It’s so insane that people still insist on making excuses for harden after all these years. Even after an undeniable track record of playoff failures. You can’t just say “well, he’s had good games too”, of course he has, no one has ever argued that he hasn’t. Both are true. Very few players of his stature, in his generation, have had the number of high leverage failures he has had in the playoffs. You can set your watch to it every year.
Trends are our friend...until they're not. We're still dealing with incredibly small sample sizes for these selected "high leverage games". Humans love to find patterns from small pieces of data and try to extrapolate to find a heuristic, so we can say X + Y = Z and we can sleep at night thinking we've got it mostly all figured out. We can't take a fairly small sample of games and then extrapolate that into an entire trend. The reality is that is that this topic is extremely complex with lots of variables and biases that effect the objective result. Which at the end might just be some bad luck/variance over a short run of data. It might seem like we have years of data to confirm our narrative, when in reality it's like 10 games over 7 year time frame. I'm not really buying the narrative that based on a 10-12 game sample size, it is a repeatable trend every time now and going forward until eternity, that Harden suddenly turns into a pumpkin every G6 and G7. This a Top 30-40 player of all-time that has had had to carry multiple teams on his back and faced some of the toughest opponents NBA history. I think more likely than not, it's just a bit of some negative variance in some challenging situations, over what seems like a large sample size...but in reality is slightly more than a handful of games. At any time he have literally 1 or 2 clutch games and then suddenly we'd see the narrative shift in the other direction.
at some point I think the Clippers have to give up on this whole team that they are building. I completely understand why people don’t want James back, but I really envisioned a trade of Fred,Tari and Capela with Harden maybe a couple second rounders coming back as fair.
