Ugh James Harden dribble fest & all his baggage. He won't age well, no thanks. I'm looking forward to the pick-up in pace and ball movement that Pop instilled in White.
Happy 4th of July to all....
Sorry if this was posted before but while reading something else, I ran into what I thought was a super interesting long-form article on Harden from last October:
https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nba/james-harden-on-his-legacy-and-how-the-joel-embiid-partnership-is-key
Harden on a one-year contract to try to win a championship would be interesting. Probably would still rather have Brogdon just for fit but Harden is still really good.
One snippet:
Almost a week had passed since James Harden's 2021-22 season had come to an end. He still wasn't returning any calls – friends, family, even his manager and longtime friend Troy Payne.
Payne has known Harden for years, so he understood that Harden reacts to year-ending losses by holing up in his Houston home and withdrawing from the world. But this … well, this was different.
"He was broken," one friend of Harden's said. "It was bad. He was really hurting."
This loss marked the fourth straight season that Harden's team had failed to advance past the second round of the playoffs. This time it was with the Philadelphia 76ers, who, just three months after trading for Harden – a deal for which Harden had lobbied, after pushing to be traded to the Brooklyn Nets from the Houston Rockets one year earlier – had fallen in six games to the Miami Heat, dropping Harden's record in his last nine elimination games to 1-8. In the second half of that season-ending loss, Harden took just two shots.
Another day went by. Then another. Payne reached out to some mutual friends to see if they'd heard from Harden. None had. Payne tried Harden's personal chef.
"Yeah, he's here," the chef said. "He's just saying he needs more time to himself."
Finally, around Day 10, Payne's phone buzzed. Harden's name flashed across the screen. He told Payne that he was hurting, physically but also emotionally, that the previous two years – multiple trades, multiple injuries, multiple playoff failures – had left him drained and deflated, that he was eager to put it all behind him.
"The whole two years was a low point. I've never really had to deal with something like that," Harden told me recently. "My body, mentally, physically … It was a lot going on. I mean, basketball is everything to me."
He never said it out loud, but throughout last offseason, friends could see that Harden recognized the window for him to secure his legacy was closing. He turned 33 in August. He was entering his 14th NBA season. He was no longer the star around which everything on his team orbited. He told people he was cool with that.
But also, he told himself over the offseason, "It was time to get back to being James Harden."