Cruise control yields win
Only Harden refuses to take foot off the gas when Dallas threatens to make a game of it
DALLAS — By now, James Harden is hardpressed to surprise Mike D’Antoni. He might impress his coach. On nights like Wednesday against the Mavericks, when Harden proved capable of doing whatever moved him, he could please his coach.
The power to surprise him seemed to have been exhausted in their first season together and the halfseason reprise since.
Then Harden took a step inside midcourt and flung a ridiculously high lob to Clint Capela cutting to the rim, tossing his pass as casually as if it were a wadded up ball of paper into a trash can.
After Capela’s slam in a game crowded with them, D’Antoni turned to Harden, rolled his eyes and tilted his head as if to say, “What was that?” as Harden broke up laughing. The Rockets were well on their way to a 20-point lead and a 104-97 victory in which they seemed in
control from the moment the lights came on.
Though D’Antoni lamented the stretches in which the Rockets did not defend as he wanted — though they held a third team in four games shy of 100 — he went back to the play he could hardly believe, citing a reminder of how Harden’s control of the game made whatever runs the Mavericks pieced together irrelevant.
“His passing was incredible,” D’Antoni said. “He threw one lob that was ridiculous. I just looked at him like, ‘That was ridiculous. You can’t do that.’ I mean, he was just so good. Even (the Mavs’) Wesley Matthews looked at him like, ‘Are you kidding me? Halfcourt and you throw that?’ It was just a great play.” 3-point happy It was also typical. Harden had 25 points with 13 assists and just one turnover. But more than his individual numbers, the Rockets outscored the Mavericks by 30 points in his 32½ minutes on the floor.
The Rockets began the game hitting their first six 3-pointers and had a season-high 10 in the first quarter, one shy of the NBA record. In the fourth quarter, Harden and Capela combined to score 11 points in five minutes to put the game away.
“That’s James,” Capela said. “When he sees me, I feel confident he will throw the ball. It’s always fun to play with him. The pass, it came back down. At first I was like, ‘Oh.’ But it came back down. Thanks.”
In between, the Rockets’ greatest challenge seemed to be convincing themselves that the Mavericks could catch them. They needed five minutes to bolt to a 13-point lead. They trailed for 27 seconds in the game. Eventually, the defense picked up enough to get by with the stretches they misfired while putting up 51 3-pointers.
“I don’t think we got 3-happy,” D’Antoni said of the 19th game in which the Rockets attempted 50 3-pointers the past two seasons, compared with the three in NBA history for the rest of the league. “We got a little a lack-ofdefense happy. You think it’s going to come easy because you’re scoring every time. We’re hitting 70 percent on 3s (in the first quarter). If you’re up 10, you should have been up 15, or if you’re up 15, you should have been up 20.
“As many as you make in the first quarter, the thermostat resets. You’re going to shoot about 40 percent. We just had to knock them out. Eventually, we did.” Gordon, Ariza produce
If the Rockets thought they could dial up their offense at will, it was difficult to convince them otherwise because they were usually right.
“That’s every single game,” Harden said. “Tonight was (about) just not allowing a letup. They were going to make a run. As long as we contest every shot and be on the same page defensively, that was the goal.”
Eric Gordon went from missing all 16 3-pointers he put up in the previous two games to hitting 4-of-7 on his way to 17 points. Trevor Ariza went from making 1 of 2 shots in his first game back from a two-game suspension to scoring 23 points. Finally, Harden and Capela put on a show that even D’Antoni had not seen before.
“Yeah, that’s fun for me,” Harden said. “Mike is a great coach. … He has a lot of faith and trust in us to go out there and rack up wins for him.”