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Our young wings and James Harden

Would you have traded Hayward, Burks, and the Golden State Pick for Harden?

  • Yes

    Votes: 16 31.4%

  • No

    Votes: 35 68.6%
  • Total voters
    51
JJAS said:
We are paying Al Jefferson what Harden will be making right now, and this is his third year with the Jazz. Are you saying that you would not pay Harden the pay scale for four years what we have paid Al for three? To be clear, as it states above, Kobe Bryant is making $28 mil. this year. Durant will be making $21 mil. in his last year. This is not even close to the pay scale of Harden. I understand the fiscally conservative argument, but in this market to be great, you have to take chances. When you look at salaries around the top players, as I have included above, he is not really being overpaid. You have to have top players in the NBA to take it to the next level. Let me be clear also, the Jazz do not have the make up of a "championship" team. We don't even have a single certified All-Star outside of Mo Williams. Our best players are our bigs, so we need to improve our wings. All of the weaknesses I mentioned above are very real for our wings. Look at a list of top twenty wings in the league, I included a link. We don't have a single wing in the top 20, and it is debateble and to be seen if we have one among our two young wings. The more I think about the Harden situation, the more I think the Jazz missed out on great chance to improve on our overall talent. You have to have at least two Allstars if not 3 to win an NBA title. Malone (arguably the best PF of all time) and John Stockton (arguably the best PG of all time) could not win a championship.

The only good argument I've heard for not trading for Harden is he's over rated and will not perform up to his contract. I don't buy this: see Locke's article.

These are the facts:
1. Championship teams have multiple superstars/allstars.
2. Championship teams have good to great coaches.
3. We have no current superstars/allstars.
4. The odds that all four of our youth or even two of the four are allstars/superstars are slim.
5. We are not going to attract a lot of allstars/superstars to our market.
6. We must, therefore, from time to time overpay, work through the draft (always difficult: Sacramento, Minnesota, Washington, Toronto, Detroit etc.), or use trades to get allstars.
7. Harden is in the top 15 wings and probably top 8 in the league at the age of 23.
8. We missed an opportunity to use our assets and expiring contracts.
9. You're going nowhere fast with middling players.
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Ding ding ding ding! We have a winner. Nice post.

The Jazz just put too much value on their "nice" players. They really missed a chance to get a top-line youngin to go with Kanter and Favors. Those 3 could have made a core that could go places.
 
The Jazz didn't have an offer that really competed with Houston's. OKC is getting back a proven scorer that IDEALLY should be coming off the bench anyway, plus Lamb, plus a few nice draft picks. The trade they made is giving them a lot of chances to replace Harden's role, whether Martin extends at a Thunder-friendly number, Lamb turns into something, or one of those picks becomes something. OKC got an offer that gives them a real opportunity to be almost as good right now and down the road at Harden's position, and the Jazz simply don't have a single player like Martin (or at least the player Martin's been).

Now, if Thunder wanted to add some balance to their offense and big rotation in general, then then the Jazz are the team on the phone. But it doesn't appear that that was their goal.

I'm fascinated how this will all play out.
 
jazzfan1971 said:
Hell no.

Harden is vastly over rated. He's got a lot of questions about his game as well. He's a pretty poor defender who's had the luxury of going up against opposing teams 2nd unit for his entire career.

There is a reason that OKC let him go, he isn't worth the money he's going to be paid. He's not a star player, and we'll probably get to see that over the next 3 years as he won't be able to elevate Houston's fortunes.
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Great post.

If harden was so great then okc would not have signed ibaka to the huge contract and would have instead given that contract to harden.

Harden will probably average about 24 pts a game in my opinion. I think burks and hayward could average that (hayward starts and gets 15, burks off the bench for another 10. Or vice versa)
 
Seems that with durant at the 3/4 and westbrook at the point guard they had an opening for harden at shooting guard and chose sefalosha/martin over him..... hmmmm
 
I voted no. You have to be extremely careful about players who are second and third fiddles to superstars. Their stats are inflated because they are the beneficiaries of double teams and less scouting. Consider our own Mo Williams, who was an all star in Cleveland when playing with Lebron. When Lebron took his talents elsewhere, Mo was now "the man", his scoring should have gone up drastically right? As you can see his scoring actually wen't down a little, but more importantly, his efficiency fell off a cliff due to being the focus of the defense.

Mo Williams 2009/2010 (Lebron's last year)
PPG: 16.7 (per 36 for comparative purposes)
FG%: 44.2%
3FG%: 42.9%
PER: 16.1

Mo Williams 2010/2011 (sans Lebron)
PPG: 16.3 (per 36 for comparative purposes)
FG%: 39.2%
3FG%: 32.4%
PER: 13.9
 
Who said Harden would be better without Durant or Westbrook? Who said Mo would be better without Lebron?
 
slc said:
There must be more to this story than OKC would not pay the extra 5.5 mil for Harden.
Why would they trade away a top 20 player when they were so close to a title?
There has to be some other reasons they did not want to keep Harden.
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You could be right here. Harden may have had a change of heart, OKC may have seen that Ibaka was really flowering (he looked great offensively in the preseason), the may have banked on good players wanting to play with Durant and Westbrook, they might have wanted to keep financial flexibility with there two great players etc.
 
