NBA
PREVIEW
talk to me, I’m able to talk to him,” Westbrook says of Harden.
“It just creates a bond. And knowing that it’s coming from a
great place because we understand and we know what our
ultimate goal is, for both us, and that’s a championship.”
This is how friends become coworkers. It’s also, of course,
how even some with strong bonds come to strain their
friendship. Perhaps there’s a world where the proposition
of pairing Harden and Westbrook seems terribly naive. A
world where Westbrook’s posting a video of himself doo-
wopping to “W hy Do Fools Fall in Love?” before the season
feels oddly prophetic. More likely, two of the sport’s most
undeniable creators will find a working balance in a genu-
inely dominant offense. “It’s all about discussion,” Harden
says. “It’s all about communication. It’s all about trying to
get better. Throughout the course of the game, he’s gonna
have it going a lot. I’m gonna have it going a lot. We’ll figure
it out each and every game.”
There is a system in Houston that will not change. Under
D’Antoni, point guard after point guard—from Harden and
Steve Nash to Kendall Marshall and Jeremy Lin—has tapped
into its creative power. “So we’re gonna have Russ-sanity?”
D’Antoni asks. It’s a harrowing thought. Westbrook has
already scored better than 30 points per game, averaged
a triple double—and done both in the same season. What
happens to his wildfire game
when it’s finally given room to
breathe?
“Last year, he couldn’t drive
without double teams,” says
Rockets guard Austin Rivers.
“It’s impossible to double-team
Russell Westbrook here. We
have too many scorers, we have
too many shooters. The floor’s
too wide. It just can’t happen.”
Yet somehow a defense will at-
tempt to corral him while pre-
paring to shift at the moment Harden gets the ball. If the
measure of a player’s basketball dominance is the absurdity
of the tactics used against him, the case for Harden as the
game’s best offensive player is crystallized by his contri-
butions to the avant-garde. Milwaukee’s Eric Bledsoe at-
tempted to defend him last season by stepping to one side
and openly conceding drives to the rim. Consider the mental
g ymnastics required for an opponent to defend Harden by
getting out of his way—how terrifying his step-back must
be for an all-league defender to abandon all hope, not to
mention all pretense of traditional coverage. What Harden
does with the ball is not, strictly speaking, guardable. The
same could be said for Houston’s offense more broadly, as
Westbrook knows all too well from his years as an opponent.
“What they do,” Westbrook says, “is put you in binds.”
The Rockets never set out to be exemplars of isolation
basketball. Things just wound up that way when opposing
50SPORT S ILLUS TR ATED- OC T OBER 21–28, 2019
SHOOT, PARDNER
Harden (right) put
up 1,909 shots last
season, the second-
highest total in
the past 13 years.
The highest?
We stbrook’s 1,941
attempts in 2016–17.