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

Since they stole my sunshine I've been a little len biased.

 

i don't disagree. i guess i'm just saying it's not fair. giannis wins a hospital ring where every major star and every major contender is destroyed by injuries (even his own injury was cancelled out by trae young's injury) and he is the king of the world and we're supposed to act like we didn't see what we saw, but harden has to somehow beat the durant warriors with his best teams and people act like "well, even though harden was on a 70-win type team when healthy and was up 3-2 against the most talented team ever and his team would beat the majority of champions ever, since he specifically didn't beat a top 5 team with his best teammate injured, how do i know he's good enough to be a champion?" it's "ringz" culture at its finest. breaking through is not independent of circumstances.

in an overall sense (PER, TS%, etc), bird doesn't actually collapse that much in the playoffs. some of it is just that his regular season TS% already doesn't look that great, especially for a guy heralded for his 50/40/90 credentials (turns out when you don't take hardly any of the 40's or the 90's, it doesn't help much). what's really shocking with his playoffs is more the lows of his playoff performance. first 4 years in the league only at 50.5 TS% in the playoffs. back to back sub-48 TS% playoffs runs (not just series). 5 series below 46 TS% (most other greats either never did that or did it once and it was a terrible, career low type series). 7 home court losses, many as either the #1 or #2 SRS team (i.e. not just a 4 seed losing to a 5 seed but an actual contender). 35% shooting in the 1988 ECF to lose to a 54 win pistons team with the celtics #1 in SRS. the kinds of series that someone like jordan or hakeem basically never had and that even the other greats tend to avoid pretty well. and he just accumulated them.

that series is what made me always think so highly of KD in the playoffs. then i started realizing some of their other losses were actually pretty bad underperformances from him. and i'm not even trying to argue harden is quite at KD's level, just that he's not that far behind and falling off in the playoffs isn't that weird.

and those are showing what i'm saying. harden and curry with the same rTS% drop-off of 3.2%. KD at 4.3% in his OKC days, which would be amongst the worst ever. maybe he was always due for some regression to the mean and it happened on his superteams, but it seemingly says something that he holds on very well with other people to draw attention and falls off hard without that (i always said in OKC it seemed like his solution to every problem was a 20 ft contested jumper, no matter the situation in the game). in an absolute sense, they beat harden in TS% because they are supposed to. TS% is the center of the steph curry story: volume scoring with insane efficiency and offball gravity. durant is basically the same but with on-ball gravity and some defense. harden is supervolume scoring with great but definitely not insane efficiency and unbelievable creation. the drop-offs (or not) from the baseline mean more to me.

i guess i'm just saying i wish we could get better at that.

on the one hand true. his numbers combined with a title or two would be hard to argue against. on the other hand, a rare case of an unfortunate circumstance (having to beat jordan) actually creating a narrative that was completely justified by years and years of bad playoff performances that weren't as well known and that should have kept him out of top 10 conversations already (kind of like if harden got a boost for winning with the nets, it would be justice for how hard 2018 was).

he lost to a KD-less warriors for 1 game, meaning he only had to face 4 hall-of-famers for 5 games and 3 hall-of-famers for 1 game with chris paul probably having his worst playoff series ever. and he lost in a game where he had 35/8/5/4 at the end of his best playoff series ever. harden had his best playoff series ever and curry had either his worst or 2nd worst and the warriors still won. good to be on a superteam, bad to face one. the kawhi-less spurs is the only real blemish and it's certainly no worse than a lot of these other greats had (in the 15-30 range). they just didn't have their breatkthrough year ruined by a horribly-timed injury against a team that had most people saying they ruined the nba (or by being in the opposite conference from that team, or having tim duncan become your teammate). sometimes you catch the breaks, sometimes you don't. doesn't mean we should reward bad narratives.

 

https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=1836300&hilit=defenses

it feels like you might already read real GM player comparison board, but there's a thread on there talking about what people did in the playoffs vs how good the defenses they faced were. the last post in the thread is by me, trying to relate the drop-off (or not) of TS% in the playoffs vs the level of defense faced. it didn't change that much really because there was only about a 3 rDrtg spread for the average opponent faced over a career between the easiest and hardest career opponents (which only equates to 1.5 TS%), but it was still interesting. curry has faced remarkably easy defenses during the warriors run. the only elite defense he ever faced was the 2017 spurs and they took kawhi out in game 1.

this table relates the difference in RS and PS rTS%, adjusted for how good the defenses you faced were. hakeem again looks amazing. harden doesn't look good, but he's joined or even exceeded by a lot of the guys i've been mentioning.

