So James Harden wants people to shut their eyes to reality and see him instead as a present-day version of St. Francis of Assisi. So selfless. So generous. So willing to sacrifice for the 76ers’ greater good.
Harden spoke to Yahoo! Sports on Sunday, an interview that served a dual purpose for him: to address the worries and uncertainty surrounding his future with the Sixers, and to promote his new wine collection, “J-Harden.” There’s no small amount of irony in the fact that Harden is launching a product that is supposed to improve as it ages. And it’s always funny how star athletes say that they don’t need to pay attention to independent media outlets — We have social media! We have podcasts! We can control our own narratives! — until they have wine to sell or an image to burnish or positivity to spread. But Chris Haynes, the reporter who conducted the interview, is a pro, and in writing the story, he knew to push the booze news to the bottom and put the more relevant and interesting quotes up top.
Harden revealed that he had spoken with Daryl Morey, the Sixers’ president of basketball operations, about the ways in which the team might strengthen itself enough to advance beyond the postseason’s second round for the first time since 2001. By declining his $47.3 million player option for 2022-23 and reportedly agreeing to a two-year contract, Harden will cut his salary next season by $15 million, which in turn allowed the Sixers the salary-cap space to make the additions they have so far this summer — the signing of free agent/Harden compadre P.J. Tucker among them.
“I told Daryl to improve the roster, sign who we needed to sign, and give me whatever is left over,” Harden said. “This is how bad I want to win. I want to compete for a championship. That’s all that matters to me at this stage. I’m willing to take less to put us in position to accomplish that.”
Interesting framing there. Harden made it sound as if he had a choice in the matter. If he did, it wasn’t much of one.
Sure, by opting in, he would have been eligible for a maximum contract extension worth up to $233 million. But just because he would have been eligible for such an extension doesn’t mean the Sixers would have been eager to give him one, and imagine the public reaction if he had insisted on playing next season for $47.3 million.
The same guy who had forced his way out of Houston and Brooklyn by performing with such obvious apathy had faded down the stretch with his latest team — a team managed by Morey, so devoted a congregant in The Church of the Beard that he routinely dons the necessary vestments. And now that guy was looking out for himself and hamstringing the Sixers’ capacity to acquire players and pieces to help themselves win a championship? Few athletes around here would have gone faster from hero to villain in the paying public’s eye.
“I don’t really listen to what people are saying,” Harden said. “I wasn’t right last season, and I still almost averaged a triple-double. If anybody else had those numbers, we’d be talking about them getting the max. People were used to seeing me averaging 40, 30 points, and so they viewed it as a down year. I was in Philadelphia for a couple of months and I had to learn on the fly. That’s just what it was.”
No, it was more than that. It was his disappearing act over those four playoff games in Miami. It was the regression in his offensive game: the drop in his effective field-goal percentage, the slowing of his first step, the diminishment of his ability to get to and finish at the rim. It was the obvious conclusion that, with his 33rd birthday coming up in late August, Harden isn’t the player he was with the Rockets and isn’t much different from the player he was last season with the Nets.
He is a player, in truth, who doesn’t have much leverage anymore. He is already in the best possible circumstances he could expect to find himself in at this stage of his career, and he’s the one here who bears the burden of proving that the Sixers’ investment in him — even at $15 million less than it might have been — was worthwhile. There is no executive in the league who values Harden or accommodates him as much as Morey has and will. There are few superstars who should fit with him, in playing style and personality, as well as Joel Embiid should. There is no other free agent the Sixers could have signed whose presence on the roster, in the locker room, and off the court would have pleased Harden more than Tucker’s will.
This is as good as it’s going to get for him. He has nowhere else to go. The notion that James Harden is doing the Sixers some kind of favor here is spin, nothing more. If anything, it’s the other way around. If anything, he should be raising a glass to them, not to himself.
