Will James Harden be the first in league history...to put up 35+pts, 6+ reb, 7+ assists, nearly 2 steals and a block and NOT finish in the top 10 in MVP voting? Saw that Harden has fallen out of the NBA.com MVP rankings. I get that Houston's hasn't been particularly impressive lately, and Harden hasn't had eye popping stat lines but this is a travesty. I mean teams are doubling Harden 50+ ft from the hoop - literally there isn't a single player in the league who is dangerous enough to get that treatment and even despite that he is STILL putting up those numbers. Nevermind the fact injuries have made a stable lineup pretty much impossible all year, or that the 2nd and 3rd best scorers on the team are both shooting career lows when they have been healthy enough to play... The hate is so real that if Harden slips even a little by his own lofty standards and isn't breaking a record every night then people are eager to forget him. I can't remember seeing anything like this in league history. Houston and especially Harden are guilty of one thing and that is they SUCK at controlling the narrative. It's just a shame that the narrative tropes of "revenge games" or "statement games" has become more important than the totality of what a player is doing - the entertainment aspect now is more important than how effective you actually are on the court. Shaking my head....
i saw that list on the nba app as well. sekou smith i think came up w/ it. at first i thought maybe it was like a power ranking from the past week or something. but doncic was #6 while not even playing. dumbass media whores
Sekou has diminished everything Harden for as long as he has been doing that column. He's honestly not worth the time, click, or frustration of engaging with.
A little bit of tough love for harden, you wanted WB here so you get to play with a good friend. Don’t think winning more also comes with it, deal with the consequences
Thank you for reminding me of another narrative/canned storyline about "the alpha dog". Westbrook has had the benefit of frankly some very easy points when teams double Harden at half court. To his credit, he has made teams pay for the strategy but since he has had inflated numbers at Harden's expense, it questions the very concept of the alpha dog on the team making Harden even that less palatable to the media.
Not in the top 10 MVP? Yet another sign that we are in the Matrix?? Go Harden !! Go Rockets!!! ....... ....... .......
Harden simply doesn't fall into an easy to package media narrative. He isn't the cold blooded closer, the isn't the ultra competitive alpha dog(Kobe), he isn't on a redemption tour(Lebron), he isn't the super driven win at all costs type(Kawhi), he isn't an exciting athletic specimen(Giannis) - he is super low key, aloof, private, has a weird energy to him - he's just complicated in a way that doesn't fit neatly into boxes. In short he makes me people form an opinion about what he does well/doesn't do well and we are living in a world where content is consumed so quickly that we don't have time to constantly re-address a complicated legacy. Shades of grey don't play well in the hot take era. While I am sure in real life he is probably very competitive and driven but he is so reserved publicly that people don't generally know that so he continues to exist as this basketball enigma mostly because writers dont have the time to unwrap that story when you can just fire up the redemption trope and talk about Lebron or rewrite one of your "hungry young player" articles to talk about Giannis. It's packaging - Harden is not a star built for engagement in today's media circus - he's just a basketball savant who makes the right choice on the court most of the time even if the optics are bad(searching for fouls, lots of 3s even when you are off, lots of iso play, etc), or if making the right choice includes decreasing your team's chances to win by giving Westbrook the opportunity to brick open 3 pointer after open 3 pointer. He's just a guy who is always going to have extreme parts to his game/personality that make it hard to judge him on balance and that's why the media at large would prefer just avoid the headache. Personally I think Harden needs a much better PR firm working for him to create those narratives for him but that hasn't happened yet.
Nobody wants to see anything from a bunch of 6'5 guys except failure. The wages of wins is all that counts - and if we keep losing games to teams like the Suns, then he's not going to get MVP votes. Needs to be a top 2 team to get the award. Unlikely.
Hadn't thought of it like that before, but now that I am... Tilman/Morey would be smart to hire a small team of exceptionally savvy social media PR types who can begin to reshape the narrative that has been foisted upon us for no apparent reason.
Harden will never be "entertaining" to the NBA and biased media trolls. They hate his style, even though so many players want to emulate it. Mind boggling.