Thinking Way Too Much About James Harden's All-Star Case
I'm positive he'll get in. But he might not.
Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.
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If there's one thing I'm gonna do in mid-January, it's get irrationally invested in a Philadelphia 76er's All-Star campaign. I remember working myself into an absolute lather a few years back before the reserves were even announced, because I was convinced Kemba Walker would get in over Ben Simmons -- I don't totally remember whether that actually ended up happening or not, but I can still feel the bile in my throat just reliving the possibility. Hell, last year I offered RTRS readers $500 of [Ben Stein voice] MYYYYY MONEY just to demonstrate my blind confidence in Tyrese Maxey getting elected to the team this year or the next, the true lunacy of which only really struck me some months and piled-up bills down the road. (Luckily, I was just barely lucid enough to build in an injury-exemption back door for me in the Terms and Conditions, and since Tyrese already missed over 15 games this season, deal's off. Sorry y'all.)
Anyway, this year -- really only since yesterday -- my cause is one James Edward Harden Jr., 33-year-old point guard for your 2022-2023 Sixers. FOTB Jason Lipshutz indicated his strong belief to me earlier this week that Harden would not make the All-Star team this year, which I reacted to with reflexive (and conspicuously high-pitched) shock and horror. After swearing my absolute certainty of Harden's All-Star bonafides (and wagering an office bagel breakfast on it with Jason), I actually started to think about it, and indeed had to concede that there was indeed a world -- possibly this one -- in which he gets left off the roster.
At this point, I'm actually a little taken aback by just how positive I initially was. I'm not totally a Harden guy; I still have very little faith in him when the games matter most, and I continue to explain away a lot of his best individual performances with a dismissive "eh the shots just went down this time." His resume is far from bulletproof; I haven't listened, but Zach Lowe and Bill Simmons apparently dismissed his candidacy near-outright on their recent All-Star pod. Still, James Harden is an All-Star this year. I just feel it. Not because he will definitely be named an All-Star, not because he unquestionably deserves to be, not even because I totally want him to be. He just is. It's my belief, I'll hear nothing to the contrary, and I'll scream bloody murder until Passover if the NBA ends up trying to tell me differently.
But will he be one? Should he be one? Do we want him to be one? Let's dig in a little deeper, for argument-I-refuse-to-have's sake.
WILL JAMES HARDEN BE AN ALL-STAR?
As with Joel Embiid's MVP candidacy on a perennial basis, you can explain away Harden's All-Star chances for reasons both tangible and intangible if you're so inclined. The most tangible one is obvious: He's missed 15 games, 3/8ths of his season thusfar, a number that's pretty hard to brush off. Slightly less tangible but still fairly credibly demonstrated is the relative one-way nature of his game; he's made some big defensive plays this season and had some solid defensive stands, but they're far outnumbered by the number of games where he's phoned in that side of the ball. And of course, you can point to the mere 12 slots available and the surfeit of other East players with credible cases this year: He's not getting in over Embiid, Giannis, Tatum, Mitchell or (if healthy) Durant, and there's at least an argument to be made between him and Kyrie, Jaylen, Butler, DeRozan, Trae, Bam, Siakam, Brunson, Randle, Garland and Haliburton.
Then of course, there's the more intangible stuff: Harden isn't well-liked by casual fans or around the league (or in particular by one of the dudes most likely to be drafting teams in February), he grifts for free throws and complains too much, he quits on teams, he's not a playoff performer, not a winner. And there's also the pervasive sense that he's not the player he used to be; a former MVP now obviously on the decline, a neutralized scorer, a second option. There are plenty of reasons for NBA fans, coaches and (perhaps especially) fellow players to not want to give Harden the benefit of the doubt when selecting their All-Star rosters, and with the embarrassment of options to choose from at their disposal this year, they have every excuse to lean away from him toward a fresher, more exciting alternative pick.
Still, I think freshness usually takes a backseat to familiarity when it comes to All-Star selections. Say what you will about Harden's perennially plummeting Q rating, he's still one of the league's most recognizable names, with one of its very few most recognizable games -- and in the early returns for East backcourt voting, he came in third behind Kyrie and Donovan. You have to go back to 2012 to find the last time he didn't make the All-Star team; even last year, when his numbers slipped, he missed a handful of games and he started angling his way out of Brooklyn, he still made the team fairly comfortably. That's just kind of the way All-Star works with players on Harden's MVP level; for the most part, you make it until you really, really obviously shouldn't. (And while 15 games feels like a lot to miss out of 40, it's gonna feel like a lot less to miss out of 57, especially in a season where even the most durable stars are gonna miss 5-7 games by the break just out of self-preservation.)
And the other part of this to consider is the Sixers' record and place in the standings. Right now, at 25-15 and fourth in the East, it doesn't really help or hurt Harden's candidacy -- the team's good enough for a second All-Star to be justifiable, but not good enough for it to be obligatory. But things could change over the next 17 games, and there's reason to believe they might; the Sixers are currently about the healthiest they've been all season, facing a soft part of their schedule ahead, and just 1.5 games back of the Bucks (who are still missing guys and just constantly seem fucking exhausted) and two back of the Nets (who just had their lone feel-good run of the past year cruelly interrupted by Durant's knee issues). The Sixers could very well enter the All-Star break at 37-20 and second in the East, and then all of a sudden a lot of voters are looking at them having two guys on the team as less a could and more of a should.
Or maybe Embiid re-aggravates his foot injury, Harden re-aggravates the fanbase with one too many 4-17 shooting nights, the Sixers limp to the break and this whole article starts to feel distinctly moot. But for now at least, I think the Beard is swimming with the tide on this one, and I feel like they'll make room for him one way or the other.
