You are welcome to take your elephant in the room discussion to the other 100 threads where it is relevant. You may find it interesting to ignore everything and just yell about team ball, ISO ball, and trusting your teammates, but some of us do not. Some of us find that tiresome at this point. The point of this thread is to look at things from a statistical standpoint, you know things that can be quantified. If you don't like the discussion perspective, please leave and stop derailing. You may think it is dumb, worthless, or whatever, which is fine, but kindly allow us to continue it without you.
I'm all for discussing the other problems and agree with things like boxing out, defensive rebounding, etc. But what you demonstrate here is a continuation of ignoring Harden's deficiencies and instead calling out the other players. No one will take this serious if you always come up with excuses for every bad side of Harden. Harden is of course not the sole problem, but leaving him out of the equation or acting like his flaws are because of teammates is not an honest solution.
For the record, I LOVE stats. I am not the kind of guy who thinks analytics somehow tarnishes pure basketball. In fact, I've been saying for a long time (before we hired Morey) that the conventional wisdom of having a former player to be a GM is stupid. The skill set of being a good player is totally different from the skill set of being a good GM. That said, statistics tell you What Is. It doesn't tell you Why It Is. For example, stats tell us that Harden shot poorly at the beginning of both last season and this season. They don't tell you why. And they don't tell you if his shooting would come around or not THIS season. There are questions that cannot be answered by statistics. There are problems that cannot be analyzed by quantitative methods.
You want some stats: Harden is #361 in the league in DRPM, I know you like to come up with RPM when it suits you, so don't suddenly dismiss it. That's 3rd worst on the Rockets, only behind Lawson and Thornton. http://espn.go.com/nba/statistics/rpm/_/page/10/sort/DRPM Or how about this, can you find Harden in the +/- Dpt.? You have to skip a few pages, as it's actually negative at -0.7, way behind usual stars or franchise players. http://stats.nba.com/league/player/#!/?sort=PLUS_MINUS&dir=1 How about TOV? 1st in the NBA while having a significant lower number of APG than the other guys. http://stats.nba.com/league/player/#!/?sort=TOV&dir=1 And what about his fg% and 3pt%? Abysmal for a 1st option. His fg% for the last three games has also been around 35%. http://stats.nba.com/player/#!/201935/stats/shooting/ Here is him being 2nd in the league in Opp points off turnovers. http://stats.nba.com/league/player/#!/misc/?sort=OPP_PTS_OFF_TOV&dir=1 Here is Harden being 3rd in opponents 2nd chance points. http://stats.nba.com/league/player/#!/misc/?sort=OPP_PTS_2ND_CHANCE&dir=1 Harden 3rd in opp's FB points. http://stats.nba.com/league/player/#!/misc/?sort=OPP_PTS_FB&dir=1 1st in opp's PiP http://stats.nba.com/league/player/#!/misc/?sort=OPP_PTS_PAINT&dir=1 Is that enough quantifiable data for now?
Rockets 'real' issue is leadership... from their best players and from the coach. JB gets much less blame since he's a rookie, but Howard and Harden have no excuse. The talent is there, just the mental toughness is lacking. Just pitiful and pathetic
So in summation, basically the thrill is gone amongst the team, Harden is trash and all we need is a rebounder to win the trophy. Seems about right for clutchfans
This! JB is all bark and no bite... Harden covets personal stats over wins... and Howard has endured enough criticism over his career that he's just shutting up and along for the ride...
Wouldn't call them garbage, but I bet if you asked most teams stat guys and GMs which stats are more telling/important they would say TOV% and TS%.
Our real issue is that the teams we play against suck too much. Now that our schedule is going to be tough we are about to go on a win streak! Joking kind of.
Okay and? What would you do? Bench or trade Harden? How are we getting better here? Harden is what he is. His defense is a sunk cost for his elite offense. There is no alternative here, you just have to hope we can compensate somewhere or he puts it together like last year This stat is not defined how it is used or calculated. This implies Barnes is better than Durant and Lebron. Don't think it has much value. If you feel it is valuable more power to you, I don't find much use for it. Even the village idiot knows that you don't use TOV, you use TOV%. TOV penalizes high usage players, so you have to account for number of possessions used. His TOV% is fine compared to his other high usage peers. Even if it wasn't, we have no ball handler who takes care of the ball better than Harden. FG% is worthless of course, 3pt FG% is useful. Looking deeper you can see a little trend: 3pt FG% October: 13.6% November: 32.4% December: 40.2% LOL Congrats on posting a bunch of volume statistics for the player who plays more minutes than anyone else in the league. You simply have no idea what any of this means, or how to use it correctly. Please do us all a favor and avoid talking about basketball all together. You are like a child with a handgun.
Larsv8, where every stat that paints a negative picture of Harden is garbage and the poster had no clueless of basketball. Only the stats larsv8 posts have any meaning, everything else is ****. And only Larsv8 knows how to apply stats and basketball. When Harden is bottom 3 in all of these statistics it's only because of minutes, yeaa... It's embarassing to what lengths you go to defend Harden and dismiss every stat that proves you're wrong, people could post 100 more stats and you'd continue with your delusional and arrogant attitude.
JTR got banned for this know it all attitude while Larsv8 gets a pass. NO! Not on my site and not on my watch. Mods clean this up
What's embarrassing is how little you know about basketball. These "stats" are common knowledge. Your position is r****ded which is why it is so easy to dismantle anything you post. All you did was go to a stats page, sort and then post anything you thought was negative without even bothering to think about it. There is plenty of negative things to say about Harden. He is a mediocre to bad defender. He does get embarrassingly bad cuts where he looks clueless. He does pass of shots at the last second. He isn't in the best condition. I have no problem being objective about that.
