Its exciting to see him play like that, he's a special offensive player that has the potential to do a lot more than he has this season. He also has seemed 2 steps quicker and I'm holding out hope that we can get the Harden of last season back. Great game by the beard! (now don't **** with me and drop a bunch of eggs in a row!)
Don't. I'm convinced most, if not all, are missing it because they want to. He has his share of faults, for sure -- and I've ragged on him more this season than ever before, easily. But when he is good, he is very very effing good. And fun to watch, unless you just insist on not enjoying it because you don't like him, which is pretty lame.
I obviously wasn't talking about Kobe in the last 3 or 4 years. I'm talking about right after Shaq was traded to Miami. Also, LeBron is still one of the best defenders in the league, and he was doing that back when he was carrying Daniel Gibson, Larry Hughes, etc to the finals in a weak eastern conference.
I said it in the game thread. Harden somehow got motivated to give great effort in playing defense in the second half. And that ignited his offensive game too. This needs to happen more often. BTW, it again shows that the "he carries too much offensive load to play good defense" excuse is BS. Games like this just throws all those excuses out the window. It's just a matter of motivation. Nothing to do with fatigue or anything like that.
I know LeBron is still one of the best defenders in the league. I said he chooses when he wants to play it.
Being a Harden apologist doesn't mean you're not a Rockets fan or that you're constantly doing it, I was talking about that instance and your opinion on his defensive woes. Apologist doesn't mean you're fanatically doing it all the time and nothing else.
Think we're all enjoying his offense right now and know it's very important, doesn't mean we should make excuses for his defense. 2nd half has shown he can be a good defender, even if he has played heavy minutes. If he did this 30+minutes/night, we'd be having very little reason to complain (aside from shot selection, offball-movement sometimes and turnovers, which would all be okay if he played good defense). Harden has been great the past few games on offense, but we all have witnessed that he can do much more.
no you have it backwards, when we lose people can't wait to bump 5 different threads to talk about how much of a pile of shet Harden is an deserves to die or something when we win and he drops like 46 points it's because he had 1.5 "good quarter", and we can't give him any credit whatsoever.
He does not deserve to have 5 threads to begin with. The season sucks so nothing going on in the GARM is normal. He deserves some recognition but dropping 50 pts in one game of a season, having a couple of triple doubles your team is still 28-28....borderline playoff team. I do not have words for it because that rarely happens when 2 of your stars are injury free most of the season and the season is still mediocre at best.
Here's what Harden's teammates had to say about him after the big comeback win: "Unreal. Guy is unreal, what he did tonight, is very, very, very special," Trevor Ariza said. "We needed him to do it. He wanted to do what he did and that's the type of person and player he is, always steps up at big times when we needed to." "He was huge," Jason Terry said of Harden. "I can see it on his face, he played [43] minutes the other night [in a loss at Utah], he played 46 minutes again tonight. We ask him to do a lot for us, on both ends of the floor; it's why he's the franchise, man. He's going to deliver. One thing about him, him and Dwight [Howard] we can count on, Trevor Ariza, we can count on. It's the other guys that we have to get our level up and once that happens we have a special group. We have a group that can do something special and it's going to take a collective effort."