SHOULD JAMES HARDEN MAKE THE ALL-STAR TEAM?
I mean, averaging 22 points and 11 assists -- the latter tops in the league, though it won't technically register as such until he plays some more games -- is a pretty good starting point for an All-Star campaign. Harden's numbers have only been put up 12 times for a whole season (of at least 25 games); all of them (including Harden himself in 2016-17) were All-Star seasons, except for Russell Westbrook's surreal Wizards season two years ago where his True Shooting % barely got above 50 and the team only squeaked into the playoffs at the last minute. While Harden's scoring numbers are obviously down from his otherworldly peak, and he's not getting to the line the way he used to, his shooting percentages are still basically in line with career averages, and he's upped his assist numbers while keeping his turnover rate lower than its been since his OKC days.
And I know we're supposed to have purged ourselves of all belief in advanced stats during last year's MVP race, but if you do still care about such things, just about all of the all-in-ones -- EPM, RPM, RAPTOR, what have you -- point to Harden as being one of the league's 15 most valuable players, with his defense not even as much of a detriment as his reputation and/or the eye test would have you believe. There's also simpler advanced stats, like the Sixers' Net Rating being +7.8 better with Harden on the court than off, and him being the driving force of an offense that's climbed its way into the league's top 10 (after spending a most of the season so far in the lower half) while their defense remains top five. There's plenty of questions left about his ceiling in the playoffs or his will to win at the highest levels -- questions I'm not necessarily looking forward to being definitively answered -- but there's no real question that Harden's level of production still helps teams win regular-season games at a very high level, which is still what the All-Star game is ostensibly rewarding.
And there's also the Embiid component: As the primary setup man, Embiid's historic scoring season essentially comes with a Harden executive producer credit, since The Beard is feeding him the easiest looks of his career, helping him steamroll lesser competition and still be near-unguardable against high-level opponents. Their numbers together have simply been extraordinary, and while fit questions may continue plaguing them down the stretch, in the first three-and-a-half quarters they've proven as unstoppable as any duo in basketball. Really, if Harden finishes the voting period as both the East's leader in assists AND the supporting actor to the East's leader in scoring -- on one of the East's best teams, no less -- it feels a little unthinkable that he could be left off the team.
But let's get down to the nitty gritty, because -- again -- you could say the same thing about Embiid being left out of the MVP top five discussion, until you review the five names ahead of them and realize they all have annoyingly good cases to be there as well. So Embiid, Giannis, Tatum and Donovan all have clearly better resumes than Harden, and it seems almost certain that Kyrie will be the East's fifth starter (assuming Durant is too hurt to play, which feels like a pretty reasonable bet given his most recent recovery timeline). Jaylen Brown... the advanced stats favor Harden, but fine, he's averaging 27 and 7 on the best team in basketball, he probably has the more unignorable case. And Tyrese Haliburton... the numbers are pretty comparable, but he's basically doing everything for a Pacers team that's been one of the year's surprise success stories, he's a better defender, and he's only missed two games all season; he's probably in over Harden too. That's seven folks -- eight if you wanna count KD -- who you could say have clearly superior All-Star claims than Harden.
After that, though? DeRozan scores more, but with little defense or playmaking for a team that's going nowhere. Butler and Adebayo's numbers are both awesome, but they've each missed some time and the Heat are disturbingly mediocre this year. Siakam is making yet another leap in production, but he can't keep the Raptors out of freefall. Brunson and Randle get points for rejuvenating the Knicks, but neither their stats nor team record are as impressive as Harden's. Trae's numbers are great as usual but his defense is putrid and the Hawks are on the verge of total collapse. Garland... he's great and I love him, but I just don't see a statistical argument for him being on Harden's level this year, and the teams' records are basically identical.
Now, maybe you still like one or two of those guys over Harden, and that's fair. But four or five? I don't think you can get there right now without some decent-sized stretching. To me, it's just all about the Games Played at this point -- if he can keep his other numbers (and the Sixers) about where they currently are and get that GP total to around 40 by the break, he'll deserve the opportunity to be picked last by KD and LeBron for the second straight All-Star draft.
DO WE WANT JAMES HARDEN TO MAKE THE ALL-STAR TEAM?
There's probably a take to be had here about an All-Star appearance giving Harden the chance to drive a harder bargain when negotiating a new contract for Philly this summer, or about him being better served using that period for rest (or at least him spending it away from the indulgences of All-Star Weekend, even in Utah). And certainly, stumping for James Harden as a Sixers All-Star doesn't feel the same as it used to with Embiid or even with Simmons when they were fighting for their first or second appearance -- our homegrown guys, taking that next step to superstardom, rather than Harden coming down from the other direction, having already made the team 10 times.
But should we still be rooting for Harden to make it? Shit yeah. Not just because two Sixers representatives at All-Star Weekend's main event is cooler than one, but because the main goal of this regular season is still getting the Embiid-Harden partnership where it needs to be in time for the playoffs -- off the court as well as on. They're not too likely to make the proverbial (or literal) Napa Valley wine tour together before May, so having the shared experience of a weird-ass weekend together in Utah might be as close as they get. And if they end up on the same team, and can work that pick-and-roll chemistry further in front of the league's best and brightest? Probably not too likely for any number of reasons, but worth dreaming about a small amount.
So it's settled then: Long as he gets through the next couple weeks, James Harden should be an All-Star and will be an All-Star, and we should root for it to happen. I like sesame, poppy and/or garlic bagels with scallion cream cheese, Jason. Maybe throw in some whitefish salad while you're at it.