[chronic] MDA tells Hot Take artists to get their facts straight with Harden

Yeah , that isn't good enough IMO

I think most coaches would say "hey James , I know you want to play but you aren't 100 percent .... so tonight we are gonna let the team pick you up and you come back next game and pick up where you left off."

Obviously , sometimes MDA didn't have a choice ..... I.e. There was no "team" (CP3 , Gordon , Clint , etc was out )

But in games that we have CP3 available and playing ... why not trust him to guide the ship for a game ?

To me this moves away from the spirit of "next man up" and hurts the team ....

1) it shows that you lack any sort of confidence to win without James
2) it deprives role players of a chance to step up and out of their role for one night to try and develop their game

To me , MDA's "next man up" policy is like .... "yeah you can play for James if : A) James is on his deathbed , B) we are blowing a team out by 30+ and there are 5-6 minutes left .

Your answer is simple .... and maybe it's just as simple as mike wanting to be a players coach and keeping James happy ..... but

I can't help but look back for context in terms of MDA's rotations in the past .... and think that James playing through injury is more of a situation where mike is RELYING on James vs mike is appeasing James .

I don't want it to take another postseason collapse ( like we did vs SA ) for MDA to finally realize that it might be a good idea to rest harden every once in a while

 

True

Why does the media hate too ??

 

PREACH!

And all the girls say Dan-T's pretty fly for a white guy.........

 

Well said Mike, but stop playing a hurt guy this much! If there’s one thing I’ll clearly favour Giannis over Harden is how Giannis has nothing to say about the whole MVP award. Nothing. Harden has made several statements that he wants it and is clearly going after it. We’ve all seen Harden get tired at the end, so I’m just wondering how much chasing the MVP matters to Harden tbh.

 

Giannis doesn’t have to say anything because the media is on his side...we got dudes on national TV and other forms of media telling outright lies/incorrect statements about Harden on a daily basis

everything is against Harden to win the award...everything is in Giannis’ favor to win the award

Harden’s already been robbed twice, and MVP is important for legacy purposes...Harden gotta do twice as much just to get proper respect...we all know if this were Lebron or Steph putting up these numbers we wouldn’t even hear about Giannis

 

Honestly Giannis is going to win this award by a landslide. Harden could drop 80 tonight and it won’t matter at all. That’s just the way it is.

 

Harden addressing media bias and narrative is all good, I’m just wondering openly saying you’re going to win it, you want it etc. is not necessary per se. Since Harden does, I wonder what he’s thinking and how it affects him and MDA with regards to minutes mainly.

 

LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT!!!

 

Honestly, I think it's not the player, it's the place. If Lebron or Steph were playing in Houston, I bet they would get dogged too. I don't know why, but I think that's true.

 

MIchael MOTHERF*CKING D'Antoni.

Legend.

 

Dude brought the Rockets back from second to last in the west and everyone in the league trying to stop him from scoring and he is still doing it.

Ask anyone back in november/december ifthe rockets were even going to make the playoffs and they would have said maybe at 8th seed.

 

I think that puts in the narrative that he's a stat chaser. Would you say the 58 he dropped against the Grizzlies was stat padding? How about the 61 against the Spurs? Were the minutes he played those games necessary or was he just chasing those MVP stats?

I legit think Harden would like to work less while seeing Ws show on the Rockets record at the end of games. These historic performances have all been necessary. From the 61 in the Knicks where Tucker almost threw the last 2 minutes of the game, to the 58 against the Nets that resulted in an OT loss. The thing about his high scoring performances is they've been necessary for the team to even squeak out a victory because no one else's shot is falling.

I mean against the Pels, he played a Giannis like 28 minutes that game because he didn't have to exert himself. If he really wanted to stat chase by playing more minutes, you'd have seen him out there easily drop 50 against the paltry effort the Pelicans put out last game vs the Rockets.

 

This should be as much about MDA vs Budenholzer as about the players.

MDA better be not distracting from that subject!

 

I liked and unliked this post just so I could hit like twice

 

Like the old joke:
Where does an 800 lb gorilla sleep?
ANYWHERE he wants to.

Look, he's on a historic run.
I'm guessing MDA doesn't want to be known as the coach who ruins a historic run

 

Simply put, Harden is a game changer - with orchestrators of this game being Darryl Morey, Danton, and Harden.i. Throw in there the entire team, including Eric Gordon, CP3, and the supporting cast. They've all taken roles that exploit their strenghts. They have forced the entire league to play, manage, and coach very differently. I would argue that in this respect, Harden is better for basketball than Lebron. His willingness to be coached, lead, inspire, and simply turn on beast mode when he chooses to is the true to the definition of a franchise tag.