[The Athletic] Harden 33rd Best All-Time... Quitten as 32nd

That's why he's got those 5 DPOY trophies!

 

*Should have

 

while it's better than crazy lists that put him in the 40s, i have a hard time finding 30 people to rank above harden. he has regular season dominance that significantly less than 30 can match (12th in mvp shares when i looked a year ago), and the main thing his resume lacks is a title as an alpha (as if it is his fault he couldn't beat the durant warriors with chris paul injured), which is also a list that is significantly less than 30, and probably not even 20 long. does someone like barkley have a better regular season career? does he have a title? does he have fewer playoff failures (blew a 2-0 and 3-1 lead in consecutive years)? being blocked by jordan from a title is no tougher than the warriors. i guess barkley still has a little longevity but we're reaching the point that it's not as big of a deal. and barkley is usually a low-20's guy and at worst 25. a lot of the same argument for malone, with worse playoff failures but more longevity (a lot more really).

even real gm, who don't seem to like harden at all, and who absolutely cherish longevity and total career value already has harden 31. most lists tend to kind of project and place guys where they think they will be, assuming no surprises, but not real gm. they even only have steph i think 24 or 25, and they love him, because they still value adding on more seasons. which is to say, if people who don't like harden and love total career value have him at 31, a list like the athletic's should probably have him at least in the mid- to upper-20's.

if that rumored trade really happened, not only would it be the best duo, but they would be the same age and spend their entire primes together. with even decent roster construction, it's hard to not see them winning every title where they both played from 1987 to 1998, and i'm not even sure they couldn't win 1986. i know logically a team wouldn't win 12 straight, but who is beating them? this is a league where jordan plus pippen ran roughshod over everyone because the only other multi-star team had perennial playoff underperformers in stockton and malone. now we're talking 2 of the greatest playoff performers ever, both probably top 5 in the playoffs.

i mean, jordan's defense and hakeem's offense would make for a good team. and that's not even what they are both best at. maybe the 2 most complete players ever. they both practically never had a bad playoff series so good luck with them having one at the same time. jordan can't quite drop 35 on you this series? well, hakeem will just massacre your big for 25-30 ppg of his own. hakeem not shutting down the middle enough for you? well, jordan can be even more aggressive on the perimeter knowing hakeem is behind him.

think about 1986. 2nd year in the league for both. jordan faces the '86 celtics and drops 63 on them and averages 47 ppg for the series. hakeem takes down the showtime lakers with a huge 31/11/4 series and then gives the celtics 2 of their 3 playoff losses. what does that finals look like if jordan is there averaging 40? it's at least an epic series. after that, it's basically a wrap for everybody else.

 

Harden has a case for top 20 or higher if we're only looking at the regular season and peak, but his case is hurt by multiple substandard postseason series performances and overall postseason performances when it comes to the greatest rankings. Fair or not, most voters/historians tend to value the postseason a lot more when it comes to ranking the top 30 or 40 players. Dirk is usually ranked around 15-25 in most lists I've seen, but without his incredible performance in the 2010 playoffs, he'd likely be ranked in the low 30's or 40's. David Robinson had some of the best statistical regular season peak of any big man ever, but is hurt by his inability to "come through" as the man in the playoffs. Kawhi is the opposite of Harden in that he lacks the volume of sustain excellence in the regular season but has had multiple breakout & defining performances in the playoffs.

ITA about Jordan and Hakeem.

 

I thought he was worth the gamble but definitely did not think we'd be getting 33rd best player of ALL TIME

 

i don't disagree with you about playoffs vs regular season. the reason i can rank hakeem so highly and not feel like a homer is that he is just a staggering playoff outperformer. there is no one else like him in the top 20 and i don't think even in the top 50, although i haven't really looked into kawhi that much (and even then, kawhi just straight up takes the regular season off so i'm not sure it's fair). i'm saying even with harden not being a great playoff performer, the list of people above him is difficult to get up to 30. the top 30 has guys like robinson and malone. those guys TS% drops off in ways harden couldn't dream of. and they have pretty bad team underperformance on top of the individual underperformance (whereas harden has only lost 1 series as a favorite and it was a 54 win houston team vs a 54 win portland team so hardly the stuff of legend). and these are guys who often make the top 20.

barkley doesn't fall off too badly in the playoffs, but blowing 2-0 and 3-1 series leads to us in years in which the title was wide open are 2 huge blown opportunities. i can't really think of a harden underperformance that threw away a really legit championship opportunity like that. arguably his most embarrassing/worst moment is game 6 vs san antonio. but all winning that series would have done was get us shellacked by the 2017 warriors so it's not like we had the trophy in our grasp.

it would appear stockton will be ahead of harden. much worse regular season performer, huge fall off in the playoffs, played 18 seasons with another top 25 all-time player, none of which were affected by injury, and didn't win a single ring and only got to the finals by basically just outlasting all the other stars in the west.

the list of guys who are great in the playoffs is just not a very long list and it isn't much different than the 17 or 18 guys who have alpha titles. lots of players fall off in the playoffs. kevin durant used to fall off quite a bit. dirk didn't in general but had an absolutely catastrophic failure in 2007 that surpasses any harden failure (though he made up for it). these guys will be handily ahead of harden. harden and curry have very similar career playoff numbers and similar drop off in the playoffs and steph will probably be top 20. honestly i would put kawhi ahead of harden for his playoff abilities but it seems like there are going to be 6 or 7 guys i definitely don't agree with coming up.

