James Harden is not "the problem", he has helped the Clippers rediscover their identity.
James Harden and the Los Angeles Clippers are the best team in the NBA since December 1st. It's a far cry from where they were reputationally just a month prior to that.
I LAST wrote about the Los Angeles Clippers on April 24th, 2023. At that time, I described it as “one of my most glum basketball-related states”.
Tyronn Lue’s squad had lost game four to the Phoenix Suns two days prior. Game five and an eventual whimpering postseason exit loomed two days away. They had entered the playoffs without Paul George after a serious injury sustained against the Oklahoma City Thunder back in March – the day before I was set to make my first pilgrimage to Crypto Arena to watch the team, and my favourite player, live. Kawhi Leonard joined his running mate in the treatment room after game two of this first-round series. We’d all seen this movie before and I didn’t want to play anymore.
“It feels like high time the Clippers try to find a way to go away from being one of the deepest teams in the NBA and get a touch more stardust. While I believe it would be hard to outright acquire a third star to lead this squad, especially with the new Collective Bargaining Agreement coming into effect this summer, another player around the level of guys like Russell Westbrook or Norman Powell would feel like a smart move to make for Steve Ballmer and company.”
“There’s a lot of uncertainty to come, some of it could yet be exciting, but right now it’s hard to feel anything that isn’t followed by a big sigh…”
Steve Ballmer and company made zero splashes in the offseason, aside from the PR-disaster-in-waiting that was picking up disgraced former San Antonio Spurs guard Josh Primo. They seemed ready to merely run it back, despite this ailing roster driving us fans to such aforementioned glum states back in April. They started the season 2-1. I threatened to buy in based on the fact I still liked a lot of the guys – and for the first time in a long time Kawhi and PG were coming into the season healthy. Hook me up to the hopium/copium.
Then on October 31st, 2023, they made a trade for James Harden. They traded away guys I (again) liked a lot and felt helped embody the spirit of the Clippers for a guy I felt embodied everything that was wrong with “player power” in the NBA today. A guy who may have had talent, but never really showed it when the lights shined their brightest, and who just seemed to be constantly followed around by a dark cloud in recent times. I didn’t want that dark cloud over my team.
I started supporting “my team” in 2014. Donald Sterling had just publicly outed himself as a terrible human being and it was big news in the United Kingdom. As I dove deeper into the story, I found out about former Boston Celtics championship-winning coach Doc Rivers, former Rookie Of The Year winners Blake Griffin and Chris Paul, and the alley-oop machine that was DeAndre Jordan. I went deeper and found out about guys like Darius Miles, Quentin Richardson and Lamar Odom. From Lob City to Rock L.A. Familia. I liked that edge they always had.
I grew up a huge Allen Iverson fan, so the Hollywood Los Angeles Lakers were never going to be for me. In the Clipset, I had the perfect underdog antidote right in front of me. A franchise that felt like it was sticking two fingers up to its Staples Center roommates by merely existing, let alone being by far the best team in the City Of Angels as they were in 2014.
However, fast forward to 2023 and the Clippers didn’t feel like the underdogs. In acquiring Harden to form a ‘big three’, the franchise – in my eyes, at least – had made its most ‘Laker move’ to date. Suddenly the Purple And Gold, despite boasting LeBron James and Anthony Davis, felt more like the underdogs in a city that they have basically ran in a basketball sense way before their now-noisy-neighbours moved away from San Diego. My ‘plucky underdogs’ were now giving ‘washed overdogs’.
A subsequent six games losing streak only confirmed my worst fears and the basketball world was reacting accordingly. My biggest concern was that, in trying to make move after move to win a coveted NBA Championship, this ball club had been completely stripped of its identity. To my mind, the only guys that truly resembled the spirit I fell in love with were longest-serving player Ivica Zubac and fan-favourite Terance Mann – and given how heavily Mann had featured in trade talks before the Harden move was made, even that situation felt a little fraught at the time.
Dallas Mavericks announcer Brian Dameris was one of the most public critics of Harden and his latest engineered move. During the coverage of the Clippers’ In-Season Tournament loss to the Mavs on November 10th, 2023, he punctuated an attack on the former Houston Rocket, Brooklyn Net and Philadelphia 76er’s character with the words: “You’re not the beard. You’re not the system. You’re the problem.”
Since that date? My Clips have a record of 33-13, the third best record in the league during that time. In fact, they have the best record in the league since December 1st, 2023, going 28-7. “Uno” has been the team’s de-facto second star behind Kawhi throughout most of that spell, and definitely since George’s most recent injury absence.
What has impressed me most about Harden and his teammates in that time is the level of fight that they have shown in the face of relative adversity at times. A 20-plus-point deficit? No problem. Injuries to primary, secondary and even tertiary stars? No problem. Seven games in 11 days during the always-daunting GRAMMYs road trip? No problem, six and one. Down 15 to the in-form Golden State Warriors without your primary star, during which your coach gets ejected and your secondary star fouls out? No problem, James Harden 26 points on 7/12 shooting. Maybe he’s not “the problem” after all?
Each of those incidents is the kind of regular season adversity that the Clippers have all too willingly caved under in recent years. Suddenly I find myself dreaming of a first-seed finish for my team.
It’s not just been the Uno show, though. No, no. Kawhi hit MVP-level form before what we’re hoping is a non-serious and actually-perfectly-timed injury just prior to the upcoming All-Star Break. Russell Westbrook took it upon himself to tell his head coach that he should come off the bench, sacrificing himself for the benefit of the team in a manner with which most NBA fans would not expect from a “washed stat padder”. Norman Powell is the fourth-best three-point shooter in the league percentage wise this season with 45.3%, just behind his teammate Leonard in third. The pair of 2019 rookie classmates Terance Mann (drafted 48th) and Amir Coffey (undrafted) continue to grow to be big contributors for this squad – quickly and emphatically so in the case of the latter. I could go on, but the point is that it has been a real team effort, and that’s all I ever wanted from my Clippers. Fight. Heart. Togetherness. All of that in the face of anything.
Are there still things the team could improve upon? Of course. No team is perfect and there are still some weaknesses that you fear could be exploited. The recent loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves was a worry, as a likely second-round matchup given current seedings. George hasn’t been at his best since his injury, he needs to rediscover both his physical sharpness and sharpness of mind in order to be the aggressive driving force that his teammates need behind the coolness of Kawhi. Zubac has also had a pretty disrupted time recently and looks like he needs more sharpness to get back to his best. Mann and Leonard’s slow starts to the season give hope in both of those directions, though.
New or repeat issues can come up too, of course. What if Kawhi’s injury is just another played-down-but-actually-serious issue which keeps him out long-term? What if the domino effect is that the Clippers enter the playoffs not healthy once again? What if they are healthy, but we get the playoff version of Harden we’ve become accustomed to in recent years, and his crunch-time-shrinking has the same impact on his team? Those concerns pervade, no doubt.
Now though, the franchise is suddenly filled with genuine hope once again. Less than 10 months on from a hopeless place, Clipper Nation have found love in their basketball team once again. More important than that though, our basketball team has found an identity once again. Maybe that never truly went away, no matter how much it threatened to.
It’s a lesson I want to personally take forward in my fandom. That no matter what trials and tribulations the individuals that make up the roster at that time go through, the spirit of the franchise will always ring true in the end. That the edge that I fell in love with in this ball club will always be there, even if it’s brought about by four written-off future Hall Of Famers – I mean, they’re all SoCal guys, right?
Kawhi Leonard. Paul George. Russell Westbrook. And you, James Harden. You are not the beard. You are not the system. You are The Clippers.
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