Our roster is more of a concern for championship hopes than Harden's extra 1.5 turnovers a game. When our roster is Warriors/Cavs level, then we can start nitpicking on things like that, unless you honest to God believe that 1.5 turnovers offsets lacking another star player.
Neither Assist/TO ratio nor basketball-reference.com's TOV% is entirely a fair estimate of how turnover prone a player is. If you look at the TOV% formula, it's total TOV divided by the sum of 1. FGA 2. 0.44*FTA 3. TOV One notable thing absent from this list is the total number assists. So, while assist to TOV ratio would artificially make a guy who focuses more on scoring look more TOV prone, the TOV% formula would mke a guy like Nash, who has the ball in his hand a lot looking to make a critical pass, look more TOV prone than he actually is. Maybe a more fair estimate would be something like total TOV divided by the sume of FGA, 0.44*FTA, TOV and Assists.
Oh kewl! Something new! Not. Why don't you compare all Hardens TOV% with all the great players that have won championships in the last 36 years. And tell me which ones had a TOV% in his range please. Don't ask for my spread sheets. Go mine your own data. And get back to me with that list. I've already got the list so I'll know if you're telling the truth. And then we can discuss why the players are on the list. Find all players who have won a championship with regular season TOV% > 19. Waiting......with baited breath.
For us to get a roster like the Cavs and Warriors Harden will have to accept playing off the ball like Curry and LeBron do. Until he accepts that and modified his game we will not have a roster like they do. You are playing the chicken/egg game here. The chicken came first. Not the egg. Remember, we don't want Kyrie. We want a 3&D guy beside Harden.
That makes some sense also, but even this may not be the complete picture. It's one thing to handle the ball in a low risk situation (like bringing the ball up and dribbling on the perimeter), it's another to handle the ball in a more high risk and high reward spot (driving into the paint). In any case, given how much Harden handles the ball, and how much he works in a crowd trying to make things happen with either shots or passes, and the fact that the Rockets are 3rd in the NBA in offensive efficiency, his TOV being high is not all that horrible, and probably nothing that he can really correct in a hurry just by improving personal skills.
True. You have to consider all those things. But TOV% is way off. Games aren't played that way. TOV% does not tell you anything about how a players turnovers affect the score of a game.
I have all the statistic to prove I'm right about the point I make over and over every day on a message board but I won't show them because I want you to figure it out yourself.
First rule of message board is only show stuff that furthers your narrative. Never show everything up front because then the illusion is ruined. BBholic is just doing his job, sort of like the guys in that movie "The Prestige", it's his job to make the illusion look real because in reality he's putting on a show for all of us and we should appreciate this too, because we all live in a world where we know that real magic does not exist. And BBholic is going to great lengths to show us that magic can be real again. He's spending many countless hours of his life trying to prove this to us and we should be grateful for that. I know that I couldn't be more grateful for it and will always appreciate his contributions, no matter how wacky or how funny they might be.
Harden has a cpl types of turnovers though, there's the one where he's trying to push it, and well **** happens. But there's also the one that happens at least once a game which is the offensive equivalent of watching your man lay the ball up where he just coughs up a lazy pass. The former is fine, he needs to tighten up the latter, but honestly the talk of turnovers etc is a bit of a red herring, Chris Paul is probably the most efficient ball carrier in the league (excellent shooter and defender too) and he can't get out of the 2nd round.
I agree but, think of it in this way, harden is practicing it so in the long run he will become better at it and perhaps be better than Jordan even
First guy i looked at, and suspected him, because he played with a similar high risk high reward game, Magic Johnson, he did it twice, one of them he had nearly 22. Next guy i looked at, had over 19 in a few seasons but not his championship seasons was Isiah Thomas, but he averaged 18 and 9 with 4 turnovers per game in his 2nd title season The reason i looked at those two? Because they're the only point guards to be the best players on a championship team since turnovers were kept as a stat. I'd be surprised if guys like Oscar and Cousy didn't also had they kept stats, nature of the beast really.
Because they were point guards, so they had a lot of the ball, but those 2 being the best players on their team (or at least the 2nd time round for magic, his career average was 19.4%), had an extreme amount of the ball with a lot of defensive focus, and in magic's case played a particularly high risk high reward style of play. In Harden's case, he's going at 28 and 12, that puts him directly in about 55-56 ppg (we shoot a lot of 3's), if the teams other 56 ppg only included 5.5 turnovers, we'd be pretty damn awesome.
