I Will Never Get Over That James Harden Game
We may never totally appreciate how great Harden was in Game Four -- or how bad things could have gotten for the Sixers and Joel Embiid if he was any worse.
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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Remember James Harden's Game 1 in this series against the Celtics? 45 points and six assists on 17-30 shooting, including the cold-blooded game-winning triple from right underneath Al Horford's flared nostrils? A +8 in what was ultimately a one-point game? A get-on-my-back leadership display without Joel Embiid, in a Game 1 that the Sixers absolutely had to have just to have a chance in this extremely important playoff series? A performance that put the lie to every claim ever made about Harden's inability to elevate his game when it mattered most, a performance that such renowned Harden-playoff-failure chroniclers as Zach Lowe and Tim Bontemps agreed was the best postseason showing of The Beard's entire career? Remember that one?
Yeah, me neither. I mean sure, not bad for a debut I guess, but turns out it was just the Bleach to Game Four’s Nevermind. On Sunday, Harden posted 42-9-8 on 16-23 shooting, with four steals and just a single turnover. He helped the Sixers separate in the second quarter, and then he kept the Sixers afloat in progressively choppier fourth-quarter waters. He hit the game-tying two in overtime. He hit the game-winning three in overtime. He got us our second win against Boston -- more than we got on them in the regular season, and the most in three series we've gotten on them in the playoffs.
Perhaps most importantly -- nah screw that, easily most importantly -- he saved Joel Embiid's bacon after a brutal fourth-quarter meltdown, sparing him the kind of resumé loss that takes years to bounce back from (if ever). Hell, he spared the entire roster from confirming the longstanding quitterloser allegations to the rest of the NBA world, and going down an untenable 3-1 to Boston right before an offseason that could very likely see the team dismantled if it came earlier than hoped. Game One James Harden saved the Sixers' series. Game Four James Harden saved the Sixers, straight up.
I can't believe we have another playoff game tonight. I'm still nowhere even close to processing this one.
I can't process how James Harden hit perhaps the biggest shot of his career last Monday, and very arguably hit TWO bigger shots on Sunday. Yes, the OT go-ahead corner three off the Joel kick-out -- in the face of a Immediately Regretting This Decision Jaylen Brown, following Brown's abandoning of Harden to needlessly double Jo -- was the one for the all-time Sixers highlight reel. It's one I still can't believe he had time and composure to catch, gather, sidestep, hoist and drain before the sprawling Brown could even get a fingernail on the ball. But don't sleep on the significance of his game-tying bucket in regulation, a floater he lifted on the run all the way out from the free-throw line, past Al Horford and over Marcus Smart, with the Sixers down two and barely 1.5 seconds on the shot clock. A catch-and-shoot corner triple and a wild runner from the stripe -- neither would have been in anyone's first 20 guesses about what the two most important plays of Harden's Sixers career would look like. But he followed both by casually trotting back on defense, as if he was Tim Duncan after knocking down a couple 15-foot bankers.
I can't process how James Harden made this game more about his clutchness than Embiid's wobbliness. This was setting up to be an all-time bust-out game for Jo, one that would undermine his MVP win, cement all the most brutal criticisms about his play and on-court character as at least partly based in fact, and become the biggest playoff ghost yet in the already extremely haunted house inside his head. Instead, Harden afforded him the chance to get to OT, to make a couple key plays he was spiraling too hard and fast to make in the fourth, and then connect on the biggest pass of the game, which Harden finished with the biggest shot of the game. Like Kendall Roy in his father's last written testament, this game ended up being just as much of a cross-out for Joel Embiid's name in the choker annals as it was an underlining.
You know how I know that? Because I watched the Inside the NBA segment on Sixers-Celtics after the Suns-Nuggets game, and you know how many of Al Horford's blocks on Embiid in the fourth quarter they showed in the highlight package? Zero. You know how many times Horf's name was mentioned in their late-game recap? Zero. You know what the TNT crew wanted to talk about after the clips were through? James Harden's heroics. Why Jaylen Brown didn't take more shots. Whether Shaq's fourth ring counts as much as his first three. No discussion at all of Embiid's mental fortitude, whether the Celtics were permanently in his noggin, whether he could shed them in time to bounce back in Game Five. Sixers fans will always remember, will always be haunted by memories of a dizzy Embiid dishing twice to Tobias Harris in one of the biggest possessions of the game, prompting P.J. Tucker to publicly undress him like a frat pledge before the next possession. But nationally, this was simply the James Harden Game, and always will be. That's the difference between winning and losing. That's the difference between your co-star having a really good game, and having the game of his goddamn life -- again, for real for real this time.
