Does Harden really make players better around him? Look, Harden wants to win but the problem is he wants to win on his own accord with him putting up big numbers He wants his numbers firstly and if we win in the process so be it. Teams like GSW and SAS don't care about personal numbers as a priority, they care about the W first and foremost. The sum of their parts is greater than the whole due to teamball, trusting each other and enjoying each other success. We have a veyr talented roster who sum of the parts is less than the whole mainly due to our #1 player caring more about his numbers Until Harden gets the importance of teamball and that winning is the ONLY goal as JB put it, we will not come close to winning it all.
Again i dont understand anyone who can claim this idiocy of a theory. What did he do in OKC playing the third wheel? He sacrificed for the greater good because he could. He had the players around him simple as that. You tell me other then letting harden run the pick and roll, what offense will work? Do we even have an offensive system in place? He has to do things the way he does, because its what we RELY on, and without harden we could have the worst offense in the nba, unless we had coaches who knew how to implement lawson. I bet your reasoning that ty lawson hasnt fit well is cuz of harden, when in reality its our coaches....we dont know how to run an offensive system that puts our players in the best position to succeed, blame harden all you want or his "lack of team spirit", but dont try to act as if you know who he is cuz the dude likes to go to stripclubs after the game
i disagree with the consensus take away from carmelos career. it seems like people believe carmelo is the kind of player that has talent but its impossible to build a good team featuring him. this is reasonable because all the teams that have featured him have been unimpressive. however my main take away from carmelos career is that he made extremely poor decisions regarding putting himself in positions to succeed. he has had two opportunities to position himself, and both times he chose to go to new york, apparently motivated entirely by non basketball reasons such as the national social status of new york and a half baked idea of becoming some kind of luxury goods business tycoon and taste maker. this was in the face of the obvious fact that this was not a promising place to maximize his basketball career. furthermore he played his cards and got the knicks to make a big trade for him instead of going in free agency. this made a bad opportunity worse. i believe there could have been a great team featuring carmelo, but his career choices have prevented it from happening. on the other hand james seemed happy playing in oklahoma city which was a good opportunity for his career. ultimately the decision to come to houston was motivated by trying to maximize his basketball career and not the kind of nonsense that was apparently in carmelos mind. i think it has already proven to be the right move, even though he may currently have a championship and a shelf full of 6th man awards in an alternate universe. so in my mind, carmelos fatal flaw is about off the court decisions regarding his career, and james does not have this flaw.
OKC is OKC. It's over. He was on a rookie contract, playing 3rd wheel to two superstars. If you can't see the difference between Harden OKC and this Harden, then I cant help you. I still think and hope he will get it eventually but at this point, OP is right
Every team has a system. Some works while others struggle to work. We've seen our system work but sometimes we have this tendency to go away from said system. There are indeed several parties to blame when that happens. Whether it's Harden, the Coaching, other players or the opposing team forces us to play out of character. No Harden is major contributor to our problems. We all know as he goes so does this team. And if you really don't think his defensive woes aren't a major issue. Then dude your hmoerism is on another level around here.
Harden is what is he is. We can argue all day about what he brings, what he lacks, and so on and so forth, yet he is a net positive on the court, while a majority of the other rotation players are not. You may not like it, you may think it is ugly, but the bottom line is there are not any better alternatives. He is your best shot at winning a title. If it's not good enough, then so be it.
We have a few systems, but there's an awful lot of times it truly disintegrates on court. And that goes both offensive and defensive. So either: 1. The players are unable to follow the system (the plays are unrealistic) 2. The Players refuse to follow the system (subordination). I'll go for the easy way out and say it's a little bit of both... Our defensive plays are just a failure. On offense you must wonder if there's really a play that calls for dribbling out the shot clock and then pass. Logic would indicate that can't be what the staff wants, so that's an indication of a player failing to stick to a feasible plan. Now onto Harden... the problem I see is the lack of HUNGER. It's not about wanting to win (we all do), it's about waking up and thinking about winning. Showering and thinking about winning, eating and thinking about winning. The anecdotes about Kobe are an extreme example, but this also goes for Lebron and Curry. Does this mean Harden will never win a title? I have no idea. There are all kinds of people who won a title. But if he displayed Curry's mentality it's almost certain he would be a much greater player.
I agree with all of this. Early on his career Carmelo was somebody you had to build around. He was so talented he deserved his chance to maximize his potential as the leader of a championship contender. His one, or two, big mistakes were choosing the Knicks. That first offseason the Bulls were clearly his best choice if he wanted to win. Of course, since he had been traded to NYK he was losing millions in the process if he jumped to a winning team on a max deal. But he also was pretty much the principal orchestrator of his trade to NYK in the first place. So yes he squandered his chance to win at the highest level, choosing business reasons instead. Unless you are Jordan Lebron or Kobe, you cannot have both. Soon Harden will have his opportunity to choose. He's only 26 and deserves his chance to lead a team to the title. But he's not Lebron Kobe or Jordan. He can't have both.
