SHOOTING FROM THE LIP
After forcing his way out of Houston, Harden’s dream of winning title with Nets seems destined to fail
This isn’t about whether or not Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving and James Harden are going to successfully play together, for as long as they’re together. This isn’t about whether the latest AAU All-Star team in the NBA, this one assembled by Sean Marks, is going to win a championship. Spoiler alert: It’s not.
This isn’t even about how Marks, the guy who got the Nets out of the ditch in which they ended up after the general manager before him, Billy King, traded all those future draft choices to the Celtics for Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce. By the way? You know who two of those draft choices turned out to be for Danny Ainge and the Boston Celtics?
Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, now the core of a team with as good a record as anybody else in the Eastern Conference coming into the weekend.
So Marks, a smart guy, not only didn’t learn from the recent history of his own team, one whose history got him his job. He just repeated it.
But this isn’t just about him, either. It is about the current, bearded face of spoiled, entitled NBA superstars, one who threatened to hold his breath, even making $40 million a year or whatever he is making, until the Houston Rockets let him go play where he wanted to play. This is about James Harden, who won’t win a title in Brooklyn the way he hasn’t won one anywhere else.
You know what Harden proved in Houston with the bush-league way he forced himself out of town? That his owner there was as defenseless against lousy behavior like his the way the guys guarding Harden are so often defenseless. Maybe one of these days, maybe in the league’s next go-around of collective bargaining, Adam Silver’s league can figure out a way to slow down player shakedowns like this, or even wipe them out entirely.
Have other star players behaved the way Harden just did? Sure they have. Anthony Davis didn’t trade himself to the Los Angeles Lakers. But you have to love it when you see LeBron James, and his decision to take his talents to South Beach, referenced when somebody acts out the way Harden just has. On what planet? LeBron was a free agent. What protocols was he violating the way Harden was just violating, all over the place in Houston, and not just about masks?
No. Harden is the poster guy, now and for the foreseeable future, for NBA stars who want what they want when they want it, as soon as they’re not happy playing where they are. Even when that team, the Rockets, did everything under the sun to give him what he wanted when he wanted it.
And at the end of the day, you know what happens with this guy? He gets rewarded. He ends up exactly where he wanted to end up, which means Brooklyn. He gets to once more play on the same team with Kevin Durant. And please don’t compare Durant to Harden. Durant went to the Warriors as a free agent same as he came to the Nets as a free agent.
Nobody would ever suggest that a great kid like Luka Doncic would ever act the way Harden just has in Dallas. But say he does? Say he wakes up one morning and decides he wants to go play in Los Angeles or New York or Miami. What if he were to someday hold Mark Cuban hostage the way Harden just held Tilman Fertitta in Houston? The sad reality is this: Cuban would have to make the best deal he could for Doncic the way Fertitta’s team just did for Harden. And so would the owner in Memphis if Ja Morant someday gets into the same lane that Harden just took out of a town in which he no longer gets to play.
Here’s the deal on this deal: Harden comes up a bad guy here, no matter how well he plays basketball. And raise a hand if you think this kind of player movement, done this way, is good for business in the NBA? Here’s another spoiler alert:
It’s not.
You look at the way Marks and the Nets rolled this thing up, and ask yourself a question: How would things have played out if the Nets had been 10-2 when the trade was finalized instead of 6-6, and a half-game better than the Knicks at the time? After just a dozen games, with 60 left barring some kind of pause on the season, the Nets were no longer being carried along by the roar of the crowd they heard when Durant and Irving decided to go play together in Brooklyn. All of
a sudden Irving decided, for his own reasons, political and personal, that he didn’t want to play right now. Even with Durant, one of the most gifted players and scorers of all time, the Nets have been just another team.
So now they get James Harden, and they put him with Durant, even as they are probably having more buyers’ remorse than ever with Kyrie Irving, who will eventually and inevitably play his way out of the Barclays Center the way he played his way out of Cleveland, and Boston. And when Irving did leave the Celtics, they were as happy seeing him go as Harden’s former teammates were in Houston.
Go back and read a fine piece that Tim McMahon wrote for Espn.com in the middle of December about the toxic situation that Harden had created in Houston. It includes these two lines about James Harden:
“‘Yeah, he’s going to act up,’ ” a former Rockets staffer said.
That’s the first one.
The second one is this:
“‘He’s never heard no before.’ ”
And when the Rockets even attempted to say no, Harden shamefully stopped trying, whatever he says about giving a full effort. And then, according to credible reports, and being the team player that he is, he attended a mask-less Christmas party at a strip club. Ho ho ho.
On his way out of town Harden, somehow thinking the world was still hanging on his every word, talked about how far the Rockets were from being an elite team and said, “I don’t think it can be fixed.”
There you have it from James Harden, newly minted Brookyn Net, happy at last, at least for now:
Everybody into the lifeboats, boys. Me first!
What a guy.