Is James Harden right about the Houston Rockets?
Can the Houston Rockets be fixed?
The Houston Rockets, as long as James Harden is in town and barring a lobotomy, cannot be fixed. Harden has made it absolutely clear that he wants no part of the Rockets’ future and each game he suits up the team is at risk of getting embarrassed.
He proclaimed that the team has chemistry issues and they do, but he played an outsized role in their creation. He said that the talent is not good enough to contend and that’s true, but it’s because he isn’t playing to his usual standards.
In reality, everything James Harden said about the Rockets was true, because he made it true. The self-fulfilling prophecy of his own creation is coming to rue but it never had, nor should it have, come to this.
The Rockets have tried everything in their power to surround Harden with the talent necessary to win a championship and enabled a loose culture so he could feel at home. Yet, neither was enough for him to give it his all as the franchise tries to trade him to a contender, per his request.
The debacle that James Harden has pushed the Rockets in is the reason why NBA superstars are so valuable. When superstars buy-in, their teams win big like the Lakers did twice this week against the Rockets.
The Rockets, with an engaged James Harden, could be a real contender, but with the half-present James Harden, they have now they look like a lottery-bound team. The only way to fix the Rockets is to move on from James Harden or hope that coconut descends from its resting place and suddenly bangs a new outlook on life into him.