[WSJ] The NBA’s Hardest Job Is Guarding James Harden. It Pays $155,647.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-...r-nba-playoffs-11598428841?mod=hp_featst_pos3

The NBA’s Hardest Job Is Guarding James Harden. It Pays $155,647.
Lu Dort vs. the league’s best scorer is the most interesting mismatch of the NBA playoffs.

By Ben Cohen
Aug. 26, 2020 7:00 am ET

James Harden is a virtuosic talent who led the NBA in scoring for the last three seasons and made $38 million in salary this year.

He’s being guarded in the playoffs by a guy making $155,647.

This highly unlikely Harden whisperer is an undrafted rookie named Luguentz Dort with a prorated minimum salary for this season that amounts to roughly one third of what Harden earns in a single game.

That financial disparity is on display every time the Oklahoma City Thunder and Houston Rockets take the floor. The peculiar thing about basketball economics is that both players are more valuable than their contracts—and for very different reasons. Harden is paid the most that a team can pay him. Dort is paid the least.

Now two players on opposite ends of the NBA’s salary scale find themselves in a matchup unlike any the sport has ever seen.

Harden isolating his defender behind the 3-point line is the sport’s unstoppable force. He’s finally meeting an immovable object. With the Rockets and Thunder tied in their first-round series—Game 5 is Wednesday night—the most important player on the court might be the most improbable one.

Lu Dort went to last year’s draft and left disappointed after every team passed on him. He spent most of this season hopping between the Thunder and their G League team on a two-way contract that limited his time in the NBA. And this player who couldn’t even practice with his Oklahoma City teammates has become the person responsible for tormenting Harden in the playoffs.

Harden is 6-for-27 on threes with Dort as his primary defender in this series after going 1-of-17 from deep the one time they battled in the regular season. It was the worst 3-point shooting night of Harden’s career. It was also Dort’s first NBA start.

Harden regressing to his mean and blasting the Rockets into the second round wouldn’t be a surprise, but Dort has the quick hands, sturdy legs and ballerina’s feet to force him into unusually tough shots, and he contests stepback threes like he’s trying to hurt the air. He is built to bother Harden.

Dort and Harden have a surprising amount of history considering their places in the NBA hierarchy. Not only did they attend the same college, but Harden was actually one of the reasons Dort chose Arizona State. “The ability to compete against James and learn from James in the summer” was part of the appeal, explained Arizona State associate coach Rashon Burno.

Dort would get that opportunity when he defended Harden in pickup games on campus. Harden was coming off his MVP season. Dort was heading into his freshman year.

Dort was the rare basketball player who grew up playing soccer in the hockey town of Montreal. He cared more about defense than scoring, which was odd for a teenager, said his former coach Nelson Osse. Even then he requested to guard the best player on the other team—no matter what position he played or whether Dort happened to play that position. “Lu always knew how to keep a guy in front of him,” Osse said.

His knack for defense was the type of thing that most people missed and the right people noticed. Before his senior year of high school, Dort was invited to a camp for elite prospects. There were two U.S. teams. One team had Zion Williamson. Dort was on the other team.

“He was probably the least hyped of any of the guys on the team,” said Seth Greenberg, an ESPN analyst who coached Dort’s squad.

Dort played so hard that he ripped open his hand while dunking—and then begged Greenberg to keep playing. His coaches had to remind him that he couldn’t play because he was still bleeding through his gauze.

But what really impressed Greenberg was a particular defensive skill that would come in handy once Dort reached the NBA. “He was impossible to screen,” Greenberg said. “He just blows up screens with his lower body.”

Being a human bulldozer is especially important against Harden, as it turns out, because of the way he uses screens to pick his defensive prey. It’s one of the reasons guarding him is harder than convincing him to shave. Dort is strong enough to absorb the contact, fight the switch, stick to his crouch and continue making it slightly trickier for the league’s best scorer to score.

But he slipped in the draft because Dort is a short (6-foot-3), thick (215 pounds) shooting guard who doesn’t shoot well (29.7% on threes). It was hard to look at him and see an NBA future. It was even harder the first time that Thunder general manager Sam Presti scouted him.

Presti, who had drafted Harden a decade earlier, made the trip back to Arizona State for another undervalued prospect and managed to pick a night when Dort was putrid. He scored six points in a home loss to an Ivy League school—the worst game of his only college season. But when a Thunder scout named Brandon Miller kept advocating for him, Presti took another chance to see Dort. He didn’t have to travel far: Arizona State came to nearby Tulsa for the NCAA tournament.

A few months later, only minutes after he went undrafted, Dort’s phone rang. Presti was calling. Dort boarded a plane to Oklahoma City the next morning.

The salary for rookies on minimum deals is close to $900,000, but he signed a two-way contract with a base salary of $79,568 that would allow the Thunder to groom him in the G League, and he would get paid more for each day he spent in the NBA.

What happened next was a season that nobody saw coming.

The Thunder have won the second most games in the league over the last decade, but they appeared to be rebuilding when they traded Paul George and Russell Westbrook last summer. Instead they kept winning. Dort got a call up in December. They won more. Dort was promoted to the starting lineup in January. The Thunder proceeded to win 16 of their next 21 games.

A team that wasn’t supposed to make the playoffs is still in the bubble in part because of a player who wasn’t supposed to be in the league. And he’s not going anywhere. Dort recently signed a new four-year contract worth about $5 million—a deal that pays him for the rest of the season what Harden makes before halftime.

Then he got back to work.


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