If Harden simply produces and is as efficient in a similar manner to last year, he's worth every penny. There's reason to believe he can still improve substantially (he hasn't had to be much of a mid-range/hero-baller because he's had two others to defer to, but he would never have incentive or the reps to improve in that situation, now he must but he has all the fundamentals and intelligence to make the improvement).

Or not, but we'll see. I think he has all the tools for the Rockets to look like geniuses.
 
Good points numberica.... I said no about the trade, but it is a tough choice for me and probably influenced by my homerism for our young guys.

I believe most all GM's in the league would trade burks, hayward and the GS pick for harden in a heartbeat. (koc included)
Like someone else said: OKC would laugh at our offer.
 
It looks like it came down to Ibaka versus harden for them. For me, I haven't seen enough in Ibaka to keep him over Harden. Bigs with his talent do not seem as rare as what Harden brings.
 
zman1527 said:
It looks like it came down to Ibaka versus harden for them. For me, I haven't seen enough in Ibaka to keep him over Harden. Bigs with his talent do not seem as rare as what Harden brings.
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Most GM's would go with the opposite of what you just said. Athletic shot blocking big men that can score are a lot more rare than a shooting guard like Hardin. Plus the Thunder already have the best scoring wing in the league and a PG that can fill it up. Ibaka would have been the one I would have kept also if I was a GM
 
Ben10 said:
Most GM's would go with the opposite of what you just said. Athletic shot blocking big men that can score are a lot more rare than a shooting guard like Hardin. Plus the Thunder already have the best scoring wing in the league and a PG that can fill it up. Ibaka would have been the one I would have kept also if I was a GM
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Beat me to it.
 
Be honest: How many of you claiming Harden is not worth what the league is fully willing to pay him have never seen the guy play even once?

Harden fills the PnR role for the Jazz. Burks' only direction is toward the basket.
 
franklin said:
Be honest: How many of you claiming Harden is not worth what the league is fully willing to pay him have never seen the guy play even once?

Harden fills the PnR role for the Jazz. Burks' only direction is toward the basket.
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Its not that Burks and Hayward are going to be as good as Harding is right now ever. I watch a lot of OKC last year and I'll be honest in that Harden does run the P & R great and he is a good shooter. But being a second or third option on offense his entire time in OKC makes me hesitate to want to pay him max money. In the clutch and in big games the guy was terrible shooting around 20% in the last 2 min of a close game. He was a complete no show in the finals this last year and was 1 for 10 on game winners last year. To me he is overrated as a player right now.

Understand that I could be completely off and Harden could thrive as the #1 in Houston. But after watching him a lot last year I don't see him being able to be close to the efficency that he has been to this point. IMO not the guy that I want to spent my teams max contract on.
 
Here's perspective on a 3rd year player:

10th in FTA, 8th in makes. Lebron shot 502 vs. Harden's 369 in 20% less minutes. That's equivalent to 441 vs. 502 for the best player in the game.

2nd in TS% & EFG%, which is rare for a small guy to do. You simply don't score that efficiently as a byproduct of other stars lifting you up above them.

39% 3/49% total. You don't shoot that well as a small player simply because of talent around you.

At this same point in their careers, Manu Ginobili's numbers are almost identical. Only Ginobili was 4-5 years older and didn't shoot quite as well.

Harden scores 16 points and 3.7 assists on only 10 shots per game. Yeah, his TS% will probably go down a couple notches in Houston but his shots should go way up, especially without a chucker/offensive dunce like Westbrook dominating the ball. If Lin lives up to anything then Harden is going to get some more nice looks.

Again, this upcoming season is only Harden's 4th.
 
franklin said:
Harden scores 16 points and 3.7 assists on only 10 shots per game. Yeah, his TS% will probably go down a couple notches in Houston but his shots should go way up, especially without a chucker/offensive dunce like Westbrook dominating the ball. If Lin lives up to anything then Harden is going to get some more nice looks.

Again, this upcoming season is only Harden's 4th.
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I agree with all of this. But does that make him a max player and one that you build your team around as a #1 option? At this point you are taking the chance that he is based on what he has done. Is it a sure fire bet? not by any means. And If it were my team I wouldn't be taking that chance based on what I have seen so far.
 
franklin said:
Be honest: How many of you claiming Harden is not worth what the league is fully willing to pay him have never seen the guy play even once?

Harden fills the PnR role for the Jazz. Burks' only direction is toward the basket.
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You are probably right about how good harden is (of course most of the nba agrees with you since we have all seen how good he is)

I just cant wait to see how wrong you are about burks.... its gonna be great. (kinda like how nice it is to see how wrong you appear to be about "kwame" kanter)
 
Ben10 said:
I agree with all of this. But does that make him a max player and one that you build your team around as a #1 option?
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I think there are are maybe 5-10 guys in the league at any time you build around. Players like Love, Griffin, Harden & D-Will you build with instead. Jazz need a star and Harden would have solved a lot of problems.

fishonjazz said:
I just cant wait to see how wrong you are about burks.... its gonna be great. (kinda like how nice it is to see how wrong you appear to be about "kwame" kanter)
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I look forward to the day you can throw Burks in my face. There's nothing more I would have loved than being wrong on Stevenson, Pavlovic, Almond, CJ, Brewer, Humphries, & Boom Bitches. I'm giddy as **** with Kanter looking like his willingness to work harder than anyone in the league and his desire to be the best player on the planet might actually yield fruit.
 
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