The official James Harden is not a legitimate #1 option thread

What.

 

At best the #4 pick in one of the worst drafts in a long time and a guy who hasn't even played. For a top 10 player.

Yeah, what am I supposed to be upset about?

 

Even the scouts and pros are very poor at telling the future. How do you know it's a "worst draft"?

What do Steve Stipanovich, Rodney McCray, Russell Cross, Darrell Walker, Ennis Whatley have in common? They were amongst the 13 players selected before Clyde Drexler in the 1983 draft.

 

Completely different style players. Harden can go 5-20 brick city from outside yet his aggressive style means he can still get 30 and put the rockets in the bonus all day like he did yesterday. Johnson isn't that kidn of a player.

 

You also got to factor in that the foul line is not dependable at all. The refs could call refuse to call it anytime they want to. Remember Dallas?

 

I'll tell you what. You can have those three "assets", I'll take James Harden. My team's long term future is brighter than yours unless you hit a home run with that 5th pick or Jeremy Lamb becomes much better than expected.

Harden is a superstar, whether you want to acknowledge it or not.

 

Nothing is "dependable," which is why Kobe has shot 30% over his past three games even while playing with Steve Nash and Gasol instead of Lin and Patterson. Free throws happen to be more dependable than jump shots for the great majority of perimeter players which is why pretty much every superstar needs the ability to get to the line to be a part of their game.

 

It's dependable enough for Harden to be the #1 foul-drawing player in the NBA. Joe Johnson? Not so much.

Harden leads the league, getting to the line 423 times on 748 shots

Johnson has been there 111 on 677 - it's not even remotely, remotely close.

Hell, even in his heyday, Joe Johnson has never attempted more than 379 free throws in an entire season. Harden took about 40 games to do that, and is on pace to do more than double that this year.

Players that can score by drawing fouls > players that score without drawing as many fouls.

It's one of the core principles that the Rockets apply (it's akin to the way the Oakland A's used to value walks in baseball before everybody adopted it) and one of the reasons why they grabbed Harden, and Lowry before him, etc.

 

That's not a valid point at all, all superstars are dependent on free throws one way or another. You act there are a ton of all-star players out there that could function effectively if they are being fouled but the refs aren't calling it.

Kobe Bryant averages 7.6 freethrow attempts in his career, and this stat is misleading because it accounts for Kobe's early seasons where he didn't get much playing time, so it should be higher. Kobe also had quite a few seasons where he has shot over 10 free throws a game.

Dwyane averages 8.5 free throws in his career and has had a couple of seasons where he averaged 10 free throws a game. In fact, Wade has only failed to average more than 8 free throws a game in all but 3 seasons of his 10 year career (including this season). Two of those seasons coming from this current season and last season, so if he wasn't playing with Lebron, he would probably still be averaging a high number of FTs.

 

Harden has gotten an unusual amount of calls. Not so much recently.

While it would be nice to continue to get lots of calls, as defenses adjust and the refs get familiar, the probability is that there will still be a good amount of calls, but not quite as many.

 

Ironic, I hate Kobe (just a laker hater), but I think Kobe should actually get more fouls than Harden. I'm not sure what the whole purpose was. Maybe the NBA didn't like his attitude. I remember one game in the playoffs around 2004?? where he got hammered and you could hear him say, "HEY WHERE's the F*** FOUL!"

And that's Kobe. I think Kyrie Irving is getting tons of ticky tacky fouls which is undeserved. Remember when we played them? I was like, are you serious! Just imagine other teams looking at us when they see Harden get fouled. It seems that the NBA can make or break stars just by simple play calling.

I'm not disputing your numbers, I just think that you can't be too dependent on people's foul shots because at any moment, the refs could really decide out of the blue whether to give you the foul.

I saw Lin get hacked tons of times and not get the call. Same w/ Kobe. Not saying that Lin is as anywhere near the talent as Kobe. Just sayin that the calls could come and go at anytime.

 

Kobe looks for a foul everytime he misses a shot.

 

His style of play is always going to draw lots of fouls. And contrary to your suggestion, the intuition about the way it works in the NBA, as players establish their reputation for being superstars, as Harden has no doubt done this season, they tend to get more calls rather than fewer. He had a career high 21 FTA's yesterday...

 

How the hell did this thread turn into a serious debate? Seriously? What's next, Hakeem not a legitimate post player? I mean, he did struggle against the Sonics and all in numerous playoffs. Steve Novak not a legitimate 3 point threat? Because he goes 0-4 from behind the arc every few games?

