Houston Rockets: Why James Harden Will Be The NBA MVP

The Houston Rockets marriage of James Harden and Mike D’Antoni was always expected to produce an elite NBA offense.

The Houston Rockets marriage of James Harden and Mike D’Antoni was always expected to produce an elite NBA offense.

But you know what?

It was never expected to give Harden the platform to produce one of the best statistical seasons ever seen in the NBA.

Houston’s offense has been firing on all cylinders with Harden on the floor the difference between the Rockets with him on and off the court has been absolutely staggering.

With Harden on the floor the Rockets have an offensive rating of 118.2 which is a best in league mark by far.

With Harden off the floor, the offense dies with him, with a measly offensive rating of 87.1 which is good for dead-last in the league.

This is just an indication of not only how fantastic a season Harden is having but how important James is to the functioning of the Rockets. As indicated by the stats, it is nothing short of a dumpster-fire offense when James needs to take breaks.

Although he is by far Houston’s most valuable player, the stock standard media response to Harden seems to be of criticism.

These comments usually refer to two things which can be summed up the the comments of co-host Max Kellerman of ESPN’s First Take:

"‘D’Antoni doesn’t care about defense and neither does Harden, which is why they are such a great match.’‘This is what D’Antoni does.. players on D’Antoni teams, their stats get inflated’"

These are two lazy bullet points that are said about Harden by people who haven’t watched the Rockets play in the past two seasons.

Harden is everything to this team — his inflated stats have actually come about because of a range of reasons rather than PACE.

The Rockets currently sit at 17th in the league in that category.

It’s like making the ridiculous notion that Curry shot such a high percentage from three last year because of the Golden State Warriors system.

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The player still needs to make it work, the system doesn’t put up the numbers for them.

The newly-dubbed “points guard” moniker is not about putting up all-time great statistics all of a sudden because of the system, and really, his improved output is not surprising considering what Harden has been working with in previous seasons.

I would argue that Ryan Anderson and Eric Gordon are two of the best shooters Harden has played with since making the switch to Houston.

It has had a huge impact on Harden’s assist numbers. Harden has made life easy for Anderson with a infinite amount of open looks, thus resulting in him shooting lights out from behind the long line at 48 percent.

This is a heck of a lot better return than any Houston player that has played with Harden.

Harden is widely-noted as a fantastic offensive player but what is going under the radar is that this could go down as a historical season for James.

No player has ever averaged over 30 points, 13 assists and seven rebounds per game, a mark that Harden is hitting, albeit a small sample size.

If we scale his numbers down a bit to 28/10/5, which is very attainable from the look of his early season play, he would still be only the second person ever to reach such lofty heights.

Only the great Oscar Robertson achieved such numbers and he played 45 minutes a game.

This should illustrate the Hall of Fame territory the Houston star is entering into.

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There is one more, even more startling fact about all of this. He is doing it while shooting 50 percent from the field and 39 percent from behind the three-point line which is incredibly efficient.

Try this on for size…

D’Antoni ‘inflated’ Steve Nash‘s stats to 17.1 points, 11 assists and 3.8 rebounds per game over two years on his way to back-to-back MVP’s.

This was also whilst playing with a much-better supporting cast than what Harden currently has with him at the Rockets.

If James continues like this for the rest of the season, there is no doubt that he should be rewarded with the MVP award, as no team currently relies on their superstar more than the Houston Rockets.

We could really be in the midst of a very special season from a player who is like nothing we have ever seen before.

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