The cold hard facts about who is the biggest ball stopper is a list of turnovers? Hate to mean, but that's just plain stupid. You should be embarrassed for posting that.
Troll sword fighters love talking about bull. Who is the last American born white player to be any good? Larry Bird is the only answer lol
Isn't it? #2 in the poll. Almost 1/3 of the hometown fans agree he is biggest ball stopper. Season turnover record holder. #1 in iso's. It's not like he shouldn't be in the discussion, is it?
'Stopping the ball' assumes the ball would be flowing if it wasn't for Harden, since Harden cannot stop something which is not already in motion. And if the ball is moving well, by your own logic, our offense should be doing fine. This can be measured by looking at how we perform offensively when Harden sits on the bench. with Harden : 110.1 ORtg (5th) w/o Harden : 101.8 ORtg (28th) So, one of your two assumptions has to be wrong : Either our offense has no ball movement regardless of Harden due to lack of system and good coaching, which inevitably leads to total offensive breakdown when the only guy who can score sits, or ball movement itself does not produce good offense.
We have no ball movement and no play making on the roster other than Harden because Harden wants guys to spot up and get out of the way. You are only further illustrating how one-dimensional this roster is. Which means by default Haden is the ball-stopper.
All the on-off offensive ratings show is what an efficient scorer Harden is over his replacement. Instead of on-off look at his ratings differences between lottery opponents and playoff opponents. That's where the sag is.
And the evidence of this is where? Wasn't it Harden who asked for ball-handling help last year? When did Harden specifically suggest "I want nothing to do with players who can pass and move the ball around"? What could Harden possibly lose by having players like Nicolas Batum, Draymond Greene or Boris Diaw? BTW, it seems like there are a lot of '0 dimensional' teams out there since our 1 dimensional offense ranks 5th best in the league.
This has nothing to do with whether Harden stops the ball or not. Again, Harden cannot 'stop something' which is not already in motion. That's physically and logically impossible. So you first have to prove that our ball movement improves when Harden is not on the floor, which you have not done so.
False premise. You are measuring Harden internally only. That has no reference point to the league. You are basically conceding he's a ball-stopper and attempting to justify it by the crappy roster around him.
False argument. I didn't concede anything and in fact you just admitted that there is no concrete proof or evidence that Harden stops the ball. "Harden stops the ball" is perfectly clear, logically coherent sentence that we can adjudicate its validity by looking at the degree of difference in the ball movement when Harden is on and off the floor. If it does, then yes Harden stop the ball movement. If it doesn't, then no the lack of ball movement has nothing to do with Harden. Outside of that is all conjecture, which you cannot definitively prove. "Harden is a ball stopper so our roster is made up this way" is an unprovable hypothetical statement of which you didn't present any evidence.
That's doesn't prove anything since you can infer anything from that data. You can just as argue that since there is not enough good passers on our team, Harden has to create scoring chances on his own every time, and that's why his number of isolation attempts are so high. Perfectly reasonable conclusion to draw form our make-up of players and the data. As I said, Houston's offense drops to one of the worst in the league sans Harden, and if the ball moves perfectly well without him, why would that be? One of your two assumptions has to be wrong. Either our lack of ball movement is a team-wide phenomenon which is not specific to Harden, or ball movement itself does not result in good offense.
holic, You have a lot of basketball knowledge (more than I, I am positive). Wish your current focus was one I agreed with though.....Why don't you use your knowledge for good (fixing our defense) not evil (slamming the only good player we have)??? haha