The Whiteboard: James Harden on the Nets could be a disaster

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Over the past few days, the Houston Rockets have seemed to be hurtling towards an implosion with Russell Westbrook reportedly asking for a trade, followed on Sunday by the news that Harden was interested in a trade as well, particularly to the Brooklyn Nets. The Rockets willingness to trade both players may have a lot to do with owner Tillman Fertitta’s financial pressures. The desire of Westbrook and Harden to take their talents elsewhere can almost certainly be traced to another disappointing playoff exit and frustration at their offensive dynamic.

The season before they joined forces, Harden’s usage and assist rates were 40.5 and 39.5, respectively. Westbrook’s came in at 30.9 and 46.5 but even those eye-popping numbers were drop-off from the 41.7 and 57.3 he posted in 2016-17.

In the 3-point era there have been just 61 qualified individual seasons where a player posted a usage rate and assist rate of at least 30. Nearly a quarter of those seasons came from Harden and Westbrook — 14 to be exact, six for Harden and Westbrook. These were two historically ball-dominant offensive creators and it’s hard to imagine a more challenging fit.

But try to imagine Harden joining Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving.

Why would James Harden, Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving be such a historic combination?

In his three seasons in Golden State, accomodating his offensive tendencies (to some degree) for Stephen Curry, Durant still averaged a usage rate of 29.1 and an assist rate of 25.1. Irving was only healthy enough to play in 20 games for the Nets last year but in his two seasons in Boston, he averaged a usage rate of 30.3 and an assist rate of 33.0. In a hypothetical closed system where those three players could combine without sacrifice, simple addition by addition, they would use 96.1 percent of the Nets’ offensive possessions and account for 94 percent of the team’s assists.

That’s absurdly unrealistic and an obvious precursor for enormous sacrifice on the part of all three players. For reference, the Celtics’ Big Three — Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen and Paul Pierce — had combined usage and assist rates of 87.6 and 71.9 the year before the teamed up, which fell to 71.6 and 61.5, respectively. LeBron James, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade saw a similar effect when they teamed up, a combined usage of 97.1 and assist rate of 89.7 falling to 86.6 and 67.3 in their first year together.

Just combining usage and assist rates is an absurdly simplistic way of getting at the question of chemistry. But it points to the larger issue that we really haven’t seen a combination of ball-dominant creators quite like this before. And even if you account for the benefits of passing to each other, something has to give. It’s also worth noting that both of those cores above were able to build elite defenses, a proposition that seems unbelievably shaky for the Harden-Durant-Irving Nets.

So, if you’re buying the Nets as a juggernaut next season, you’re buying their ability to make enormous offensive sacrifices for the sake of the greater good. Maybe it’s just me but that seems like an enormous longshot bet considering that process didn’t work with Harden and Westbrook, or Harden and Chris Paul the year before. Or the way Kyrie Irving left the Cavaliers and pretty much everything that’s happened since. Or the way Kevin Durant seemed to feel uncomfortable in a very similar situation in Golden State.

Maybe it’s to the Nets advantage that Durant and Irving haven’t actually played a regular-season game together yet, they’d be trying to build a hierarchy from scratch, rather than trying to incorporate Harden into something that had already been established. But it’s also possible that makes things even more challenging, there is no established structure to lean on. Everything will be made up on the fly during a historically abbreviated offseason.

On paper, Irving, Durant and Harden would be a combination of offensive talent and skill unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. But in real life, it just seems fragile.

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