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Thursday 5 December 2019 08:42, UK
James Harden has proved he is talented enough to win any game, regardless of the opposition, but have the Houston Rockets given their star man enough support for him to lead them to an NBA championship?
In their last game against the San Antonio Spurs, the Houston Rockets blew a 22-point lead in the fourth quarter and ultimately lost in double overtime. However, there was some controversy over a "missed" dunk by James Harden that was not reviewed, and there is a chance that at some point in the future, the game will be protested successfully, and the end will be played out again.
If it happens, perhaps it will save Houston from two historically poor shooting performances. And if it happens, it will also only add to an already-intense workload for their key players.
With a 7-for-30 shooting performance in 48 minutes, Russell Westbrook became only the sixth player in NBA history to attempt at least 30 field goals in a game and score 20 or fewer points.
Alongside him, Harden put in another monster performance by volume with a 50-point outing in just as many minutes, including 24-of-24 shooting from the free-throw line, but he shot only 11-of-38 from the field to do so, the worst field goal shooting performance of any player to ever score at least 50.
As a team, the Rockets only attempted 112 shots and 36 free throws. The pairing of Harden and Westbrook, therefore, combined for 61 per cent of their field goal attempts and 78 per cent of their free-throw attempts. As well as an incalculable percentage of their overall dribbles, bumps and changes of direction.
The Rockets are deliberately built in a unique way in which the individual isolation talents of their guards, and Harden, in particular, are prioritised and supported where once they would have been so unorthodox. This is not news and has been covered at length elsewhere, including in our earlier look at them.
The fact that Harden somehow continues to score even more points with each passing season, averaging only the tiniest shade below 40 per game thus far this year, is polarising considering the aesthetics of how he does it. It is something that can be taken for granted too, as evidenced by how he somehow did not win the most recent Western Conference Player of the Week award despite averaging 47 points per game. But it is by design. For as long as is foreseeable, the Rockets are built around Harden and the unique way that he does things.
The way the rest of the team has been built, though, brings forth very significant questions about whether the Rockets can sustain what Harden does throughout the season strongly enough to contend for a championship.
Houston are the oldest team in the league. Their roster has an average age of 30.2 years, the only one above 30 in the NBA and one of only three teams (along with the Los Angeles Lakers at 29.1 and the Milwaukee Bucks at 28.7) to be older than 28 years on average. Considering this is a team with championship aspirations, this is fine in isolation - this is not the time to be blooding in youngsters arbitrarily with a view to the long term. The future is now.
Those aged legs, however, may be a problem now. Especially when considering Houston's lack of healthy and available players.
Due to luxury tax concerns, the Rockets have only 14 players on their main roster. Of those 14, Gerald Green will be out for the entire season, and Nene has yet to take the court due to injury either. Nene's unique contract situation means there is no way he will play as few as 10 games even if he was at full health - if he does, it will cost the Rockets millions of dollars for reasons not worth going into in this space - and the other veteran reserve center option, Tyson Chandler, has 18 NBA seasons in his legs and is thus not going to be a big-minute player ever again either.
Even when at full health, then, the Rockets have only 11 guys and a smattering of Chandler, plus the two-way contracts of Chris Clemons and Michael Frazier. Clemons and Frazier can only spend a maximum of 45 days with the team on their two-way deals; to be with the big club for any longer than that, they would have to sign full NBA contracts, and the aforementioned luxury tax concerns will make this difficult to do. Indeed, any additions at all will be hard to come by for that reason, hence the reliance on cheap retread veterans and their two-way players in the first place.
In the case of Clemons in particular, he is getting regular minutes with the team right now due to the injury to Eric Gordon. The words "when at full health" above are doing a lot of legwork; because they are as old as they are, the Rockets will never be at full health. Gordon has missed much of the season so far, Nene and Green have missed all of it, and Clint Capela has also been in and out of the line-up.
The healthy depth that the Rockets do have is, with respect, largely marginal. Ben McLemore has been signed as a reclamation project on the wing, a very keen shooter who goes through hot streaks but who does very little else on the court and gets lost defensively; a couple of good shooting performances as an emergency starter this season do not supplant all the shortcomings of what he does not do.
Austin Rivers' reputation as an isolation guy and pesky defender has always exceeded the reality of his production, and while Thabo Sefolosha has become a savvy defender and rebounder in the frontcourt over the years, he looked aged in his final year with Utah and is surely not capable of big minutes this time around.
Further to this, Gordon is also slowing down even when healthy; a good second half to last season should not omit how poor he was in the first half, when he could not make a shot consistently and made little impact defensively either.
Of course, the fact that these games do not matter compared to the postseason run that Houston are eyeing up is important here. If Gordon does the same again, and is ready come April, so be it. But the fact that Houston are as short-handed as they are, relying on aged players such as he, Sefolosha and the invaluable PJ Tucker while also putting so much on the shoulders of Harden and Westbrook - who, it should be remembered, are not young either - gives rise to very real concerns as to whether they can again crescendo in this way.
This is the era of load management, and regardless of how one may feel about the concept and what it says about players' toughness today, it exists for a reason. Selective rest during the regular season so as to avoid injury and retain stamina for the postseason is done by aspirational teams so that they can be as strong as possible at the most important time of the year.
Houston have not done this; indeed, due to how reliant they are on their two starting guards, plus how little frontcourt depth they have behind Capela and Tucker (whom they are almost as reliant upon in different ways), they likely could not afford to do so even if they wanted to.
All of this compounds the Harden problem. Few players play as many minutes as he does, and none do it while shouldering nearly as much of the team's load as he does.
Harden is second in the league in minutes per game at 37.4, behind only the 37.8 per game of Toronto Raptors guard Fred VanVleet, and he leads the league with a 40.3 per cent usage rate. He simply does more for longer; he both chooses to, and has to. Beyond this and the feast-or-famine wildness of Westbrook, the Rockets' offense plummets off a cliff.
The above all sounds very negative, and so it must be remembered here how good the Rockets are. Notwithstanding the implosion against San Antonio that may yet be reversed anyway, victories over the Miami Heat, LA Clippers and Indiana Pacers on their way to a 13-7 record, plus a hefty 47-point win over the Atlanta Hawks, provide some reason for hope.
In Harden, the Rockets have a player that can win any game, no matter how good the opposition is. He is ridiculous in the best possible meaning of the word.
They have however lost six times to fellow playoff opposition. Already, then, there has been reason to worry about whether they could bridge the gap to the top as constructed.
Having the oldest roster in the NBA, niggling injuries, four players in the top 45 minute-recipients in the league and a severe lack of reliable depth - their 24.7 bench points per game is last in the league, as are the 11.0 rebounds per game, and both are so by quite some margin - will only add to the strain.
The Rockets, therefore, will need to improve during the season. A lack of trade assets - save for Nene's contract and their 2020 first-round pick - will, when combined with the payroll concerns, make this difficult to do in the trade market.
Growth, then, will have to come from within, from the few young players who can make an impact on at least one end. Gary Clark, for example. Isaiah Hartenstein. Clemons. Maybe even Frazier. And the time for that starts now.
Depth will not be forthcoming if it is not blooded in now. As things stand, much of it is too old to ever blood anyway.
