It’s so insane that people still insist on making excuses for harden after all these years. Even after an undeniable track record of playoff failures. You can’t just say “well, he’s had good games too”, of course he has, no one has ever argued that he hasn’t. Both are true. Very few players of his stature, in his generation, have had the number of high leverage failures he has had in the playoffs. You can set your watch to it every year.
Trends are our friend...until they're not. We're still dealing with incredibly small sample sizes for these selected "high leverage games". Humans love to find patterns from small pieces of data and try to extrapolate to find a heuristic, so we can say X + Y = Z and we can sleep at night thinking we've got it mostly all figured out. We can't take a fairly small sample of games and then extrapolate that into an entire trend. The reality is that is that this topic is extremely complex with lots of variables and biases that effect the objective result. Which at the end might just be some bad luck/variance over a short run of data. It might seem like we have years of data to confirm our narrative, when in reality it's like 10 games over 7 year time frame. I'm not really buying the narrative that based on a 10-12 game sample size, it is a repeatable trend every time now and going forward until eternity, that Harden suddenly turns into a pumpkin every G6 and G7. This a Top 30-40 player of all-time that has had had to carry multiple teams on his back and faced some of the toughest opponents NBA history. I think more likely than not, it's just a bit of some negative variance in some challenging situations, over what seems like a large sample size...but in reality is slightly more than a handful of games. At any time he have literally 1 or 2 clutch games and then suddenly we'd see the narrative shift in the other direction.
at some point I think the Clippers have to give up on this whole team that they are building. I completely understand why people don’t want James back, but I really envisioned a trade of Fred,Tari and Capela with Harden maybe a couple second rounders coming back as fair.
I really don't want Harden because I think we already struggle enough on the defensive end at times. The Reed/Sengun lineups struggle enough on that end, I don't even want to know what Reed/Sengun/Harden would look like. We need someone with good point guard skills, low turnovers, can control the pace (and Harden does all this), but we need someone who is not a total defensive traffic cone.
sure we struggle on defense at times, but the Rockets are still the 4th best defense in the NBA lineups with Reed and Sengun have a 111.3 defensive rating which would be 8th in the NBA Harden-Norman Powell backcourt was a top 3 defense just last season
Yeah good point. There's only so much you can cover for though. Sengun/Sheppard/Amen together are at 112 but Sengun/Sheppard with no Amen are at 120.8, which is really bad. Maybe that just means the answer is to make sure Amen is always on the court with those guys or something, I don't know. I just have a hard time seeing it working. Having Harden's skillset on offense would be super valuable for obvious reasons that I already stated, I just went on a DD-style posting rampage where I posted the same thing in like 6 different threads. I just wish we could get someone that does what he does but also can play defense. But maybe that's wishful thinking and not a realistic thing we could get.
Amen would have to be on the court with them for sure, but he’s already 2nd in the league in mpg behind only Tyrese Maxey at 37.1, so that would naturally happen anyways since he hardly leaves the court…with less playmaking responsibility, maybe he’d be able to ramp up his defense closer to what it was last season not sure a player like that is available, and certainly not for cheap…I don’t think Harden is coming here because FVV is basically Ime’s son and Fred would have to agree to a trade, but Harden for like FVV, Tari, and a random pick is a no brainer to me
Gotta keep the plus defenders around Harden to make up for his statutory defense. and those defenders need to be consistent perimeters shooters also.
interesting. The pick and roll game would be back. More playmaking and passes to the corner and crosscourt etc. getting to the paint and creating inside. His defense sucks and inconsistent issues in post season but might worth analyzing further
