Evaluating the James Harden deal
Who looks better since the trade, Houston or OKC? (PER Diem: Nov. 28, 2012)
Originally Published: November 28, 2012
By John Hollinger | ESPN.com
Allen Einstein/NBAE/Getty Images
James Harden is returning to Oklahoma City tonight.
You might describe James Harden's season in Dennis Green terms: He is who we thought he was.
Through 14 games with his new squad in Houston, Harden has predictably been forced to take more shots than he did in Oklahoma City and converted with less efficiency as a result. But the upshot of that trade-off is that Harden still looks to be the All-Star caliber guard he showed himself to be as a sixth man with the Thunder: His 21.89 PER is nearly a perfect match for the 21.13 he registered in OKC.
If he keeps that up, it pretty much cements him as utterly deserving of a max contract; very few wing players ring up numbers anywhere close to what Harden has done. His PER ranks him second only to Kobe Bryant among shooting guards, and fifth overall among wing players -- behind only Bryant and the three luminary small forwards, LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Carmelo Anthony.
While one presumes that Dwyane Wade probably will pass Harden at some point too, this at worst leaves him as the sixth-best wing player in the league. The other five, you'll notice, all get the max.
So let's set that debate aside, because it's not much of a debate anymore, and then look at a few other questions as Harden's Rockets head to Oklahoma City tonight for his first visit since his surprising preseason trade to Houston:
What if he signed that extension? Here's the question I've been pondering lately that I don't think has received enough discussion: What was the Thunder's plan if Harden had actually agreed to that $54 million extension? (Or $52 million, or $56 million, or something in between, depending on who your source is and how you treated the incentives.)
If Harden signs that deal, the Thunder are looking at a $76 million payroll before re-signing Eric Maynor, and that's with only 10 players on the roster. Throw in two draft picks and a pair of minimum guys and they're at least at $79 million. Even if we assume a 3 percent increase in the cap level from this season, that still triggers an additional $9 million in luxury tax penalties, taking the total cost to $88 million.
We don't know exactly where the Thunder's breaking point is on salary, but I think we can safely say it's well south of $88 million. So if the Thunder got Harden to agree to the extension, they needed another out.
What was it? Were they planning to trade Russell Westbrook after the season? (Westbrook would have been much easier to trade after the season than Harden or Serge Ibaka, because of base-year compensation rules affecting the extensions of the latter two.) Were they pricing in an amnesty of Kendrick Perkins, which would get them just under the tax line and save them about $7 million in tax and salary, even after signing a minimum level-ish replacement?
We don't know, and we'll never know. But it doesn't seem plausible that they would have smiled and paid the tax at this level (especially considering the recent financial wobbles of Chesapeake Energy, the Thunder's largest benefactor). And if you go through the salaries, it pretty much meant that either Westbrook or Perkins had to go.
Is Harden killing Linsanity? James Harden is a pick-and-roll guard. Jeremy Lin is a pick-and-roll guard. You can only run pick-and-roll with one of them at any given time, and Harden is better at it than Lin. Soooo ... what exactly does that leave Lin doing?
"Spotting up" seems to be the answer, but Lin isn't any good at this, shooting only 25.6 percent on 3s this season and 29.4 percent for his career. In fact, he has been even worse inside the arc, making only 6-of-28 on 2s from beyond 10 feet. He shot respectably at this range in New York a year ago (44-of-98), so this may just be a short-term thing, but regardless opponents will happily concede long 2s to Lin if it lets them smother Harden's drives. He needs to punish them with 3s.
There's a lot going on here -- it's a small sample of games, Lin is coming off a knee injury and the Rockets are still figuring out how to incorporate the talents of all their new players.
But the cruel truth, according to NBA.com's stats tool, is that Harden is a lot better when Lin isn't playing next to him. Harden shoots 48.9 percent with Lin on the bench and only 43.9 percent with him in the game; he also draws dramatically more fouls and has a better plus-minus.
As for Lin? Amazingly, the Rockets have hardly tried letting him run the show while Harden sits. He has played only 48 minutes without Harden this season, and while his numbers in that stint haven't been good, we're looking at a fairly minuscule sample size.
