James Harden looks like an aesthete. The beard, the hair, the funky clothes. The crossovers, the step-backs, and the way he always seems to be a little too up in his own head to make eye contact. The dude exudes attitude and style, he looks like someone who would live and breathe artistic side of basketball.
Beneath those external trappings, Harden is an engineer. He doesn’t create, he builds. His raw materials are not those of an artist, he works with repetitive, probing dribbles, with a well-researched and thoroughly detailed blueprint for shot distribution, and with an exquisitely honed rip-through move that seems to send him to the free throw line at will. Harden’s basketball genius is not so much spontaneous inspiration, as the willingness to keep pushing the same damn buttons often enough that they create the desired result.
This is one of the reasons so many people find Harden grating to watch. He has the tools of a beautiful game and some find it offensive that he uses those tools in the service of something as utilitarian as efficiency. As a general rule, fans don’t derive much pleasure from watching players shoot free throws. Even less joy is to be had in watching the tangled mess of bodies that sends that player to the free throw line in the first place. Harden’s ability to create offense in isolation and get himself to the free throw line helps his team win. It does not help make him or them likable.
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Last season, the Rockets mostly played a joyless if not quite terrible brand of basketball. Ty Lawson didn’t work out. The chemistry between Harden and Dwight Howard was…lacking. Kevin McHale was shown the door after just 11 games and whatever momentum they had built with their trip to the 2015 Western Conference Finals was quickly eroded by losses, lackluster defense, and a general basketball malaise. The Rockets weren’t much fun to watch and they didn’t appear to be much fun to play for either.
Likability and a beautiful aesthetic are not prerequisites for winning games. Championships have been won by villains and by heroes who played ugly basketball. But joy and inspiration can certainly grease the wheels a little. The Rockets haven’t been lacking for talent or strategy the past few seasons, and sometimes that’s enough. It appears Houston needs a little bit more.
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Mike D’Antoni was a revolutionary. The revolution didn’t belong to him, nor did he start it, but for awhile he was the keeper of the flame. The vision and imagination of Steve Nash. The bounciness and soft touch of Amare Stoudemire. The defensive versatility of Shawn Marion and the dead-eye shooting of Joe Johnson, Quentin Richardson, Raja Bell and Jason Richardson. Those were the fodder and fuel, but it was D’Antoni’s system that set them ablaze.
The Seven Seconds or Less Suns made basketball fun again. They ran relentlessly, shared the ball, and unabashedly worshipped at the altar of the three-pointer. The Suns were defined by Nash’s derring do, their transition motor, and the high pick-and-roll, but the basic building block was creative freedom.
On a spreadsheet, those Suns and these recent Rockets would look similar. The pace, the shot selection, the offensive efficiency, those numeric markers all line up. On the court, with bodies in motion and shots going up there is more of a disconnect. Mike D’Antoni is not here because of those similarities, he’s here because of the differences.
In theory, D’Antoni allows the Rockets to lean into the strengths, helping them supercharge a system that they’ve been using for years. D’Antoni has been less than successful in each of his stops since leaving the Suns but he’s never had a ball-handler with as much Nash-ness as Harden. There’s no obvious Amare stand-in, unless you’ve been helping yourself to the Clint Capela Kool-Aid. But the rest of this roster feels like an homage — the shooting, the complementary ball-handling, the full-court athletes. Ryan Anderson. Eric Gordon. Trevor Ariza. K.J. McDaniels. This is what Houston is giving to D’Antoni.
In return, his task is to inject some spontaneous inspiration.
This loose grouping of stylistic similarities, the running and the threes, has not worked for the Rockets the way it worked for those Suns. The numbers have been fine but in the hands of Harden and company it has felt robotic at times, fundamentalist at others. The Rockets seem beholden to the system, rather than freed by it. I suppose somewhere in there is a lesson about how revolutions inevitably give way to the same sort of dogma they rebelled against.
The occasional lifelessness in Houston’s offense has not been the sole product of Harden’s isolationism or an organizational approach that incorporates data and analytics. But it has been there nonetheless. This Houston Rockets team will not be the second coming of Seven Seconds or Less. These things don’t reappear as carbon copies but as translations and adaptations. But they don’t need to steal everything from the Suns. They have the pieces for an incredible offense, the shooters, and the passers, and the basic underpinnings. What they need is a spark.
The Rockets will likely struggle on defense, that’s the cost of playing Harden, Gordon, and Anderson big minutes. Their ceiling will be set by their ability to get the defense to something approaching average, and their offense to something special. They need what Harden has, they need what D’Antoni has, and they desperately need them to bring out the best in each other.
It’s a gamble but it makes sense that D’Antoni and Harden would work beautifully together. D’Antoni is an artist in need of a muse. Harden is a scientist in need of some art.