Superstar. Although I admit I am fairly liberal with the term "superstar." I consider the top 10-15 guys in the NBA superstars. But 1st team all-NBA, and 5th in MVP voting? C'mon now.
Has Harden's efforts on the defensive end, improved at all since entering the league? [youtube]wVYJULACcao[/youtube]
Why do u guys always like to discuss so-so topics? Harden is harden whether what u think what he is. What is allstar? what is superstar? can u give a standard? I don't understand why the Rockets fans r such nonsense!
This is way too subjective to prove. All star is easy. You either make the All Star team or you don't. All NBA is the same. Superstar is something else. Where's the line? What puts you in that category? Championships? Individual honors? Scoring titles? That's like, "Hall of Fame" vs. "All time Great". Do they mean the same thing? Off the top of my head let's say it goes like this: Scrub (Dorsey?) Rotational player (D-Mo) Solid contributor/role player (Beverley) Above average role player (Parsons) Borderline All Star (Lowry?) All-Star (Howard) All NBA (Harden) Hall of Famer (Duncan) Once in a generation player (Durant) Once in a lifetime player (MJ) Just some rough examples, but I'm betting even on a list like that there are tons of folks that would disagree. All subjective. Fun to debate though!
What does "harden is harden" mean? I gave you my personal standard in my first post, I think we tend to overuse and misuse the term superstar when comparing to allstar. I feel like we only have a few superstars today, but many allstars. And Harden is an all star. If you want to see my personal standards, read right under where you quoted me. We like to discuss what we think of our players because its not like there is anything else to talk about... Unless you want to talk about how butthurt we are over parsons, or what a jerk bosh is, how pat riley is the devil, or how morey failed, how we gave away lin AND our first rounder for nothing, or would you rather talk about how much an impact Joey Dorsey is going to have?
What are you comparing you ridiculous asshat? The stats are all wrong. And you compared age 23 Harden to 24 Arenas. Also Harden never shot .446 from the field in a season.
All stars are made in the regular season. Superstars are made in the Finals. IMO, true superstars play within the team concept and elevate their teammates to achieve greatness. They are flat-out winners. They are clutch. They embrace the pressure of making the right play, regardless of the stat sheet. They are unstoppable, fearless and consistently dominant. This generation has its lot of faux superstars. Given the above criteria I would say each generation has 3-4 genuine superstars -- not stars. Began watching in the early 80s so I'll start there. 80s -- Kareem, Magic, Bird, Thomas 90s -- Jordan, Olajuwon, Malone 00s -- Duncan, Shaq, Kobe 10s -- LeBron, Durant All others like Barkley, Ewing, Stockton, Drexler, Robinson, Miller, Iverson, Dirk, DWade, CP3, etc. are great players but not quite superstar caliber, IMO. The term 'superstar' gets thrown around far too freely for my liking. Others will disagree, and that's OK.
I actually pulled those from an article long ago comparing the 2 and those were the numbers they used. But that's fine if they are slightly off, I pulled the following numbers from basketball-reference.com myself. Arenas: vs. Harden:
If harden doesnt show dramatic improvements on defense this upcoming year, im going to make the bold statement that he has reached his peak. He's going to be as good as he will ever be. This is a make it or break it season for Harden in my mind in terms of stardom.
First of all, Wes Matthews isn't a scrub. He's a good 2 guard on both the offensive and defensive end. Secondly, if you believe that Wes Matthews shut down Harden then either you didn't watch the series or you don't know much about basketball. Portland schemed their entire defense to stop Harden. They chose to not double Dwight and to completely ignore our PF (Jones or Asik) so that they'd have two big men camped in the paint at all times. Matthews responsibility was to play up on Harden to contest a 3 pointer and over play to the outside to force him to the middle where Aldridge and Lopez were waiting. That's the exact same strategy that OKC used in the 2013 playoffs. Dwight is always going to be near the rim so his man will be down there too but we have to have a legitmate threat at the PF spot to pull that second big man out of the paint. Otherwise, we'll see the same thing next year too. It doesn't really matter who we play, if Harden has to go 1 on 3 to score then he's not going to be effective.
Yeah, Harden was schemed out of the picture. It was a beautiful triangle formed behind Matthews at all times. The Rockets didn't counter with either scheme or players (there was no player they could run at the 4 to open things up). The team is gonna have to have some different ideas about how to use Harden -- even without a stretch 4 -- because teams are going to resort to the same zone/help scheme every post season.
Incorrect. Harden finished 5th in the MVP voting. http://www.sportsgrid.com/nba/here-...ing-results-kevin-durant-wins-in-a-landslide/ What you linked to is the ESPN weekly rankings ladder. That has no connection to the actual MVP voting.
