PHILADELPHIA — Given the dizzying array of reports attempting to qualify the likelihood of a James Harden trade before Thursday’s deadline, any Sixers fan could be forgiven for wondering if anything is real or if we’re all just living in a fun room in Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse.
At the moment, the barometer looks like something you’d get on an airplane inside a hurricane inside of a black hole. At the moment, it’s readings range from “certainly not” to “probably not” to “well, maybe.” So, in the immortal words of Lloyd Christmas, they’re telling us there’s a ... what?
There are number of different ways to interpret the conflicting messages being sent by the Nets and those speaking anonymously on their behalf. From a macro view, though, there is one scenario in which each of them holds true. The TV Guide version goes something like this: If Harden has decided he does not want to play in Brooklyn beyond this season, the Nets know they need to trade him. If he wants to sign a contract extension to remain with the team, they’d love to have him. Right now, the biggest question in a Harden-for-Ben-Simmons trade is what, exactly, does Harden want?
I’m going to try to talk myself through this thing. You are welcome to follow along.
1) From the beginning, the Nets’ governing strategy has been to turn themselves into Warriors East, transforming an untraditional NBA market into a revenue printing press that uses a combination of superstars, fun basketball and double-digit point differentials to capture the hearts and minds and Instagram feeds of the tech-finance-celebrity ecosystem.
2) When the Nets acquired Harden from the Rockets last year, they viewed him as an integral part of that equation, a player with an individual skill set so singular and extraordinary as to be worth the price of admission for even casual basketball fans. In Harden, they envisioned the kind of performer who could transform the Nets from a very good basketball team into a spectacle, the Steph Curry to Kevin Durant’s ... Durant.
3) One year into the experiment, the Nets have yet to realize that vision. That is mostly due to circumstances beyond anybody’s control, circumstances that could easily correct themselves by the end of the 2021-22 postseason. Part COVID uncertainty, part injury misfortune, Brooklyn has only played 51 games in which Harden and Durant have been on the court at the same time and 16 in which Kyrie Irving has joined them. This, out of a total of 124 regular-season and playoff games that the Nets have played since trading for Harden.
4) The Nets still think the Harden-Durant formula can work. Last year, they took the eventual NBA champion Bucks to seven games in the Eastern Conference semifinals despite Harden and Irving both missing three games and the trio spending just 43 seconds on the court together in the series. In the regular season, the Durant-Harden-Irving triumvirate outscored opponents by 14 points per 100 possessions. They’ve spent much of this season at the top of the Eastern Conference standings. Assuming Durant returns from his MCL sprain with 20-plus games left, the Nets will have time to play themselves into a top-four seed and set the stage for a playoff run.
5) The Nets desperately want the Harden-Durant formula to work. They’ve poured most of their disposable resources into building a brand and a roster around the duo. They’ve traded three first-round picks, plus a player who was just traded for a first-round pick (Caris LeVert). They’ve said goodbye to Spencer Dinwiddie. Plus, they paid a $30 million luxury tax last year and will pay more this year.
Think about the tax in particular: it is essentially a premium they are paying as an investment in a brand. Remove Harden, and there’s huge reason to doubt whether they’ll ever reach the organizational transformation they invested in. Irving is a wild card even when he isn’t raging against the machine. When you consider that he isn’t allowed to play in home games because of Brooklyn’s vaccine mandate, and that he can opt out of his contract after this season, his future with the team is highly questionable.
Trading Harden for Simmons could leave the Nets potentially needing to build an NBA superpower around Durant, Simmons and Joe Harris with just two first-round picks between now and the start of the 2027 NBA season, when Durant will be 38 and a free agent. That situation could be especially dire when you consider that the Rockets have the right to swap for their 2027 first-round draft pick.
6) Taking all of these things into consideration, the Nets know that their best chance of becoming a perennial NBA superpower is with Harden and Durant together. As long as both players are committed to making it happen in Brooklyn, Brooklyn is committed to making it work.
7) Brooklyn has yet to be convinced that Harden is committed to making it happen in Brooklyn.
8) If the Nets become convinced that Harden is not committed to making it work, and and that he has already decided to play elsewhere next season, their best chance at success over the next five years is trading Harden now for a package that will give them more options moving forward while at the same time pivoting to a future built around a Durant-Irving pairing, with the hope that the vaccine mandates go away.
Simmons would fit fine alongside Durant and Irving, and he’d give the Nets an asset that they could use to acquire another superstar in the future. Given their current free fall in the standings, and the questions about Durant’s knee and Irving’s availability, there isn’t enough incentive for the Nets to gamble on keeping him for the rest of the season and then trying to get value for him in a sign-and-trade.
9) If Harden genuinely has yet to make up his mind on his commitment to Brooklyn, the Nets have some serious figuring to do between now and Thursday.
In sum, the reason why so many different parties are saying so many different things to so many different people is that the reality of the situation hinges on the opinion of the one person who hasn’t said anything.
Of all the seemingly conflicting reports, the most important one might be the one we have yet to hear: an official statement from Harden or someone speaking on his behalf. If the state of play is what it seems, Harden could end all of this by telling the Nets he will sign an extension this summer and then telling everyone else what he told the Nets.
Until that happens, everything else is anybody’s guess.
