more through his first month as a Net. After his fifth, which came in a February win at Sacramento, Harden reaffirmed what the Nets had seen firsthand: “It wasn’t going to take me a long time.”
His brain moves too quickly for any alternative.
If an offensive possession were a staring contest, Harden would be the last to blink. He likes the opponent to make the first move and then properly punish him as he sees fit. In a Nets win at Phoenix back in February, Harden grabbed a defensive rebound and pushed the ball up court with Mikal Bridges, one of the Suns’ best defenders, trying to contain him. Harden noticed Devin Booker, the Suns’ star guard, out of position, which allowed him to drive right and draw Chris Paul onto him. Paul freed Tyler Johnson, who Harden found, for a wide-open 3.
“He plays off counteraction,” said Antwi Atuahene, Harden’s teammate at ASU and close friend. “So he knows of everything that’s going on. That’s why he can adapt so quickly. He doesn’t force anything. He makes sure everything is in a flow. It’s all about adaptability with James. That’s the thing I think he adds over a lot of people. He knows what he brings to the table and makes everyone else adapt to him.”
Harden’s reaction time is what makes his intellectual horsepower unique. He sees things before they happen and quickly processes a game as it unfolds, which is why one can usually find him talking to a teammate or a coach quickly after a play breaks down to discuss what his mind just filtered.
Occasionally, he operates at a higher level than the coaches on the sidelines. During one Rockets game in the 2018-19 season, Harden was getting inbounded the ball when he saw something downcourt. Rockets interim coach Jeff Bzdelik, filling in for D’Antoni due to personal reasons, thought his lineup could use a break. He called timeout just as Harden fired a 60-foot pass to Eric Gordon with the ball hanging in the air. “Coach, he was gonna be wide open!” Harden admonished him in the huddle. All Bzdelik could do was smile in return.
Harden was no different when Kevin McHale was coaching the Rockets early in his Houston tenure. “He was great at taking a play and watching how they guarded it and making subtle adjustments with the guy that was setting the screen,” said Kelvin Sampson, who was on McHale’s staff and now coaches the University of Houston. “He may say ‘Short roll on this one, long roll on this one. They’re gonna help from this corner so I’m going to throw it to the other corner.’ He was always making his own adjustments. He would change plays because he would see it and thought that was better. It usually was.”
Accordingly, things can often get muddled when he’s off the floor. Brooklyn went 28-7 in the regular season when Harden played and just 12-11 in games he didn’t. Without him, the offense devolved into something isolation-heavy and stagnant when defenses loaded up on co-stars Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving. With him, the disparate parts sync up. Even if it means his numbers suffering — “He’s definitely the one out of the three sacrificing based off the personnel that we have,” said Green — Harden prioritizes the synergy of those around him.
“James is just one of those guys where he’s got a unique ability just to manipulate the game in a way offensively where he might come down the floor and he’s thinking in the back of his mind, ‘Well, Blake hasn’t gotten a touch, or Joe hasn’t gotten a shot,’” said Joe Harris. “And he just does a good job of putting guys in a position where he wants to get them going. James just has a very unique ability where he can do that in a way where it’s in the rhythm of the game, too. And there’s very few players who have that ability.”
The same applies to the first-person shooter franchise Halo, which he picked up at Arizona State. He treats the game as if it were an offensive possession, letting the other players go about their business and readying himself for when they make a mistake. Christian Polk, the ASU teammate who introduced him to the game, said Harden will take the least-experienced players in online sessions and coach them throughout to help his team win, just like he does in basketball. By the time they’re done playing, the novices look like veterans.
“He knows the map (of Halo) like he knows the basketball court,” said Jerren Shipp, a fellow ASU teammate and frequent Halo victim. “He knows the angles, he knows where you’re coming from every direction on that map — he knows it. There’s gonna be bombs that you would never expect would be there, but James knows where you’re trying to go.”
The endgame, Polk said, is an outcome that sounds eerily similar to his work on the hardwood: “If you make a mistake in certain situations, he always makes you pay.”
Harden’s personnel knowledge extends far beyond a video game console, however. As a rookie in Oklahoma City, Harden watched the first round of the 2010 playoffs with Ty Abbott, his college teammate who is now a player development coordinator for the Bulls. Abbott said Harden correctly predicted how nearly every offensive set would end for both teams despite having only played against each team a handful of times in his young career.
