James Harden is a Cavalier and it might be great
How does it work?
Please don’t think that a bunch of NBA names in the Epstein files has kept our TrueHoop team from spending days obsessing over the NBA trade deadline. Soon we’ll have reactions to all the big moves.
But the most interesting one, from David Thorpe’s point of view, is James Harden as a Cleveland Cavalier. Is that … good? I asked David all about it.
Did the trade deadline affect this year’s title odds at all?
I’m intrigued with Cleveland. They moved De’Andre Hunter because he wasn’t outplaying Jaylon Tyson. I don’t know if he’ll be any better than De’Andre in the playoffs. But that’s why they did it.
A year ago, De’Andre was really good.
Really good. He was injured some, and that’s a factor. When they lost to Indiana in last year’s playoffs, Darius Garland wasn’t the only one hurt. Hunter missed, I think one game, and so did Evan Mobley. (Henry note: David just says this stuff off the cuff. I google it, and he’s right.) As we’ve written about Cavs coach Kenny Atkinson, Kenny wants athleticism and he wants mental toughness.
James Harden, we know, doesn’t solve either of those problems.
But, I have insight into Team Harden. Harden is very excited about this. He does want to win. He does want to change the narrative about him. And there’s reason to believe he can have a special effect on the Cavs bigs, especially Evan Mobley. To understand that, just look how Ivica Zubac’s game changed when Harden arrived on the Clippers. As we discussed at the time, Harden stayed late to work with Zubac in the pick and roll, and it was highly effective–Cleaning the Glass says that Zubac was a 99th percentile scorer from the mid-range (shooting 63 percent on 2-pointers not at the rim) in Harden’s first year as a Clipper.
In Cleveland, we’ve got Mobley and Jarrett Allen, and now we’re and we’ve got the gravity of Donovan Mitchell (like they had the gravity of Kawhi Leonard in Los Angeles). Donovan’s more available than Kawhi, different player, but now we have two guys who can benefit from a pick-and-roll surgeon like James Harden.
They have a coach, Kenny Atkinson, who can be really good for James. I don’t know that James will listen. I don’t know that he’ll be excited about Kenny, but he should be. Kenny’s a smart, curious guy. People who know him well say, including you and I, both know he’s a fun guy and he’s a straight shooter. He’s close with Mike D’Antoni, who is clearly the Harden whisperer. So I think that there’s real opportunity there for Cleveland to get more out of James than what people probably expect.
And between those two bigs and Donovan, I think James is in a really good spot. No one’s gonna say Harden’s record in the playoffs is amazing. But both Harden and Donovan Mitchell have put together a litany of phenomenal playoff games (and they’ve had some bad games too, especially James), but, I mean, Cleveland didn’t go backwards. They move forward. How much forwards? You know, a lot depends on what they get more out of Evan and Jarrett.
I’m confused. How is it that James Harden, at age 36, in a much more athletic NBA, has incredible plus/minus numbers? (In actual EPM, Harden’s a top 25 NBA player right now, ahead of Jalen Brunson, both Thompson twins, Deni Avdija, etc.) He’s not very fast. He doesn’t really jump. He’s not scoring a million points. How is he so effective with his limited athletic tool set?
We all like to talk about how this or that player “knows how to play,” right?
Sometimes I like to talk about the Pacers’ Johnny Furphy. He knows how to play, more or less, for a 20-year-old Australian guy, who didn’t exactly grow up at Montverde Academy learning the modern NBA basketball system. He just has a good feel for when to cut, when to screen, when to pass, when to race–even though he’s not particularly skilled at all.
Let’s say Furphy is at the bottom of the list, among NBA players who know how to play. Because there are plenty of guys who don’t know how to play in the NBA.
What percentage NBA players know how to play?
Yeah, I mean, it’s not much more than 50 percent. I think it’s fair to say half the league will know how to play. Now, there’s going to be a percentage of players who will learn how to play. So if you take that, well, then, Furphy’s on the bottom of the “knows how to play” chart.
At the very top is a collection of players that includes LeBron and James Harden. They are like Einstein would have been at a physics convention, or Mozart at a meeting of composers. There is an economy of movement that doesn’t just come from lack of mobility. It comes from a total understanding of what’s required. He is not making many false steps. It’s not just movement with the ball and without the ball, it’s also what he can do with the ball, when to pass, where to pass, how to pass.
The way the league is reffed now, defenders can’t touch you with their hands, but they can abuse you otherwise. I teach defenders to keep hands wide and high. Get them wide, get them high, which means their hands are off the player they are guarding. One of the benefits of that is you get more deflections. So on offense, you have to know how to deliver the ball where it goes through a forest of more active hands in passing lanes than ever before, and Harden just knows how to do all of that.
It just seemed like the game that has more chaos with all the blur ball and everything we’ve been talking about and maybe, which I had wrongly anticipated would really hurt a slow guy, but maybe actually, chaos favors people who can read the floor better and never be confused or sped up, right? He’s never bewildered by what’s happening on the floor.
That’s a fantastic way of putting it. I have talked about this on our podcasts before. He’s like Tom Brady must have been in huddles late in his career. What defensive wrinkle hasn’t Harden seen? It’s unbelievable. There are issues, to be clear. He can’t shoot right now, in January: 39 percent from the field, 30 percent from 3. He’s not shooting well at all–and yet, he averaged 24 points a game on 18 shots, because he got to the free throw line eight times a game and made 93 percent of those.
And how does he not get roasted on defense?
