I'd like harden to drive more and shoot less 3s. He may be the best drive and dish guy in the nba but he's definitely not near the best 3pt shooter. Also, bring back faster pace. Less walking
I think he will get better. Probably he will work heavily on his right hand in this offseason. At a certain point, though, how much more can you expect from one guy? I rant about Harden running the shot clock down to nothing all the time, but I'll play devil's advocate here to try to keep my mind a little more open. Harden has so many things he can do and HAS to do for his team to score that's it's got to be a huge mental drain on him. He's got a dozen different ways to score by himself, and you damn well know he doesn't trust his teammates to take some of that load even if he sets them up with a perfect pass while drawing off their defender. PJ talked in his article promoting James for MVP about how James is always sizing up the situation on each play. That sounds awesome, but, man, it's gotta be tough on him. I might hypothesize that that's why he takes so long deciding on a course of action each play and also why he tends to have these mental lapses during games. He's playing so far beyond what a standard distributive point guard would do, because he has to consider all his own options to score as well. And those options dwarf the combined abilities of the other four guys on the court. I absolutely think Harden can get even better and add more tools and do it in a time frame no one else could do. He's already shown he can do that. But I also think it's just too much to juggle, and that's really his teammates' and coaches' faults.
You realize, the more things change, the more it stays the same? Harden has tried to do the same thing every single year. Shoot more, iso more, step back more, don't step back more, draw more fouls, shoot more free throws. What if he did less of all that stuff and played disciplined defense? You really can't out shoot the warriors when you got Klay and Curry. The difference between going to the WCF and going to the strip club is Harden's defense. How many missed assignments did he have? He became a liability on offense shearly because the Rockets became dependent on his scoring ability. Then when they took the ball out of his hands, noone else could really score, at least not enough.
The idea is solid, I just don’t know how much more driving we can expect. Led the league during regular season and playoffs in drive attempts. His 19.6 drives per game this year is the 2nd most ever(since they have tracked drives) to Westbrook’s 20.1 a few years back. League leaders have been in the 17-20 range.
Or maybe some more off-ball action to replace those ISO 3's. Not that he should eliminate the stepback 3s but shouldnt be the primary offensive move he goes to.
Refs will get worse and continue to screw Harden over so it won't matter. Harden could grow two more arms, become the greatest defender of all time and the league would create a bullshit rule to stop him. Harden could learn how to fly 90 ft and the league would create a new bullshit rule to make him stop.
Yeah, Harden should learn to play off the ball more. Moving around multiple picks to get free. He can't be expected to work so hard for his points.
Yeah it did seem like towards the end of the year maybe even earlier they were trying back door cuts with Harden when defenders overplayed him with the big man being the passer that seemed to work pretty well. I also would hope that Paul could go the season without missing a giant chunk of games all at once. I don’t care if only plays 60 games, but if it were spread out more I think we would get a better balance of chemistry built between him and Harden.
How about assist to bad-pass turnovers? Harden has finished second or first in bad pass turnovers per game in each of the last 4 years. http://www.nbaminer.com/player-turnover-details/
I'd like to see him push the pace more, shoot more midrange, and post up. I definitely don't want to see anymore of those plays where he's not even visible on the camera because he's out of the play somewhere near the midcourt line. At least by feeding him in the post, it forces him to get involved and forces the defense to respect him and every open shooter.
I think it's way more important to look at team turnovers than individual turnovers. If you really think about it, individual turnovers mean nothing. Theoretically, imagine a team where one player handles the ball 100% of the time and played 48 minutes per game. He could average 11 turnovers per game and that would actually be good thing. You'd be the lowest team in the league in turnovers by a good amount. So use this logic when you look at Harden. This year the rockets were 25th in the league (30th being the best) in turnovers per game. So we did a really good job taking care of the ball, we did not turn it over often. It's just that we run our offense in a way that all the turnovers go to either Harden or CP. So individually it may look like their performance is poor, but that's just because of how we run our offense. As a whole, as a team, we do not turn the ball over often. Other teams run systems that turn the ball over more than we do, it's just that their turnovers get spread out more among different players.
We were also last in points off turnovers allowed in the playoffs: https://stats.nba.com/teams/misc/?sort=OPP_PTS_OFF_TOV&dir=1&Season=2018-19&SeasonType=Playoffs How much of that can be attributed to Harden, I can’t say.
It’s all relative though. If we use your logic we must look at the other numbers as a whole team ... We finished 28th in the league in assists. Just ahead of Cleveland and NY for dead last. Our team as a whole finished 24th best in A/TO. My original post was not to bash Harden. I think we can all agree he can do a better job of protecting the ball and being more cautious of the careless turnovers. So on that subject I was bringing up CP to take more primary ball handling duties since historically speaking he’s one of the best when it comes to high assists and low turnovers. Having Harden play of the ball will create better ball movement and it will give him the opportunity to get open looks without being a ball stopper. Side note I noticed you quote a lot of my posts and often times you have a different take than mine but I enjoy your input and thoughts.
Having a large amount of assists doesnt mean anything for our offense. We are still a great offensive team and our system doesnt depend on us getting a lot of assists. Just James and CP. So keeping turnovers as a team low is more important than having a large amount of assists as a team.
It doesn’t mean anything for our offense? Maybe if we’re never planning on beating the Warriors. Overall series stats: Warriors had 152 assists and 83 turnovers. Rockets had 109 assists and 87 turnovers. James Harden accounted for 33 assists and 23 turnovers and his efficiency was down in all 3 categories FG% 3pt% and FT% in the playoffs compared to the regular season. It’s been proven and backed by actual numbers that we can not and will not beat the Warriors with our heavy Harden (no pun intended) ISO style.
See A/TO doesnt actually mean we were bad offensively though? Our offensive rating for the series was good enough to win. Its just that our defense(particularly our rebounding) were simply not good enough. Yea turnovers are bad but in the grand scheme of things, its not the issue we shoudl be focusing on imo. But the numbers say our iso ball was working against them though haha, at least for this series. Defense was the problem.
