Lowe on OKC Finances and the Harden Trade Legacy

Here you go.

 

The problem with that line of thinking is that we have to ignore how other NBA GMs perceived Harden coming off an amazing year as a 6th man in 2012. Teams wouldn't give up guys like Bradley Beal, Jonas V. and Klay Thompson for him. Of course now the Thunder and other GMs look silly for hesitating on giving Harden a max contract but this time last year the number of teams that were willing to give up good value and max him out was not very high. LMA's value now is much much higher than Harden's was last summer.

 

Also if you end up having to match a max offer sheet for Harden there is no guarantee that you will be able to unload him without taking on large amounts of salary while also getting good talent. I'm not saying OKC made the right call but holding out had its risks too. It just so happens that the option they chose blew up in their face.

 

About Harden's trade value as of October 2012:

I wonder how many NBA teams saw him as a legitimate, no-doubt-about-it, max contract elite player at that time and how many of them had doubts because he'd only been a sixth man in OKC.

Daryl Morey was clearly pretty confident in Harden's abilities since the Rockets signed him to a 5-year $80M extension before he even played one game for the Rockets. This is what one would conclude by looking at all of the analytics data on the guy: 125 ORtg, 66% TS%, 21.5% Usage Rate, with only 49% of his FGs being assisted, 6.3 FTA per game to 10.7 FGA. Everything pointed to a guy who has elite scoring/shot creation ability and should be able to scale up his role while remaining very efficient (if not quite as insanely efficient as he was in a lesser role).

But what about teams who looked at the guy through more traditional views? Did they see a guy who had never been a regular starter, played more than 32 mpg or scored more than 17 ppg? Did they doubt that he could play without two superstar teammates? Did they focus on his struggles vs. Miami in that small but highly visible sample?

For what it's worth, here's Bill Simmons' take in March 2012 on his yearly "Top 50 NBA Trade Value" column:

Simmons isn't an NBA GM but he is a pretty serious NBA fan and talks to reporters and team sources pretty regularly.

Anyhow, if a GM, especially one of a team with elite young prospects and high picks (i.e. a typically a bad team) had doubts whether he's getting a surefire max-player, but knew that he would need to pay him max or near-max salary (if not right away, then very soon), this would seem to make him hesitate before giving up valuable assets for the guy, no?

 

I wonder if the OKC "model" actually hurt the Thunder in looking for trade value. A rebuilding team might not trade for Harden because he'd make them too good to stockpile back to back lotto picks

 

The Harden trade reminds me a lot of the Google IPO back in 2004. Everybody knew the name Google and knew that it was a big up and comer in the tech world but people had no idea how big it was going to be. Guys like Steve Woj from Apple were afraid to take the risk back then because even though google was the best search engine in the world and was branching out it was still a search engine first. A few years later everybody is kicking themselves for not buying it at $85/share when it is selling for $500/share. People can look back and say you were dumb for not buying google back then but that would be ignoring the fact that even though it showed signs of huge potential it was still a risk based on what it was at the time. Morey bought every single share of Harden at $85.

 

This is very true. I wonder how many people here on CF knew Harden to be this good before the trade.

I for one doubted whether he was a legit first option for a contender. And I was wrong.

 

Yes, that's what I was doing. And yes, $83mil is still not much compared to LA. But I was pointing out that $15mil was a disingenuous number because it was not the reason Bennett moved the team to OKC. That the city must've gave him a lot of extra benefit for him to move from a top-15 market in Seattle. Local TV deal reflects the market size. It doesn't reflect what the tax payers in OKC gave Bennett for the right to call a team their own.

 

Doesn't this just make Presti even more stupid for trading Harden? If Morey can extend Harden for the max without blinking an eye, surely Presti would think the same. So if Harden had a severely depressed trade market, then Presti would've done better to let Harden's value grow, rather than trade him cheaply.

http://bbs.clutchfans.net/poll.php?do=showresults&pollid=8108

http://bbs.clutchfans.net/poll.php?do=showresults&pollid=8606

We're looking at nearly half of clutchfans who was happy with both the deal and the contract.

