His effective field goal percentage dropped below 50% for the first time since his rookie year. Harden's offensive efficiency has taken a dive. ![]() That percentage dropped to 30.3% last season and to 29.1% this season. In 2019-20, per Second Spectrum, Harden blew by his defender on 44.1% of his drives. The underrated part of Harden's peak was his burst, a combination that allowed him to both get to the basket at will and turn his step-back jumper into one of the most unguardable shots in NBA history.īut recurring hamstring injuries over the past two seasons have zapped that burst. The first postseason of the Joel Embiid-James Harden partnership delivered a second-round exit. Over Harden's final 29 games of this season - including Philadelphia's 12 postseason contests - he managed to hit those benchmarks four more times each - and had only one game, against the Milwaukee Bucks on March 29, when he hit them both on the same night. Those early performances proved to be outliers. Harden had at least 25 points on at least 50% shooting in each of his first four games as a 76er - all wins.Īfter toppling the New York Knicks in the duo's second game together - during which Harden and Embiid combined to shoot 37 free throws - the big man offered up a simple review: The plan: pairing Harden with Embiid, arguably the league's most dominant physical force, another of its elite foul-drawers and a finalist for the NBA's Most Valuable Player award for a second straight season, would create an offensive juggernaut.Įarly on, the returns were good. He made 734 step-back 3-pointers during that span, more than 500 more than any other player. He averaged 1.10 points on those plays, the highest efficiency in the league. From the 2013-14 season - the first season Second Spectrum began tracking data - through 2019-20, Harden recorded nearly 8,000 isolation plays, more than 2,000 more than any other player during that span. Harden has spent the past decade being an elite NBA offense unto himself. THE HARDEN-EMBIID partnership should make sense. "They're making it, they're gonna sleep in it and it's not gonna f-ing work." "This is their bed," a Western Conference executive said. Is there a future for Harden and the 76ers? Now the franchise heads into another offseason full of uncertainty with another massive - and potentially expensive - question. Miami eventually ended Philadelphia's postseason with a 99-90 win, sending the 76ers crashing out of the second round for the fourth time in five seasons. ![]() His giveaway with just under 11 minutes remaining in the fourth quarter - which led to Bam Adebayo's fast break bucket - sent boos raining down from the sellout crowd inside Wells Fargo Center as Harden and his teammates trudged back to the bench. He finished with 11 points, 9 assists and 4 turnovers. With everything on the line in Game 6 of their Eastern Conference semifinal against the Miami Heat, Harden was a non-factor. He certainly didn't show up in the biggest game of Philadelphia's season. ![]() Morey's thinking was also an assumption: that Harden was still the level of player who finished first or second in MVP voting four out of five seasons during their time together in Houston.īut it has become clear that the MVP-level version of Harden is gone.
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