And I really, really cannot even begin to fucking process how James Harden had this game just two days after looking like an eight-year-old playing on an adult-sized rim for the first time. Go back to Game Three and watch the wide-open 12-footer he missed short in the second quarter, looking like late-career Kendrick Perkins attempting a jumper -- then watch him hit that free-throw-line floater in Game Four to tie it in regulation. It's mind-boggling they could be the same player, without enough time in between to even get some kind of magical surgery or blood replacement from the LeBron James of Achilles heels or whoever. And it wasn't just that one play; all game Harden looked spry, had energy, was operating both mentally and physically at crisp 5G Wi-Fi rather than the crappy 56k dial-up he was working with in Game Three -- when he shot 3-14, made passes that looked like he hit the wrong button on the controller, and ultimately stopped looking at the rim altogether. (Or Game Two, when he shot even worse but was generally somewhat less spectacular in his decrepitude.)
Taken all together, there simply is no processing these four games as part of the same data set, as cohesive elements of the same athletic or artistic endeavor. A friend of mine who's a big Smiths fan asked me to help explain the phenomenon of this Harden series to her; I told her to imagine having to review a Morrissey EP whose first track was as good as "How Soon Is Now" and whose last track was as good as "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," and in between was 10 minutes of spoken-word right-wing moaning set over a military drumbeat. It's not surprising that it would happen to the Sixers, but I have to believe this isn't just a Sixers thing -- there simply can't be any way that any player for any team, this deep into their career, has ever made this kind of shit-on-marble-rye sandwich out of their first four games of a playoff series, two absolute masterpieces wrapped around two slices of total excrement. It defies shot variance. It defies common sense. It certainly defies good taste.
The debates have already begun, of course, about what this means the Sixers should do with James Harden this summer. But hell, I don't even know what it means the Sixers should do with Harden for the rest of this series. Let's assume at this point that the only two on-court options for him against Boston at this point are best lead guard on the planet or drunk fan wandering in from the bleachers. Do you just play him until the first TV timeout of Game Five, and if he shows unmistakable signs of suckiness, give him a towel to wave and park him on the bench for the rest of the night? Or do you just leave it in the hands of fate, ride him the rest of the way, hope you get more GOAT James Harden than goat James Harden and brace yourself for the crash if he ends up being the latter?
I truly have not one clue. Going into this series, the chances of us getting a single James Harden Game seemed like 1 in 10 if we were generous. After Game One, the chances of us getting a second felt like maybe 1 in 50. After Game Three, those chances... well, I estimated them yesterday at around 1 in 200, but I actually think it might've been closer to like 1 in 2,000. The chances of us still getting a third this series? They might be 1 in 2 million, or they might be 1 in 2. Couldn't tell you.
All I can tell you is that we could all live to be 120 and still not totally be able to wrap our weak and decomposing arms around just how big a game James Harden played for us on Sunday. If he played anything less than the absolute finest basketball he's ever played in the month of May -- hell, if only played as good as he played in Game One -- the Sixers' playoff run is probably over tonight (and with it an entire era of Sixers basketball), while it's open season on Joel Embiid all summer, possibly all next year, possibly for the remainder of his Sixers tenure. I still can't even let myself really think about all the implications of losing that game, this year, against this friggin' Celtics team; spend too long plumbing that deep a darkness and you might never find your way back to the light. Suffice to say, a loss like that... we'd never let it go. And we'd never live it down.
Instead of all that, though, we get a real chance to take control of the series tonight. Even better, Joel has the opportunity to make his Game Four fourth quarter a mere second-act low in the much longer story of how he finally shed his postseason demons and got the Sixers to the next level. Maybe Harden can pull back and conjure the magic one more time, maybe he never hits anything but the front rim for us again. Even if Harden pumpkins from here on, it will just make this game stand out that much more in my mind as the unlikeliest pantheon performance in Sixers playoff history — for the second time this series — in a moment when we needed it more than we will ever totally comprehend.