On the day before the opening of NBA free agency, news broke that James Harden will opt into his $35.6 million player option for the upcoming season as he and the Philadelphia 76ers work together on a trade to send him elsewhere, according to reports from both The Athletic and ESPN.
The Los Angeles Clippers are among the teams interested in trading for Harden, per SNY. The New York Knicks are another, per ESPN.
The Knicks make no sense. With loads of dry powder in their asset barrel, they should be resisting their get-rich-quick impulses with every bit of organizational discipline they can muster. Jalen Brunson is better than Harden, who comes with the extra risk of being a one-year rental before he enters free agency next season. Don’t do this, Knicks. I beg of you.
I don’t like the move for the Clippers much better. Kawhi Leonard and Paul George are already slated to become free agents next summer (assuming they decline their player options in search of one last huge deal), meaning the Clippers will either have to commit really bad money to multiple rapidly depreciating stars or lose them for nothing.
This is what the Sixers are avoiding by cutting bait with Harden, and it’s either a glorious stroke of luck that Harden made the decision for the Sixers or a savvy stance on the part of Daryl Morey that Philadelphia was not going to get into long-term business with Harden. It’s probably parts of both.
Whatever the case, this works out great for the Sixers, who now get out from under a guy who, at this point, is never going to be worth the money he will end up making somewhere.
There was a time when the Sixers felt squeezed into overpaying Tobias Harris by a moonshot because they lacked the space to immediately replace him and they didn’t want to slow the championship momentum they felt they were starting to build. Harden, relatively speaking, would’ve been along the same lines, and chances are the Sixers would have given him a lot of money (maybe only two or three years, but a LOT of money nonetheless) had Harden let them. They would’ve regretted it.
Harden is simply not a championship player. You can throw around all the tracking stats you want: his pick-and-roll efficiency with Joel Embiid, his ability to get into the paint and draw fouls (which isn’t near the level it once was but remains a viable skill), his league-high assist percentage (44 percent of Philly’s buckets last season came via a Harden pass, per Cleaning the Glass), his 122.7 points per 100 shot attempts — seventh among all point guards and basically equal to Luka Doncic, per CTG.
His 45 points in Game 1 against the Celtics.
His 42 points and nine assists in Game 4 of the same series.
All of it is noted, and all of it adds up to the same thing: A second-round loss.
When the Sixers needed just one more win to eliminate Boston and advance to the first conference finals of the Embiid era, Harden scored 22 combined points in Games 6 and 7 on a 26% shooting clip that included a 1-of-11 mark from 3. In Game 7, he made three shots. Total. Finished with nine points and five turnovers.
Harden, for reasons of both extreme disinterest and lacking lateral ability, remains a detrimental defender, and no matter how many of his step-back 3s are going in over a given stretch, they are not going to go in when you need them to. If you believe differently at this point, you either haven’t been watching or you’re willfully ignorant.
I don’t think Daryl Morey, for all his Harden affection, is ignorant. He knows Harden, who is about to head to his third different team in the last four years in search of a title run he has never even come close to making since Houston, just isn’t a dependable championship-level player at this point, if he ever was even in his prime.
Yes, he still has huge highs, but over four playoff series, or hell, over even a long single series, his lows are virtually guaranteed to undercut you. There are a lot of teams right now trying desperately to hang onto an aging core: The Clippers, Warriors, Lakers and Bucks all come to mind. But three of those teams are doing so with stars who’ve proven they can win you a title. The other is the Clippers, who apparently think Harden is the get-over-the-hump piece.
The Sixers once thought the same thing, and perhaps on some level still do. But they have enough sense to not throw a full bag at him, and that little out that they gave themselves appears to have been enough for Harden to make the decision to cut ties for them. Breathe easy, Philly fans. You got off easy.
Who knows how long it will be before Harden is actually traded. Morey could very well drag this thing out in search of whatever he deems his best deal. The man held onto Ben Simmons way longer than almost any other GM would have, and it landed him Harden. Philadelphia isn’t going to rebuild. It wants winning guys right now, and the difficulty with that is the teams trading for Harden are going to be in win-now mode, too.
Under normal circumstances, you trade a star for young players and future draft picks, but the Sixers are likely only in the market for that kind of package if they think they can re-flip those younger assets for win-now players in a subsequent trade. You don’t wait around with Embiid. The guy turns 30 next season. It’s time to compete now, and the Sixers weren’t going to do that with Harden.