[ESPN] First Take James Harden or Russell Westbrook, who has the more impressive streak?

PG and Westbrook are having career season (Westbrook with his triple double streak), with a relatively healthy roster, is only 4 games up on a Rockets team decimated by injuries and is only in playoff contention because of Harden.

Rockets should have finished OKC off on Saturday? damn..

 

Westbrook streak way more impressive. Harden got tired against OKC and had to take that desperate 3!

 

Pick one

 

Westbrook shooting like ass but he is breaking records with his triple doubles. it counts as a career season.

 

Wow. So, Westbrook flames out in the first round in consecutive years without KD, but he’s a better playoff performer than Harden. Ok got it

 

That Westbrook streak is so ugly!

 

No one is going to give harden credit for scoring all all kinds of players, all kinds of schemes, zones, double, triple teams and keeping the fg% up... how disrespectiful.

 

Wasn't Kellerman anti-Harden? I can't keep up.

This whole notion that his scoring isn't equating to winning is nonsense. WINNING is a team function, and for almost all of January the team wasn't at full strength and he HAD to put up these insane numbers.

The context of his usage and scoring and team record is constantly being overlooked.

 

Oh and as for 'any' player doing what Harden was doing, since he was the only player on his team capable of getting up shots to that level?

We can look at KD's MVP season: 14 40 point games.
Westbrook:18

Harden has 21 and we're only at the all-star break.

 

Jalen: harden is inefficient, look at his ACTUAL fg%!

Max: yes but his effective FG% is very good, he’s actually very efficient.

Jalen: LOL my point stands.

WOW

 

Totally understandable why they'd think that: Small sample size for Russ the last couple of years, because he's only played in 11 playoff games, while Harden's played in 28.

 

Actually Westbrook has really been on a quadruple double streak;

10+ Points, 10+ Rebounds, 10+ Assists on better than 10% shooting (although I'm not totally sure about the last one...)

 

3 reasons: Both streaks are impressive but Harden is only the 2nd player since Wilt C whereas Westbrook is one of the 4 players who has achieved his Triple double feat. 2) Harden has been doing it without much of CP3, Capella and Gordon. 3) OKC has been winning mostly because of Paul George plus they have not been ridden with injuries so this whole winning percentage argument is non-comparable.

 

Guys. I can sense some anguish and stress in your posts. Why? It's not worth the raised blood pressure. You are not trying to convince any of the true Rockets/Harden supporters. Your are singing to the choir already. It won't make a difference whether you are mad or anguished by the foolishness of the so called basketball talking heads. They are who they are when it comes to the Rockets and/or Harden. They are clowns, and you better accept them for whom they are. Even if James-the-barber-Harden scores 60 points tripple doubs for the rest of the season, these ignoramuses will still begrudge Harden or the Rockets. If it's not MDA system, it's because he goes to the charity stripes too much. You guys know of course that Kobe, MJ put up more shots than Harden is putting up right now and yet did not do what Harden is doing. For Jalen Rose, how many times did he score over 30 points? Has he ever scored 60 points in three games combined? Oh I forget, 61+ points was rained on him in a game. Take them for what they are - - buffoons, and I wouldn't worry about their nincompoop commentaries.

 

Harden is great. We all know that.

Westbrook is great. We all know that.

They are great individual players who seem to care more about their streaks than they care about winning. The way they shamelessly chase the numbers is embarrassing. I am so ready to have a Rocket TEAM again. Been a long time.

 

So in my earlier post, I posted numbers that showed that overall Harden's per-game numbers in his last 30 games is far more impressive than Westbrook's per-game numbers in his last 10.

But let's just focus on the supposed streaks themselves, and leave aside overall performance. A lot of people are saying Westbrook's performance is more impressive because triple doubles are a relative rarity compared to 30 point games. Yes, triple double are relatively rarer. But this illustrates most people's lack of feel for probability, because the chances of repeating a feat 30 times in a row is almost vanishingly small compared to repeating that feat 10 times in a row. To take a basic example: how many times has a team won 10 games in a row? It happens several times every year. How many times has a team won 30 games in a row? Once in the entire history of the league.

So to properly compare these two streak one needs to account for the chances of scoring 30 vs getting a triple double as well as the chances of repeating a streak 30 times versus 10 times in a row.

Here's one way to look at it. For the current season, I counted up all the games in which a guard (not named Westbrook or Harden) played at least 35 minutes. 1120 of them. In 12 out of those 1120 (or 1.1% of the time), the guard got a triple double. In 174 out of those 1120 (or 15.5% of the time), the guard scored 30 points. Using those as our base probabilities, the chances of a typical guard not named Westbrook or Harden getting a triple double in 10 consecutive games if he plays at least 35 minutes in each of them is 1 in 5.0 x 10^19th. Very small indeed. But if you calculate the probability of such a guard scoring 30 points in 30 consecutive games, it is 1 in 1.8 x 10^24!

So, in my estimation, in the current NBA for how typical guards play, Harden's streak is a more impressive statistical feat than Westbrook's -- even putting aside the overall statistical superiority of what Harden has done.

 

Winning>>>>>individual stats

 

If we lose, all hardens individual stats should be thrown in the trash. They do nothing for any of you. They only do something for Harden and they shouldn’t do that either.

 

That's a lot of NBA history you want to throw in the trash if you think only a team that wins it all is relevant. To each his own. Individual athletic brilliance can be celebrated even if it doesn't come with a championship ring in the end.

 

But the point is that Harden's scoring is actually conducive to winning because Harden does not do it like WIlt (aka black hole), but instead like Nash (makes teammates better). The impressive thing about Harden's streak is the necessity of it. Sure, he chased it twice out of 30 times, but he never did it at the expense of winning the ball game.