An obvious solution for Houston would be to stagger the minutes of both players so that Lin and Harden each get a solid 10-minute run without the other. Thus far, they've averaged about half of that -- in 14 games, they have only 164 minutes of solo time between them.
The theoretical maximum, if the Rockets had perfectly timed the rest periods for each, is 336, which means Houston is giving their two guards solo time only about half as often as it could. Obviously there are some practical limitations to this, but it seems Houston could take it further.
In the meantime, the two have to coexist better as well. Despite their talents, the Harden-Lin pairing has been one of the Rockets' worst two-man units (just a +7, while playing nearly two-thirds of the minutes of a team that is +31 on the season). Working out the kinks with two guards who need the ball and aren't great spot-up guys (especially Lin) was never going to be easy, especially without a training camp. We're seeing the growing pains as we go.
What are the Thunder without Harden? Still darned good, apparently, as this weekend's blitzkrieg of Charlotte affirmed. The Thunder have plopped Kevin Martin into Harden's spot with solid results -- his PER isn't quite in Harden's territory, but it's among the leaders at the shooting guard position. Additionally, Martin has managed to play passable defense; given that Harden was a "meh" defender himself, the Thunder don't seem to have lost much at this end.
Check out the plus-minus data and it seems much like old times: The Thunder's starting lineup still doesn't work, but when Martin combines with Nick Collison, Kevin Durant or Westbrook, the Thunder trample the opposition. Play the four of them together and it's a feeding frenzy -- they're +42 in just 93 minutes as a unit. Why the Thunder don't use this grouping more often in place of their shockingly ineffective first five is something that archeologists will debate for centuries.
But in the big picture, it doesn't look like a whole lot has changed, does it? The Okies are No. 3 in offense and a Bobcat-aided No. 7 in defense. Statistically, it's the same story too -- four players are doing virtually all the lifting while the role players are mired with poor stats.
That could be changing for the better, however. Maynor has come back from a serious knee injury and is really struggling, shooting 30.9 percent with a 7.89 PER. One expects his play will improve as the season goes on, and if not the worst-case scenario is that they'll at least find a replacement-level player to take his minutes. Meanwhile, Hasheem Thabeet has been juvenated (there's no "re-" here) -- while his shooting percentages are utterly unsustainable flukes (80 percent from the field, 19-of-23 from the line), it has been encouraging to see him show a pulse on offense.
The Thunder, in other words, might be 2 percent worse with Martin replacing Harden, but they have ways to make up for the dropoff -- getting more production from their center position, their backup point guard spot or their laughably unproductive starting group could more than make up for it. They've left themselves in position to do one more of the three (one item to watch: They have a $1.28 million trade exception active for three more weeks and just enough wiggle room under the tax to take in such a deal).
Instead, the bigger dilemma for them is down the road. First, down the road of this season -- remember, Martin's biggest shortcoming is not his defense but his durability. Martin managed to play 80 games in 2010-11, but he missed 42 games a year ago, 36 in 2009-10, and 31 and 21 the previous two seasons. Yikes. If he isn't upright in May, the idea of mostly replacing Harden with Martin goes by the wayside.
And then, obviously, there's the issue of the future. Martin has a $12 million expiring contract, but it's unlikely he can return to OKC for anything more than the midlevel exception given the team's current salary structure -- even a dollar more makes them a tax team. (They have nearly $66 million committed to 10 players, though Thabeet's money isn't guaranteed.) While they could amnesty Perkins to create some more wiggle room, the fact that they'd still have to pay Perkins nearly $19 million mitigates against this.
So instead of Harden, they'll have a random midlevel guy? Jeremy Lamb? A younger talent plucked with the likely lottery pick from Toronto they're holding? Kevin Martin at a discount?
We don't know yet. But as Harden prepares to visit, the future remains more of a dilemma for Oklahoma City than the present. The Thunder still have a heck of a team, and the Rockets are still figuring out how to make their backcourt work, which means in spite of Harden's excellence the Rockets probably will get thumped tonight.
Instead, the larger issues facing the Thunder in the wake of the Harden trade are (1) whether Martin can stay healthy, and (2) how they can replace Harden beyond this season. And unfortunately, we probably won't be getting those answers any time soon.
― lag∞n, Wednesday, 28 November 2012 20:23 (thirteen years ago)