 

Thing was everybody except Morey and his stat geeks kept doubting whether Harden could be a superstar. Didn't OKC fans and some of the media pooh-poohed us for paying max salary to a 6th man?

Presti and his bosses probably bet on the same thing. So when Harden blew up during his 1st 2 games of the season, they finally knew what a colossal mistake they had made.

Even Lebron and the Heat were amazed at his scoring dominance. Durant, Westbrook and his teammates knew. They said their 2nd team with harden beat their 1st team during scrimmages many many times.

 

Presti even talked to Washington and Golden State first to try to trade Harden. They didn't want Harden (for Beal and Thompson respectively, IIRC). A sign that GMs didn't think highly enough of Harden.

HOU was 3rd in line for OKC to talk to. Morey of course jumped on it offering him the trade package that ORL rejected for Dwight. Everything else is history.

Morey told media and HOU fans that in their stats, Harden scored well with the OKC 2nd team but was even more prolific and efficient when he played with Durant and/or Westbrook. Other teams don't keep those kinds of stats.

 

We weren't even 3rd according to reports. Apparently Presti called the Raptors about Jonas V and they shut him down.

 

Of course you are right, but indeed Presti didn't know Harden was this good. You can't just assume a GM knows how good each of his players could have been. If that's the case there would be no winning/losing trades in the NBA.
If he was confident that Harden was a hidden top-10 player, he would definitely lock him up first and then seek trades later. He could even trade Westbrook or Ibaka who have higher market value instead.

I would guess he views Harden as a top-30 or top-20 player. A player in that tier is worth max-dollar in the right situation, but not in a sixth-man role and definitely not in a financially-straddled team like this case with Thunder. If you don't think Harden can significantly outperform a ($15M/year) max contract (which superstars do), it makes sense to split the money for two solid $8M/year type of player in positions of need from a team-balancing point of view. In the mean time, they got a stop-gap in Martin and a rookie-of-the-year candidate in Lamb and multiple draft picks. It did look like decent value (for a sixth man/borderline star) at the time. Most criticism on Sam Presti at the time was that he should not risk their chance to win-now for the sake of the unpredictable future, rather than complaining he got too little in return.

Morey projected Harden as a better player partly because he is a better GM than Presti, partly because we were desperate for a star and willing to take risks. Of course hindsight is 20/20, Harden is arguably a top-10 player and we won the trade big time, but it really wasn't that clear at the time. See how the Warriors and the Wizards passed up on the trade.

Also thanks for the CF vote links. I do remember the 50/50 voting result on if Harden is worth a max contract. That paints a borderline star (top-25-ish) player, doesn't it?

 

Considering that OKC actually payed in (rather than received) to revenue sharing, he must have the sweetest of all sweet heart arena deals.

 

Of course presti knew how good harden was he had 66 ts%. I think on thunder he would have still been 3rd fiddle. Do you want to pay max money for a 3rd fiddle?

Just like people are wondering if bosh should get max money.

 

Yes

I thought Harden was worth what we gave up easily. I one year rental and some draft picks and Lamb was an easy choice. Saying that I never expected Superstar.

 

Everyone can check his TS% from the box score, but before the trade still very few people believed he was a top-20 player in the league, not to mention a top-10 one. Remember TS% isn't the only metric to evaluate a player. Presti did have more first-hand info on Harden than other GMs, but projecting what a bench player can do (and can develop into) in an expanded role in real NBA games is by no means easy.

Projecting Harden to be a top-10 player in the league before the actual game test was the hard part. If that was a given, even an average clutchfans can do better than Presti in handling that trade. To the very least he could easily trade a well-known commodity--Westbrook for one of the many decent PGs in the league plus a full roster of good role players on bargain contracts, leaving them a contending team and a good financial book for years to come. But did he have that kind of confidence in Harden?

 

OKC got Morey'd. It happens.

 

No one in the NBA expected it. Otherwise teams would have been beating on the Thunder's door with better offers. I'm not saying that Morey got lucky. He saw a player who he thought could be special, and he went for it.