Alexander: Clippers’ roll of the dice with Harden trade is too risky
No.
Just, no.
The Clippers are going to regret this.
James Harden got his wish. And doesn’t that sentence sound familiar, and aren’t the chances good that it’s going to sound hollow within a couple of months?
Harden has talked his way into leaving a team for the third time in four seasons. He was happy in Houston, and then he wasn’t, and he basically ate his way out of town and into the arms of the Brooklyn Nets.
There, he was supposed to be the third star with Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, and we all know how that ended up. By the time Harden was traded to Philadelphia in February of 2022 – basically a swap of disgruntled players, with Ben Simmons going from Philly to Flatbush and a bunch of throw-ins and draft picks thrown in – the Nets dynasty as it had once been envisioned was a smoking ruin.
Harden was happy in Philly, too, for a while, signing a two-year deal with the 76ers in July of ’22 with a player option for the second year. And then he wasn’t. After averaging 21 points and a league-high 10.7 assists in just 58 games last season but not getting the long-term contract he sought – when he was about to turn 34, remember – Harden picked up the option for the second year of the current deal (at $35.64 million) toward the end of June and then demanded a trade, again, this time specifically to the Clippers.
This was a demand that came with the requisite degree of acting out. Harden called Philadelphia general manager Daryl Morey a liar during a promotional trip to China and said he no longer trusted him, for which he got fined by the league. He skipped Media Day and sat out a week of training camp, and ultimately was a partial practice participant while the team waited for an offer it could live with, with no leverage to speak of.
It took four months to complete before the final terms were hashed out late Monday, and give Clippers president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank credit for standing firm, at least. The Clippers got Harden and didn’t have to give up Terance Mann. They did give up four players – role players, essentially – plus two first-round draft picks, two second-round picks and a pick swap.
The return is a veteran who not only has never won a championship but has only been to the Finals once. That was in 2012, as a 22-year-old in his third year in the league, when his Oklahoma City team was taken out by LeBron James and Miami in five games. His playoff performances throughout his career have been, well, underwhelming.
Yet he’s supposed to be the missing piece, the guy who will join Kawhi Leonard, Paul George and Russell Westbrook to help erase the Clippers’ woulda-coulda-shoulda reputation and bring a championship banner to the Intuit Dome when it opens next season?
Sorry. I don’t see it. Why should we assume, now that Harden is back home in L.A., that anything will change aside from the fact that he’s again playing for a contract? Since he’s a free agent at the end of this season anyway, if it doesn’t work out the Clippers can just wave goodbye and all they’ve lost is … oh, maybe the last portion of the championship window that opened when they acquired Leonard and George in 2019.
Meanwhile, with four high-maintenance players in your lineup, what happens when the ball stops moving at the offensive end?
And how will Harden’s arrival affect Westbrook’s game? The Clippers have benefited from Good Russ since he joined the club last February, but will the presence of one former MVP (Harden in 2017-18) short-circuit another (Westbrook in 2016-17)?
“I don’t think they need (Harden), but it would add talent,” ESPN analyst Doc Rivers said during a preseason teleconference two weeks ago when the potential of a Harden deal to the Clippers was still just conjecture.
Then he added: “Adding talent, like I said at the beginning of our talk, doesn’t always just do it, if you know what I mean. They do play a style of – they do run a lot of iso stuff with Kawhi and then with PG, so if you look at James and James’ style, it fits in. But the third guy to stop the (ball), would that be good or bad? I’m not sure about that.”
Rivers, of course, not only coached Harden for the last season and a half in Philly, but he coached Leonard and George with the Clippers. “I had them for one year (2019-20), and the entire year that I had them, they practiced together three times the entire season. I’m including training camp,” he said. “Now, it’s a little different. They’ve been together for so long now that they do have chemistry, so the next part of them is being healthy.”
Maybe the best justification for adding Harden is as a fallback go-to guy on those nights when Leonard, now 32, or George, 33, aren’t available. Of those, there have been plenty. For example, not since the Western Conference semifinals in 2021 have the Clippers had both available at the same time during the playoffs (or, in 2022, the play-in games).
But doesn’t this smack of a certain amount of desperation? Remember, the Kawhi-PG era began with owner Steve Ballmer standing on a stage at a recreation center in South L.A. on a July afternoon in 2019 bellowing, “From now on, it’s all about the Larry O’B!”
The “Larry O’B,” otherwise known as the Lawrence O’Brien Trophy, has remained elusive. And both Leonard and George can be free agents at the end of this season if they don’t pick up their player options ($48.7 million each for 2024-25, according to Spotrac, which estimates that with Harden’s $35.6 million added to their salaries, the Clippers currently have a luxury tax bill of more than $100.9 million).
Best case scenario: Harden is relatively happy while playing for his next contract, he and Kawhi and PG and Russ figure out how to make it work with one ball and four guys who need it, and somehow the injury gods give this team a break for a change. But I can also see a scenario where this backfires spectacularly, and the Clippers go into year one in their new Inglewood building with no banners, two or one or even no stars, and a hefty rebuilding chore ahead of them.
Is this roll of the dice worth it? I go back to the top of this column for my response.
No.
jalexander@scng.com