NEW YORK – According to James Harden, “it’s all a flow.” Some nights, he said at his introductory press conference on Friday: “I can be a facilitator”. Other nights, it can mark a high point. Kyrie Irving or Kevin Durant “can win ten consecutive possessions,” he said, “and I’m fine with that because we’re going to win and it’s going to be good.”
Harden will make his Brooklyn Nets debut on Saturday, provided all players pass Wednesday’s exams. Irving will be off schedule, by Malika Andrews of ESPN, but could return from his absence as early as Monday. Whenever the three stars enter the court together, the world will be watching to see what it will be like. Harden said “it will be fun”, inadvertently channeling an infamous Sports illustrated and that he cannot predict how it will be from game to game.
“That’s the beauty of being versatile and being able to do more than one thing,” he said.
The counterpoint is that, since 2012, he has done the same thing. For every moment of his tenure at Houston Rockets, Harden was unmistakably the centerpiece of the attack and the organization. The teammates changed, the coaching staff changed and the style of play evolved, but he had the ball in his hands, in full control. Nets coach Steve Nash acknowledged on Friday that “it will be a fit for him”, but said Harden was excited by the newness of this situation. Harden said it was thrilling to hear Nash, “one of the best ever,” explain his place in the attack when they spoke earlier in the day.
“As long as I’m improving my teammates, it doesn’t matter the points,” said Harden. “I think everyone knows that I can score at a high point, and that’s where the sacrifice comes in.”
Repeatedly, Harden emphasized that he wanted this, and so did his new castmates. Nash and general manager Sean Marks, who spoke on Thursday, said the same thing. It looked a lot like what everyone said about Durant and Irving coexisting with game creators Spencer Dinwiddie and Caris LeVert, an experiment that had barely begun before Dinwiddie partially tore up his ACL and the Nets negotiated with LeVert in the Harden business. This partnership, however, is different. Brooklyn has three All-NBA players, all between 28 and 32 years old, and Harden is not about to return to the role of the Sixth Man of the Year he played in his first 20 years.
Neither Harden nor his new coach offered a quote on the adjustment that might correspond to the line that Klay Thompson presented after Durant joined the Golden State Warriors with 73 wins: “There’s a ball. Guess what we’ll do – we’ll put it in the ring.” Nash did his best to reframe the discussion about “a ball”, calling it the cliché “big problem” for the technical team and, more convincingly, a “big opportunity” for the trio. (Thompson also said, memorably, that “I wasn’t sacrificing shit.”)
“Look, these guys, they want to win,” said Nash. “If they really want to win, they will find a way to play together. I think my role, our role as coaches, is to create an environment that is very, very fun, challenging and competitive, but fun.”
It is difficult to imagine a more interesting coach for this particular challenge. Nash is one of the best leaders in NBA history, a Hall of Fame point guard who personifies altruism. He’s also in his first year on the job, and he was in that infamous SI cover, posing next to Dwight Howard. Help the man he is, when idiot Howard sang “I Love LA” during the photo shoot, Nash joined us. In this story, Grant Hill describes Nash as a “conductor”, but that super team was never in tune, condemned by personality conflicts and injuries.
“Having played in teams with other talented players, you can see the pitfalls, you can see the difficulties and you can trust those experiences,” said Nash. “And I think part of that is just starting out really just by clarifying what our reasons are here together. Like, what are we here for? What do we want to accomplish?”
In that respect, Nash believes they are on the same page. Harden, Durant and Irving know that they will “have a slightly smaller volume approach to play now,” he said. “There are still many shots to make, there are still many opportunities to make plays, but it will not be the same format as before, when they were largely focal point # 1. the attack doesn’t have to look perfect next week, but they’ll figure out how to make each other – and their non-star companions – better.
Harden described himself as “an elite player, an elite teammate and just a guy who is willing to do whatever it takes to get as many wins as we can, with sacrifice”. He did not speak to Irving about how they will share the responsibility for handling the ball, he said, but he did not seem concerned about it.
“Depending on what is happening throughout the game, it will determine who gets the ball and who makes the moves,” said Harden. “We are all altruistic, we are all passersby willing and we play basketball the right way. And that is all that matters.”
Harden said the Nets were at the top of his list as he planned to leave Houston. “It was a no-brainer for me,” he said, because all he wants at this stage in his career is a chance to win a title.
It is always easier, however, for a star player to talk about sacrifice than to actually do it. Durant certainly adapted with the Warriors, but even the dominance on the court failed to maintain this arrangement for more than three seasons. Irving said all the right things when he joined the Boston Celtics, but that situation became untenable in year 2. One can look at the recent history and usage rates of these stars and conclude that it will all blow up in the collective face of Brooklyn. It can also be assumed that they understand exactly what is before them.
“We know what is at stake,” said Harden.