 

This is the kind of post that shows what this board lacks -- REAL analysis. Just because announcers tell viewers 5 times a game that a foul was called and it was because the player is a star, or that a foul wasn't called because a player is a rookie -- the viewer then internalizes this info as "fact" when it's not.

Did you ever actually look up FTA for some "stars"? Be honest. You did not. You just assume so because the announcers tell you.

Well, Kobe had a high of over 800 FTA like 8 years ago, and it has declined EVERY year since then to just half of that high last season. The most famous basketball player in the world, and getting LESS calls.

Stop listening to announcers, and stop being lazy and do some actual research. See torocan's posts, for example.

 

Correction. Every year except one year where it went slightly up compare to the previous year before starting to decline again.

 

I thought this is not "xxxxx is a joke" thread

 

Harden's scoring 26 pts on just 19 shots, on a team without any real superstar besides him. He's also one of the league's leading scorers, and he's on a 0.500 team in the WEST. If you actually watched our games you'll also see how he carried the team several times, exploding in the 4rth quarter and putting the opponents away. And you think he's not a number 1 option?

I know you don't want this thread to be derailed by Lin, but the truth is the only reason you'll make a thread like this is:

1) You're an idiot
2) You're a Lin nuthugger


Either way, 1 star for you

 

I have never seen so many convoluted excuses all in an attempt to bash Harden.

So Harden leading the NBA is free throw attempts is bad....
The refs are trying to help Harden......
Harden is not a distributor......
Harden skowled at Lin at the end of the Spurs game.....
Harden and McHale are not a democracy.......

Seriously?
I don't know about you, but I want a guy shooting 86% from the line going to the line....
I want a player that puts the other team team in the penalty playing for me...
Harden and James are the only non point guards in the top 30 for assists....

The other odd point is that many of the posters attempting to discredit Harden in this thread are notorious LOF. I am not sure why they hate Harden but they do.

 

Here is an article for you to consider Falcao.... not trying to be pushy.... just sometime, when you have a little free time, it may be worth your time.

I am just trying to educate..



Incompetent People Too Ignorant to Know It

By Natalie Wolchover | LiveScience.com – Mon, Feb 27, 2012

A growing body of psychology research shows that incompetence deprives people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence. To put it bluntly, dumb people are too dumb to know it. Similarly, unfunny people don't have a good enough sense of humor to tell.

This disconnect may be responsible for many of society's problems.

With more than a decade's worth of research, David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, has demonstrated that humans find it "intrinsically difficult to get a sense of what we don't know." Whether an individual lacks competence in logical reasoning, emotional intelligence, humor or even chess abilities, the person still tends to rate his or her skills in that area as being above average.

Dunning and his colleague, Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now at New York University, "have done a number of studies where we will give people a test of some area of knowledge like logical reasoning, knowledge about STDs and how to avoid them, emotional intelligence, etcetera. Then we determine their scores, and basically just ask them how well they think they've done," Dunning said. "We ask, 'what percentile will your performance fall in?'"

The results are uniform across all the knowledge domains: People who actually did well on the test tend to feel more confident about their performance than people who didn't do well, but only slightly. Almost everyone thinks they did better than average. "For people at the bottom who are really doing badly — those in the bottom 10th or 15th percentile — they think their work falls in the 60th or 55th percentile, so, above average," Dunning told Life's Little Mysteries. The same pattern emerges in tests of people's ability to rate the funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own performance in a game of chess. "People at the bottom still think they're outperforming other people." [Graph]

It's not merely optimism, but rather that their total lack of expertise renders them unable to recognize their deficiency. Even when Dunning and his colleagues offer study participants a $100 reward if they can rate themselves accurately, they cannot. "They're really trying to be honest and impartial," he said.

If only we knew ourselves better. Dunning believes people's inability to assess their own knowledge is the cause of many of society's ills, including climate change denialism. "Many people don't have training in science, and so they may very well misunderstand the science. But because they don't have the knowledge to evaluate it, they don't realize how off their evaluations might be," he said.

Moreover, even if a person has come to a very logical conclusion about whether climate change is real or not based on their evaluation of the science, "they're really not in a position to evaluate the science."

Along the same lines, people who aren't talented in a given area tend not to be able to recognize the talents or good ideas of others, from co-workers to politicians. This may impede the democratic process, which relies on citizens having the capacity to identify and support the best candidate or policy.

The ultimate takeaway of the research is the reminder that you really may not be as great as you think you are. And you might not be right about the things you believe you're right about. And if you try to joke about all this, you might not come off as funny as you think.

Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on Facebook.