James Harden panicked at the idea that these posts would be different from the previous postseason failure of Ason Sun Run over his previous Clahoma City Thunder on Wednesday with the same play winning Game 7. One of the three-time defending scoring champion and one of Twitter’s favorite LolitaLite targets, winning the game and series for the Houston Rockets with his defense, blocked Lugiants Dort on a potential game-winning shot. The prevailing image of the series will forever try harden, footsteps, darting, trying to throw the ball out of the ball to save possession that can draw attention to the final truth of the night: the game was no different than any other big harden moment.
Yet again, the former MVP came in a big moment soon, and it happened for the same reason it always does. Harden’s style of play is simply less effective in postseason, and a memorable moment won’t change it.
In Game 7, Hard shot 4-of-15 from the field. The previous one is related, but ultimately to some extent is the result of randomness. Harden doesn’t usually go 1-for-9 on 3-pointers. The latter is horrible depending on the process. In the biggest game of the season, recovering from his co-star injury, Hurden made just 15 field-goal attempts. Harden had only eight games in the entire regular season in which he took less than 16 shots. Blame Dort’s incredible defense, that’s all you want, but a year ago, poet Leonard managed to get 39 shots on his face with Jimmy Butler and Ben Simmons. LeBron James, a more passive star than Harden on most nights, averages 23.4 field-goal attempts in Game 7s, and has dropped just under 20 in a single hit.
The superstar has a responsibility to control crime in the biggest games of the season, but the most used player in history, Hurden, added one more mysterious disappearance to his account. He had already done two different 2-of-11 shooting nights against the Golden State in 2015 and then again in 2017 against the Leonard-less Spurs team. Despite being in a different role, Hard tried only 9.6 shots per game in the 2012 NBA Finals, and only 37.5 percent of them hit.
Game 6 was also an insane display of Harden’s big-game fitness. Russell Westbrook dominated the offense as Harden took just one shot in the competitive part of the final four minutes. Harden played five full assets in that period without touching the ball and on the sixth, his only touch came on the rebound that started it. Game 7 did not differ. Hard scored just four fourth-quarter points.
The simple suggestion here is that Harden doesn’t want the ball in big moments, but it’s not that easy. Harden, after all, has some great playoff games to his name, even if he goes beyond his worst ones. The nice explanation is that the big scoring load he did all season is exhausting by the time of postseason. Harden’s love … Nightlife is probably not ideal for conditioning.
The mid-season interval offered a theoretical recovery. Four months of rest might have allowed him to enter the postseason to freshen up, but injuries to Westbrook and Eric Gordon forced him to put the heaviest load on the bubble. A string of second-half 3-pointers in Game-4 missed the string short, Westbrook’s final absence from the series, justifying the notion that his leg was just over.
Many of Harden’s postseason misses come from the front of the rim, but even if fatigue is an explanation, it’s not an excuse. Everyone is fed up in the playoffs. The best players play through it. Whether it’s his conditioning habits or the weight his team has put on him, he needs to change something to keep him fresh for the playoffs. Load management exists for a reason. Math suggests that 0-for-27 shooting at 3-pointers in Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals is just bad luck, but it ignores the reality when the team has only one true shot-maker and that shot-creator. Hoy is too tired to make shots, his teammates usually miss the bad looks he finally gets.
It has been argued that his shameless free-throw total forgives the number of some of his fewer attempts, but Harden is not matching his regular-season product on that front. His free-throw efforts have consistently dropped significantly from his regular-season average of five post-seasons. Harden has averaged 10.9 free-rounds per game over the last three regular seasons … but only 8.3 in the corresponding post-season. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. Especially in Game 7, whistles become notoriously rare in playoffs. Tuesday’s game between Denver and Utah has 7, for example, 28 total free throws. Harden has hit himself a total in almost regular seasons. His personal career high is 27. His nine attempts in Game 7 were below his season average.
That free throw hunt becomes problematic in a setting that disappoints Harden’s playing style. His – point percentage has dropped from the regular season to five consecutive years in the postseason as he can’t draw many expensive three shot fouls, for which he often sells. Fewer calls on the rim make its drives less valuable. An area of the floor harden that is a form of crime that tends to become more valuable in the postseason is routinely overlooked. Chris Paul Lee attempted 37 mid-range shots in the series. Hard took 20 … throughout the regular season. He averaged one per game in the series.
Logic supports that shot profile. He is analytically flawless and believes that long enough samples, 3-pointers, layouts and free throws are very valuable shots on the floor. Those shots have arguably made Harden the biggest regular-season offensive player in NBA history, but the thinking process behind him ignores the crucial differences between regular-season and postseason basketball. The playoff does not provide enough samples to rely on average law. Defenses take away the best look on the floor and force the superstars to look for fights in less valuable areas. Paul hit the ninth-most mid-range jumps in the NBA this season, hitting 54 percent of them. Surprisingly, he was the NBA’s leading clutch scorer this season. Houston has only been in the top five clutch offense once in the last six seasons. It was Paul’s only healthy year as a rocket, during the 2017-18 season.
Paul probably shouldn’t be a better clutch scorer than Harden. He is significantly younger, and despite not being an elite athlete, has lost significantly more on that front at the age of 35 than Pa Paul Le Harden, who is still his prime minister. But Paul’s more varied offensive game gives him a bag of unda tricks when it comes to counting. Defenders don’t know what he’s going to do in the final moments because he can do almost anything.
But Harden’s game is estimated at doing just a few things at such a selective level that, depending on the night-to-night, it increases its uniformity. But defending Harden in seven games could predict that. He will take a stepback, or he will drive. In Houston it no longer even has a true center to use the screener. Time makes it easier to defend. Thunder solved Houston’s MVP by the end of the series.
That doesn’t mean he decides to suffocate forever or that the Lakers have a lock to beat the Rockets in the second round. If anything, he favors Match Harden. Danny Green and Cantavius Caldwell-Pop are good defenders, but they are not Dort.
But it points to a bigger trend which is the single biggest reason Harden has not already won the championship. His history of falling short in the big game is no longer a coincidence. That is an explanatory attitude. And an incredible obstacle aside, Harden needed 11 3-pointers from Robert Cuewington and Eric Gordon to avoid the first round. If the pair had even shot 50 percent from behind the arc, it would have saved them from blaming for another postseason insult so far.
And the fact that it doesn’t mean that this playoff run will be any different. Harden play fell short of the game for the same reason it often fell short, and a nice defensive game doesn’t magically cure those issues. They’ll probably turn their ugly heads again as the Houston postseason progresses, and while the Thunder weren’t good enough to punish him, a nice defensive game isn’t nearly enough to overcome the caliber of this offense. Lakers or clippers.
