I would like for him to experiment more with playing tough D and on the offensive end to try floaters more often sure you dont always need floaters but when you do they are a gamble if you weren't practicing them regularly i noticed last night his first couple of shots were floaters james simply needs a reliable floater
I saw him doing the Chris Paul dance move, ie. dribble behind his back while facing the defender. I LOL'd. You could tell he was pretty much dicking around against the lowly Cavs.
We don't beat the Warriors in OT last game, if Harden doesn't execute that full-court pass to Capela over Durant. I've been actually thinking the opposite; that all the attempts to do the long passes in the past are starting to pay off, as the two have gotten better at it. Seems Harden isn't leaving the pass short anymore. And Capela always at least catches it, to hold up and reset, if it took him too far under. I do agree about interior passes though. The degree of difficulty is increasing on some of them....like he's forcing the drives and wrap-arounds, or pocket passes, when I'd like to see more floaters.
When need a PPP metric where we can filter for passes over 50 feet and possessions less than 7 seconds in length!!! Until then I can't argue that this is bad or concerning or anything. It might even be one of those things that helps us in the long run because opponents will change, for example, the way they offensive rebound against us because they know Capela is Randy Moss and Harden is Dante Culpepper. So even if these hail Mary's result in a slightly lower PPP than a normal half court possession, they could still be beneficial.
I don't see a citation, so I'm assuming you wrote it. If so, it's better than anything I've seen on ESPN.
Whenever Harden goes for the Hail Mary, a little part of me dies. As soon as I see the windup, I’m like, “No, don’t.....” Every once in a while he makes the connection and it’s awesome and we all, male and female alike, ejaculate all over ourselves. But 90% of the time it doesn’t work, and usually winds up a turnover (as if he doesn’t rack up enough of those), and thus we s*** all over ourselves instead. It’s the one thing about Harden’s game that I guess I have to live with: when those thread-the-needle passes become thread-the-open-doorway passes, a gift for the opposing team.
Knowing him, he'll find a way to leverage the rules. Like grow his beard to make that strike zone smaller.
Zero chance those passes only connect 10% of the time. Just a hunch, but I think our org tracks everything. And I mean everything. I also have a hunch they share their findings with players and coaches and I just can’t see them letting something so terrible continue to happen.
If those passes keep the other team's bigs on their toes and less inclined to fight for offensive boards (and instead run back on D) then it may be an overall win. With that said, the one move I want to see more of from James is the floater in the paint. That shot is literally unstoppable and he should be taking 5+ per game.
He only started doing them when D'Antoni became our HC. I've seen Lin do it during the Linsanity stretch a lot in NYK. I'm fairly sure Mike is actively encouraging the high risk high reward full court passes.