yes, I too think the vocal minorities here have too much say on matters of Harden. If you actually look at the polls, majority of people still hold favorable view towards Harden, but they don't voice their opinions as loudly as the haters do.
Sorry let me clairfy for you harden has made more free throws than FG attempts this season. This was well known all season how he over relied on drawing fouls when driving to rim instead of finishing strongly. Free throws made 720 Field goals made 710 its actually over 50% lol
I get a lot of the criticism directed at Harden is well deserved. But to put Lowry, Klay, and Lilliard above him is mind boggling. Definitely people's negative perception of his defense is being exaggerated and causing people to underrated him.
I understand your logic but you're determining a players values based on three things, offense, defense & leadership.. when in reality it's a boat load of other factors. For example, the category of offense has a ton of factors, turnovers, points, assists, offensive rebounds, shooting efficiency etc... As does defense, on ball defense, off ball defense, defensive rebounding etc. Other factors apply like fatigues, touches. Leadership in itself is entirely too broad of a category to define whether a player is good at it or not. What you're doing is making a category cluster of offense, defense, leadership. It's an incomplete determination, which makes your argument false. Also *general point* determining whether a player cares or even worse, whether a player got two coaches fired based on your 3rd person interpretation of what goes on in their lives is an incredibly flawed argument in itself.
Blame it on Harden himself. We can see him not even trying on defense. Unlike AB, Harden can play good defense if he wants to. Lowry used to play for Rockets, nobody ever questioned his effort.
TNT and ESPN did their job. Lillard earned that spot so cant hate on him. He carried a lackluster team to a better record than houston and put on great performances against GSW . Rockets barely passed .500 and record always makes an impact on individual rankings
what you're saying is irrelavant because Harden's highest total FT attempts in a season is not even top 40 of all time http://www.basketball-reference.com/leaders/fta_season.html Harden just doesn't shoot as much, that's why the proportion looks like that. There were many other players in NBA history who shot more free throws, but also just shot more in general. Harden - for better or worse - is a pretty conservative shooter. He doesn't chuck as much, like Kobe, Iverson or Westbrook.
How does that constitute to 50% of his points being from the free throw line? Field goals & three pointers are worth more than a point. Harden scored 720 points off of free throws, he scored 2376 all in all. How would that be 50% of his points? That's roughly 30%. You're trying to validate an argument by trying to prove another argument.
There are a lot of factors, but there is simply no universal stats to make a 100% error fee definition. So in the end you combine those factors and make a few big categories to make an objective view, instead only looking for certain stats and become biased. I think for All NBA players, the categories should be offense, defense, intangible(leadership is the most important factor for franchise player). Harden only gets one here. The other 5 guys gets at least two and their offense wasn't bad either while Harden's defensive effort is just terrible. I have no doubt if Harden belongs on the list if he just tried to play even average defense. But he didn't this season. Last year Harden almost won MVP because he tried harder. Another example is Green gets 2nd team as forward. A lot of guys have better offensive talent than him, but his defense and intangible are just elite.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Clyde Drexler on Harden missing All-NBA teams "James Harden - top 5 player in the game today, plays hard every night." <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Rockets?src=hash">#Rockets</a></p>— SiriusXM NBA Radio (@SiriusXMNBA) <a href="https://twitter.com/SiriusXMNBA/status/735948763114680320">May 26, 2016</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
You are predicting he is a better player than Russell Westbrook, Steph Curry, Lebron James, Kevin Durant, ... ?
Team record is huge. There's a reason why Anthony Davis didn't even make any All-NBA team. He's better than a lot of those guys listed but his team is horrendous.
And some people don't look at stats or elevate them because they are too busy face palming while 2 points were given up on a basket cut while Harden is pointing his spindly fingers at his teammates. Oh, and the bad part for 'us' who point these things out isn't the backdoor or 2 points, it's the pointing of the finger at guys who are supposed to be down to ride with you.. That's a character issue, and no real leader shirks responsibility or blame like that.