 

Aside from maybe Jordan, every great player has had multiple bad postseason series. I remember checking awhile back and was quite surprise by Lebron & KD who were also consistently excellent while Curry was only a step behind. But the point is that most of the greats have had bad series even multiple bad series; what made them great (or atleast remembered as great) is the series and moments they delivered. Barkley's run to the finals helped his legacy immensely despite not winning.

As for Stockton, I disagree that he should be over Harden, since he was clearly a number 2 his entire career. Its debatable who would be a better 2nd best player on a championship team between the two of them, but who the greater player overall isnt.

 

Yeah but he "played the game the right way" - hint hint wink

 

quitten should've been #2.

he said so and i believe him

 

awesome, and he chocked in the playoffs every year. 33 is good for him.

 

I’ll say this, Len Bias never scored a single point when guarded by Melo.

 

that's my point (i think we're agreeing with each other). people tend to think "harden falls off in the playoffs" and "great players step up in the playoffs" and, while the first part is true, the second part just isn't. outside of hakeem, who truly was just a better player in the playoffs than regular season and is almost a singular example of such, you are usually doing great if you just maintain regular season performance like MJ and lebron (because playoff opponents are better than regular season opponents). shaq and duncan are others i hold in high regard because they basically didn't drop off.

anyone who does a deep dive on larry bird's playoff career usually comes away astonished at how many really bad series he had (five series under 46 TS%!!! 4 of them he lost, 3 with homecourt advantage). wilt looks pretty bad. you mentioned KD was consistently excellent but he had some pretty big drop-offs (even more than harden) in his OKC days. it's really only been his superteam days where he has maintained or exceeded his regular season self, which probably says something bad about his resiliency when he is the complete focus of a defense. curry drops off every bit as much as harden. once you get past the all-time top 10 or 11, it's usually just about who has fallen off the least as opposed to anyone actually stepping up. and once you get to the 20-30 range we are talking people with flawed playoff resumes who almost certainly weren't the best player on a title team.

and that's where i say harden becomes a victim of narrative. the 2018 rockets are easily better than the 1993 suns, but the 1993 bulls were in the east and the 2018 warriors were in the west. so harden is a guy who lost in the conference finals because he had arguably the most talented team ever in his own conference and his best teammate got hurt, but barkley made a finals. barkley had to beat perennial playoff underperformers in seattle and harden had to beat maybe a top 5 team ever with one hand tied behind his back. harden's 2 best teams lost in the 2nd and 3rd rounds because they had a 4 hall-of-fame juggernaut in their way in their own conference, not because guys like barkley or malone actually were better in the playoffs than harden. if the warriors are the east, we have 2 epic finals series against them and somehow harden is considered better without actually being better.

 

Harden has three problems:

1. defense
2. Performance drops in the playoffs
3. No title

that’s why he is behind people like Barkley or Pippen. If it was just about offense and regular season he would be close to top 10. Still I believe a title would change the narrative around him…

 

Pippen without Jordan goes to a few all star games and is relegated to remember him discussions, not being ranked up there with franchise carry stars like Harden.

 

Wood is #1 Ugly.

 

I agree. For every stat Curry leads him in, James leads Curry in another. The titles have elevated Steph into top 15 convos.

 

Yes my point was similar to yours, that Harden suffers in the rankings because of the playoffs. The point about "great players stepping up" however isn't that every great player steps up every time or even the majority of the time, but rather that they have that defining series and playoff run that elevates their career. For Dirk it was the epic 2010 run. For Barkley it was the Finals run vs Jordan (despite losing). For Giannis it was last season. Fair or not, Harden simply hasn't done that, which is the main reason he isn't higher on most lists.

Agree with you on Bird. His overall numbers (TS+) in the playoffs is rather pedestrian though I'm not sure how much of that is due to the era. As for KD, the man avg 35 on 67% TS in the NBA Finals versus the Heatles. Yes his efficiency with Curry improved significantly, but his playoff numbers were very good before that.

KD: 2011-2016 KD avg: RS 28.6 PPG on +8.7 rTS%, playoffs 29.1 PPG on +4.4 rTS%
KD: 2017-2019: RS 25.8 PPG on +8.4 rTS%, playoffs 29.6 PPG +8.6 rTS%
Curry: 2014-2022: RS 26.8 PPG on +9.1 rTS%, playoffs 26.9 PPG on +5.9 rTS%
Harden: 2013-2020: 29.6 PPG on +6.2 rTS%, playoffs 28.4 PPG on +3.0 rTS%

But again this isn't about the numbers. It's about having one or more playoff series/run where everyone can point to as that player being great and rising to the challenge.

I agree that luck, narrative are all factors in it, but that's always the case. If not for Jordan, Karl Malone might be in the GOAT conversation (shudder). But to be one of the best 30 out of tens of thousands of players, ultimately performance and results on the biggest stage is going to be the most important. Harden didn't only lose to the GOAT Warriors. He's lost to a KD-less warriors team, to a Curry-less Warriors team, Kawhi-less Spurs team as well as others during his playoff career. In 15 playoff series with the Rockets, Harden has average 41% or less 10 times (many under 40%). And again all that wouldn't matter if he had one run where he broke through, just like Dirk's collapse in 07 no longer mattered after 2010.