Even if you tend to think that the final non-call was the right one, which I do, it would require seeing yesterday's game through lenses so royal blue they'd make Elton John blush to fail to see that the Warriors were the obvious beneficiaries of bad officiating. I don't even think that's an opinion as much as it is a fact...
That being said, if you're anything like me, it's also impossible to come away from that game feeling at all bad for the player who went on to shamelessly plead for fairness in officiating after spending an entire MVP-worthy season making things entirely unfair on those officiating him...
Call it paying a postseason physicality tax after having his net-worth inflated by the relief he was granted at the charity stripe all regular season. Call it an untimely regression to the mean. Call it whatever the hell you want, but James Harden's gift (and it is absolutely a skill, albeit an obnoxious one) in creating otherwise unnecessary contact is a curse in that there is reason to doubt literally every reaction he has on the court. In the same vein of "the boy who cried wolf", the engine to the Rockets' offense is very much the beard who cried foul, and placing your fate in historically inconsistent hands by design is not a strategy that's liable to succeed when it matters most. Simply put, it's of James Harden's doing, and his doing alone, that the refs, whose job is hard enough as is, are basically flipping a coin in trying to decide if he was truly fouled or if he shamelessly flopped. It sucks that coin kept coming up heads in biting Houston in the tail yesterday, but it was really only a matter of (playoff) time before those questionable calls became a hell of a lot harder to come by. As he referenced, Kawhi Leonard's postseason-altering injury a few seasons ago is evidence of the importance of giving a shooter space to land, but what he failed to address is one particular shooter's need of an entire runway to land as he often has the intent to do so on his back. That intent was pretty clear to me as one of the most unstoppable scorers in league history appeared more worried about kicking his way to the free throw line than actually making a game-tying shot with mere seconds left...
Now, I could very well be seeing that wrong, but the point is that James Harden has actively and voluntarily made it so that, even in dissecting the replay in high-definition and slow-motion, it's still pretty damn difficult to tell what's right (i.e. fair). At the risk of giving too much of a pass to full-time officials that undeniably had an off afternoon, it's absolutely irrational to expect them to do so with any consistency in real time. I'm as tired of the Warriors as anyone else, and as such I'm made about 100x more exhausted by Draymond Green's mouth. Unfortunately, what came out of it this time around was dead-on-balls-accurate. Ain't nobody trying to hear James Harden whine for whistles, and for good goddamn reason.
1 Comment
5/7/2019 07:29:05 pm
It is really hard to feel bad about James Harden's NBA career. I mean, he is definitely one of the best players of the modern era, however, the fact that he cannot win a championship a shot at his legacy. James Harden is a marvelous scorer and an offensive facilitator. People often times undermine his defense, however, I believe that he can play defense pretty well. His only weakness is the fact that he cannot make a shot when under pressure. Leave a Reply. |
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