As Harden’s career went on and his influence within the Rockets organization grew, his knowledge of the league’s personnel helped influence how Houston built its roster. Harden didn’t just know who would fit with the team’s style of play but also with his own, even if he hadn’t played in an NBA game with that player. In 2016, for instance, he knew the Rockets would be better served with Clint Capela as their center instead of Dwight Howard and successfully swayed the organization into supporting it. Despite only playing pickup with Gerald Green, he could tell Green’s ability to play off him would translate in Houston. Sure enough, the Rockets eventually added him in 2017.
Harden unknowingly played a role in the Nets’ roster construction months before he was traded to Brooklyn. In January 2020, Harden lobbied for the Rockets to sign Jeff Green, who had recently been waived by the Utah Jazz, his sixth team in four years. Harden had played with Green in Oklahoma City with Durant, and despite evolving from the sixth man he was with the Thunder into a superstar, Harden knew Green’s game still meshed with his. Houston signed Green and, at age 33, he shot a career-high 56 percent from the field in 18 games. His performance and the familiarity he developed with D’Antoni contributed to the Nets adding him on a one-year deal this year on the veteran minimum. As a Net, Green shot a career-high 41 percent from 3 in the regular season, partly because of the looks he got from Harden and Durant.
It’s a personnel executive’s instincts inside a world-class athlete’s body.
“I think that one of his talents is that he’s able to put together with different players and different styles and use people under these circumstances,” said D’Antoni, who coached Harden for four years in Houston. “I think that’s where he’s unique.”
Throughout his career, Harden has continually reinvented himself, with each iteration bringing even greater success. But nowhere have his past selves coalesced better than in Brooklyn. “I think James Harden as a Net is a total incarnation of himself,” said Greg Howell, a high school teammate of Harden who now coaches with Pera at Rice.
In Oklahoma City, Harden was the sixth man alongside two stars in Durant and Russell Westbrook. In Houston, his responsibilities expanded along with the spotlight, and he pushed the role of a heliocentric creator to its limits, helping change the sport in the process by choreographic an offense that overwhelmingly traded on 3-pointers or shots in the paint. Now Harden is once again alongside two stars on a team but this time on equal standing, with a far more distinguished resume and repertoire to fall back on. To make this work, he has to draw from all of his past experiences while tapping into the creativity that has defined his career.
“He’s always been so good at finding ways to just make the game easier for him,” Howell said. “He’s always been that evolutionizer of let me figure out one step out that you can’t figure out. Let me do something that you just can’t figure out how to guard. Now he can pass, he can play with a superstar, he can play by himself, he’s just so versatile and dynamic you can expect suspense every night.”
D’Antoni agrees. In Houston, the Rockets had to lean on Harden in many different ways because that’s what was needed of him. The Nets, on the other hand, ask him to sacrifice alongside Durant and Irving while also balancing when to take over a game against when to defer — all while developing a rapport on the fly.
“It’s a different puzzle to solve,” D’Antoni said. “The skill set is the same. The way he plays the game is still the same. It’s just that the pieces around him are different. He’s really good at figuring things out and being able to get the most out of it. I think he plays the way he has to play to win with that particular group of players.”
History isn’t on the Nets’ side. Super teams rarely win a championship in the first season of the stars being together, and the ones that have had endured far less attrition than Brooklyn has this season. But Harden was able to keep the Nets winning and competitive without having Durant or Irving regularly in the lineup. Now they need him to take them to the top together.
Unlike in college, Harden doesn’t have a rec center to experiment with. There are no lab rats in the postseason; only the best competition the NBA has to offer. But he still has access to his mind. That might be all the Nets need.
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Is Houston good at developing young talent? Wood is too good of a player on too team friendly a contract to give up unless they are confident in their ability to develop talent.
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What
it seems like you think you’re making a point but it’s so bad that it’s not even clear you’re making a point
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impossible to finish that when you got a grown man that's 270 lbs diving at you in mid-air
wood is good right now. not sure how much more you can get out of him
i think the key guy is KPJ. if they can get him right on and off the court, he can be a pivotal piece
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Dray had like 3 turnovers mid-late in the 4th trying to thread the needle. Was pissing me off.
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Wiggins had Lebron in hell for awhile. It’s like he was getting revenge for being traded for Kevin Love or something. Officiating aside, the Warriors got beat by Caruso and Wes Matthews in 2021. Gotta go back to the drawing board after that.
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