harden Page 25 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

James Harden Is Just Toying With Poor Ricky Rubio
The Houston Rockets have encountered little resistance through their first two games against the Utah Jazz. They’ve hung 240 points on the NBA’s second-best defense and hit 32 three-pointers. (Those would’ve come in handy last May.) Eric Gordon and P.J. Tucker are getting theirs, the weird bench uni...

Paul George Ended A Crazy Game On A Crazy Bucket
The final minutes of Rockets-Thunder on Tuesday night were a dense flurry of batshit. They featured Russell Westbrook swooshing a runner from 27 feet, Paul George earnestly looking to scrap with P.J. Tucker, and James Harden conducting the Rockets’ woozy show as usual. All of that is weird, but some...

James Harden Cooks His Spiciest Meatball Yet
At this point in James Harden’s absurd season, a 27-point first quarter is not all that shocking on its own. The dude has already logged 57 or more points five times in 2019, and the Rockets’ offense is weirdly at its most effective when Harden gets to step back across the three-point line to his he...

The Notoriously Rule-Bending Rockets Whined About The Refs In Their Loss To The Lakers
No NBA team has less of a right to complain about refereeing than the Houston Rockets, given how its two biggest stars have bought property in the gray areas of the rulebook. Chris Paul is a notorious flopper and instigator, while James Harden is James Harden, flailing his way to the line a million...

Josh Okogie Locking James Harden In A Closet Makes For A Satisfying Highlight
The Timberwolves beat the Rockets at home on Wednesday night, 121-111, and even though James Harden led all scorers as usual with 42 points on a nauseating 34 field goal attempts, he was far from unstoppable, as proven by T-Wolves rookie Josh Okogie on a pair of dramatic occasions within a couple mi...

Thirsty Rockets Gloat Over Video Of James Harden Committing Grave Robbery
The Houston Rockets resorted to just the saddest damn evidence imaginable Monday night, in an effort to push back against James Harden’s well-earned reputation as an often distracted and indifferent defensive player:...

Jrue Holiday Put A Nice Marinade On James Harden, Slapped Him On The Grill, And Then Ate Him Up
The biggest casualty of the Anthony Davis exodus may well be his poor sidekick Jrue Holiday, who is playing his proud butt off this season, as he generally does. Unless he too can engineer an escape from New Orleans, one of the NBA’s best two-way guards is going to have to make do with LeBron’s bear...

Teams Are Getting More And More Shameless About Defending The Rockets
The fun and frisky Brooklyn Nets deserve enormous credit for their overtime road win in Houston Wednesday night. Even with almost every useful non-Harden Rockets player either on the shelf or suddenly a member of the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, that’s still an impressive outcome, especially on a night...

James Harden's Freakishness Calls To Mind Some Guys
James Harden right now is like no one else in basketball history in at least this one way: he is taking more combined free throws and three pointers than anyone ever. But don’t take my word for it—here are some cool graphs:...

Damn, Now The Rockets Are Even Losing Their Replacement Dudes
The Rockets are currently missing all of Chris Paul, Clint Capela, and Eric Gordon, three players who together make up roughly 99.9 percent of all the difference-making talent Houston has around James Harden. By rights the Rockets should be dead. That they are not is mostly a testament to Harden’s i...

James Harden Has Reached His Final Form
James Harden is no longer a basketball player. He is a thought experiment turned to life, an answer to the question of what happens when one team gives itself over completely to a hyper-efficient death machine....

The Bucks Just Provided The League With A Blueprint On Stopping James Harden And The Rockets
Like with any of the NBA’s elite players, teams can often extrapolate victories from limiting the damage a player is capable of doing in lieu of expecting to stop them entirely. This was the case in the Milwaukee Bucks’ 116-109 victory against the Rockets on Wednesday night. Not only was the team ab...

Humiliating Faceplant Is Just The Beginning Of Jamal Murray's Sudden Basketball Death
The indignity doesn’t end with Jamal Murray getting dropped like a sack of dirt by a James Harden behind-the-back dribble. Oh no. It gets worse from there:...

James Harden Is The Most Valuable Damn Player
There are perfectly good reasons to root against both the Golden State Warriors and the Houston Rockets. The Warriors have Kevin Durant and Draymond Green and are a juggernaut; the Rockets have James Harden and Chris Paul and play maybe the least interesting brand of basketball of any worth-a-shit N...

James Harden Is On An Unholy Tear Right Now
The Houston Rockets—who this season have been dead, not dead, and dead again—are decidedly no longer dead. Since getting spit-roasted by Luka Dončić, Houston has gone 10-1, with the lone loss a two-point squeaker in Miami. Chris Paul tweaked his hamstring, again, in that game, yet it hasn’t mattered...

James Harden Did A New Thing To Infuriate Everyone
James Harden is one of the very best basketball players in the world and the NBA would be worse off without his handles and shooting and creative abilities. He’s also an annoying pile of crap!...

James Harden Irritated The Lakers Into A 50-Point Triple-Double
James Harden carried the sub-.500 Rockets to a much-needed win at home against the Lakers Thursday night, as Houston beat L.A. 126-111 in a game that was tight up until the last few minutes. It was a signature performance from Harden, who scored 50 points on 14-of-26 shooting and also picked up 11 a...

Luka Dončić Went Nuts For Two Minutes And Crushed The Rockets<em></em><em></em>
With a little over four minutes remaining in last night’s Rockets-Mavericks game, Chris Paul drove hard at rookie Luka Dončić, then used a step-back dribble (and a, uh, conspicuously extended left elbow) to separate for a short jumper in the middle of the lane. The basket gave the Rockets an eight-p...

James Harden Uses Incredible Defensive Awareness To Pull Off No-Look Steal
The idea that “James Harden is so good that he doesn’t even need to try” is mostly used to describe the efforts of last season’s MVP on offense. In fact, Harden’s defense throughout his career has been somewhat of a detriment to how he’s viewed as a player. But his typical defensive demeanor came in...