James Harden officially signed a five-year $80 million deal with his new team the Houston Rockets today. Whether this deal ends up being more trick or treat remains to be seen, but I am of the opinion that he is not worth that type of money.
First off, I think Harden will be successful in Houston. I believe that he and Jeremy Lin have the potential to form one of the Association's most dynamic backcourts. He is a heady player, who makes plays and makes the right plays. He's efficient and deploys a complete skill set. Best of all, at 23, he has room for growth.
The question, in my mind, is how much growth? Because at $16 million a year, Harden is going to need to grow a lot in order to justify his newly signed max contract. And the fact that Harden already excels at the things that young players typically improve upon--turnovers, shooting percentage, freethrow shooting, drawing fouls--the only avenue for vast improvement is on the defensive side of the ball. Harden is sneaky athletic, but he isn't an elite athlete, which makes his defensive ceiling somewhat limited as well.
I won't be surprised if Harden goes off for 45 points in a game this season. It's the other nights when he gets 12 points on 4-16 that will separate him from other max-level players.
Sure, on any given night, he can absolutely be the best player on the floor. But putting aside all the fancy per-minute projections (touted as "advanced stats") that show Harden improving his numbers with more minutes, the reality is we are talking about a player who has seven NBA starts to his name, who averaged only 31.5 minutes per game last year (a career high), and who was playing with two of the top 10 players in the NBA.
ESPN's John Hollinger points at the minutes Harden played without Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook last season. He says those numbers, when projected over 36-minute averages, show that Harden scored 30 ppg on 50 percent shooting without Westbrook and Durant. What he fails to mention, however, is that a big chunk of those minutes were played against second string players. That's an extremely important distinction that should not be overlooked, especially when we are talking about fabricated numbers.
Just because Westbrook is a ball dominating guard and Durant is far more likely to put the ball up then he is to pass it, doesn't mean that they are not good teammates or that their presence on the court somehow makes Harden a worse player. Sure, it might not be as easy to get in a rhythm in that situation. That could certainly be the case. But perhaps Harden's struggles were not so much from his teammates, but from his competition. Typically, if Westbrook and Durant (the starters) are in, the competition they are playing against is the opposite team's best--meaning Harden would also be facing much stiffer competition.
Take for instance the NBA Finals.
Was he tired? Maybe, but everyone is tired at that point in the year. Furthermore, that brings into question his endurance. Harden only averaged 31.5 minutes a game last year. Aside from Tony Parker (32.1), Steve Nash (31.6), and Roy Hibbert (29.8), no player that made the all-star team played less than 33 minutes, and that player was 34-year-old Dirk Nowitzki who was coming back from injury and has a career average of 36 minutes per game.
As I previously stated, minutes matter.
Harden will get all the minutes his heart can take this upcoming season and for the next four seasons afterwards. Whether he'll be worth the money he's being paid to play those minutes is still very much in doubt.
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