You don't have to do everything to be an MVP caliber player. Harden can still do his thing, but we should have someone else initiating the offense. I know we brought in Lawson for that, but he is a terrible fit, seems he is not versatile enough to share the ball. DD
You're right and I said as much - Lawson was bad, but Lawson wasn't bad at passing the ball around. He has been terrible at penetrating and being a scoring threat. If anything, he was too passive. The other guys would scramble around getting open, making cuts and we had a 5-6 game stretch where Harden would just watch Lawson on offense when he'd come in, and obviously he was getting blown by regularly on the defensive side. I'm not at all saying that we didn't have to go back to Harden. We did, because Lawson couldn't carry a load, and Harden was making it even more impossible for him to succeed. When Harden doesn't have the ball, he should still be the #1 offensive option if he's on the court, but he was a #5 option in that role. We had to scrap the whole thing and go back to what worked last season. But I don't believe we're a team that needs a Ty Lawson to be more effective than we currently are when Harden doesn't handle the ball. You can pass the ball around, move off the ball and create on offense much better than we do even with Beverley/Terry at PG. Shouldn't stick with one person, just keep it flowing, and make good decisions. That's on the coaching staff IMO.
Harden is an elite (and willing) passer. Some of his passes are so elite they go out of bounds or to the opponents. Because Harden is soon to be the most elite of all time at turning the ball over. Everything is relative my dear Watson.
Sigh. It would be nice if his teammates were more consistent shooters. If Harden was averaging 10 assists a night he wouldn't get hated on as bad. Ball hog or turnover machine? Damned if you do damned if you dont.
How??? Harden wants control of the ball.... Every pg we have gives the ball up to Harden and then move to the corner... In the 1st quarter the starting pg will start off running the offense and then somewhere in the middle of the quarter it goes to Harden taking over. So either Harden is ignoring the coach or that's the game plan. T_Man
Just for kicks....went through the whole league with this calculation: ORBs+STLs-TOV Any guesses who was the absolute worst in the entire league?
He's needs help it's so simple so right in front of our faces but no one wants to admit that. Generally you don't blame the guy you depend on too much for not doing more. You blame yourself for not getting that guy more help. We have one of the best offenses because of him but what people don't realize is that once you key in on him it's over. Once Harden sits our elite offense is done, once he is tired we are hampered and when he is doubled or tripled say goodbye to your lead because no one else can do anything. Curry has Klay and Green and AI. Duncan has Aldridge, and, Leornard, Parker etc. Lebron has Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love for gods sake. Durant has Russel Westbrook. Even Kyle Lowry has Derozan it's ridiculous to think by having only one elite scorer you could win a championship. What we hear is he should be better no he should have help.
i love how we went from the "one of the deepest" team when things seems to look up ===>> "he needs help!" as now things have gone deep south. it's not tennis. an individual player has a team consists of his own coach, trainer and such. it's a team sport. if one wants to have an idol, bball is not the best choice.
A) All of a sudden everybody on the team teamed to **** because they are not good players B) Something is causing everybody to play like **** I'm gonna go with B... and I'm gonna attribute it to: 1) JBB is an idiot 2) Harden is so busy padding his stats and his 'useage rate' that nobody can get into a groove... I'm sure dwight is tired of being harden's 'rebound b****'
Another stupid post making Harden responsible for other people's effort and play, lol. This has been proven wrong long ago. They suck even when Harden isn't in the game. And the reason why we don't have a large enough sample size of how atrocious we would be without Harden is because he's never injured.
Harden started the year playing awful on both ends of the floor. He deserves a lot of the blame for the poor start to the season. If he began the year playing at the level he is now the team would be 10 games or so above .500, right in the mix for the 4/5 seed. They had an easy opening schedule they didn't take advantage of. Just beating the Nuggets the three times we played them and Brooklyn twice would put us now at 33-24, as opposed to 28-29. The problem right now is all the disappointment of losing has led to chemistry problems, people not accepting their roles. Winning covers up a lot those issues. Harden is no longer the problem, he's been playing elite level offense for a few months now, his defense is still bad, but nothing like it was to start the year. We are getting very little from the PF position this year, something that was actually a positive last year with Smith/DMo playing well. Lawson and Jones both play very tentative, they have been awful this year. Right now Lawson has a negative 9.4 point on/off court net rating, jones has a team worst -11.7 net rating. Brewer has been bad more often than not, unfortunately J.B. has expanded his role from last year, he's playing way too many minutes. The defense has fallen off a cliff from where it was last year. Part of that is Harden's fault , but there are other reasons as well. They have numerous players in the rotation that are bad defenders (Lawson, Harden, Thornton, Terry, Jones) and guys like Brewer gamble too often going for steals. Another big factor is Trevor's defense has taken a big step back this year. Looking at the on/off court numbers, opposing teams are scoring 110 points per 100 possessions with him on the court, 105.3 off. Last year those numbers were 103 points on the court, 104.5 off. For Harden this year teams are scoring 109.2 points with him on court, 106 off. They each have positive net ratings overall though, due to them both being over +7 on the offensive end. I would also add that with all the problems I just pointed out, the team's schedule in now really tough. It will be that way most of the rest of the year. They really made things difficult not picking up wins when the schedule was soft. Check out the Rockets on/off numbers, they are pretty interesting: http://www.basketball-reference.com/teams/HOU/2016/on-off/
It's about time somebody called out larsv8. His rampant blind homerism has been ruining this website for years.
Rockets last 15 games 6 wins, 9 losses Just saying. We used to hear KLove and we now hear DMC being branded as empty stats guy despite them putting up huge numbers on losing teams.
Yet most teams would love to have either of those two players on their teams. Including the Rockets. But you're right. Winning cures all. Everybody loves you when you're winning.
You forgot the 4 turnovers and zero defense. Harden can't win on the court because he turns the ball over way too much, he controls too many possessions and doesn't make his teammates better, he isn't leading his team because he's lay them, and he gives up too much on the defensive end. He is having an awful season, last 15 games included. You have to watch the games. Not just stare at stats.