Code:

Name         PS-RS rTS%
Russell      +2.194
Hakeem       +2.19
Wade         +1.47
Nowitzki     +0.793
Duncan       +0.431
Kobe         +0.41
Jordan       +0.284
Wilt         +0.189
Shaq         -0.051
Lebron       -0.243
Kareem       -0.571
Bird         -0.728
Magic        -0.832
Moses        -1.518
Durant       -1.844
Garnett      -2.073
Ewing        -2.363
Harden       -2.562
Curry        -2.81
Barkley      -3.015
Robinson     -4.039
K Malone     -4.458

 

Trust me I wasn't in favor of that thought in the least. It was just a worst case hypothetical.

 

33 is too low, but I’ll save my trigger for when they drop Dream out of the top 10 behind Kobe or ****ing Stephen Curry.

 

Curry is prob going into the top 10. He is the best shooter in history and widely credited for starting/popularizing the 3 pt era. He has been considered one of the top 10 nba players and generally stayed there since 2013. He is also the only unanimous mvp in nba history. He also gets bonus cred for being the Anti-Lebron and stickinv with GSW even if it looked like their window closed already. He is a model player and teammate, no drama or controversies he is the NBA's golden boy. Yeah he is prob going into the top 10.

 

Harden didnt really do himself any favors by looking like an amish dude, parrtying hard every summer and going to strip clubs instead of taking care of his health.

At his peak he was really really good, but just like Tmac that peak was quite short maybe 4 yrs and then he never quite reached that level again.

In terms of ranking it encompasses all aspects of being a bball player and Harden gets docked for feuding with Dwight, Cp3 and WB or basically every other star he been paired with in Houston. Those choke jobs also didnt help either.

I feel like 33rd is fair. He only 1 MVP as his sole big award.

 

lol tmac…. Short peak…

delusions

 

Umm no. Scottie Pippen was a bonafide superstar even without Michael Jordan and he really showed that during the 93-94 season.

He was the team leader in points, rebounds and assists that year and led the Bulls to the conference semis before eventually losing to the Knicks in 7. You know… the same Knicks that went to the Finals and nearly beat the Rockets. Oh and he finished 3rd in MVP voting.

There’s no way MJ wins 6 rings without Pippen. People hate Pippen cause he did us dirty and sucked when he was here but you have to set aside personal feelings if you want to keep it real.

 

Short peak for Harden? Not really.

He averaged over 24 points per game for 9 consecutive seasons, which included a stretch of five straight seasons over 29 ppg. You can argue he’s past his prime now, sure (even though he’s still averaging 22 this year) But he didn’t have a “short peak”

 

he absolutely does not have the credentials to be in the top 10. there are people who (wrongly) barely have hakeem in the top 10 and sometimes even have him at 11 and curry has no where near that resume. same goes for any of the border guys like kobe, shaq, duncan, bird, or wilt. even ignoring the fact that's it's incorrect to say, popularizing 3's isn't an on-court accomplishment that helped his team win, any moreso than having a cute kid who the media liked at press conferences.

 

yeah, a guy with 5 top 3 mvp finishes only had a 4 season peak. makes sense.

 

There's no way they put either Curry or KD in the top 10. Even Kobe has only recently been regarded as belonging in the top 10. In 2015-18 he was usually found 11-15 or so on lists compiled by SI, CBS, ESPN etc.

Curry and KD will probably be the same and placed somewhere around 11-15. They both need another title or mvp to get in the conversation for 9th or 10th.

 

But Curry does have 2 MVP's as well as the distinction of being the GOAT shooter/off-ball player.

I'm not saying Curry is in the top 10 right now (he's not), but you're short-selling his credentials.

 

Lol so why's Jordan the goat then? Russell has more rings than him and Lebron played against better comp.

Ranking the best isnt just based on the stats otherwise Lebron who compiled most stats would easily be no 1. He has won way more games and helped his team win more games MJ ever has as MJ only played for 15 yrs, Lebron still trucking at yr 17th.

As far as creds go Curry has as much as any 2 mvps, 3 rings same as Larry Bird who most people had in the top 10.

 

Top 3 mvp finish isnt really peak anymore right. If you go down from 100 to 90 you aint at the peak anymore.

 

So ur argument he didnt have a short peak is he had 5 yrs of peak performance instead of 4? Lol.

 

What? I said he had 9 years of superstar-level performance with a 5-year MVP LEVEL window. That is not a “short peak”!