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Talk About It Here.
Chris Paul is shooting approximately 60% in the playoffs. He’s shooting better than that in the fourth quarter. (And it’s his birthday! He’s 37.)
James Harden is shooting about 40%. Harden looks like a shell of himself, and although he never really says if he’s injured or not, he sure looks that way. Or it could be he’s on a path like the NBA of old, where guys often lived hard, and didn’t keep themselves in peak condition to make up for it, and were often done around 32, 33 years old.
But if you were going to pick a career divergence, from about the time of the disastrous Chris Paul trade, (where Daryl Morey PAID Sam Presti to take The Point God off our hands, so James Harden could be free of him,) would it have been this?
Would your prediction, three seasons on, have been a rampant 37 year old Chris Paul, and bleak, ineffectual, James Harden?
When we look back on The Morey Years there will be things he doesn’t get credit for, like building a great team around Yao and TMac in 2008. That team, but for injuries to both, probably wins a title. Don’t believe me?
For reference the main other players were: Ron Artest, Kyle Lowry, Shane Battier, Luis Scola, Carl Landry, Aaron Brooks, Dikembe Mutombo, Chuck Hayes, Brent Barry, Von Wafer. All pretty much at their best, except Lowry, who was really good, but got even better. That’s…pretty, pretty, good.
They took the eventual champion Lakers to seven games, without Yao, TMac, or Dikembe, who’d been kept in bubble wrap all season for the playoffs.
And the same with CP3, Harden and MDA. Sometimes bad luck ruins things.
Sometimes bad decisions, and misplaced priorities ruin things. Trading the player that embodies everything you believe as a GM, for a player that embodies everything you despise as a GM, to keep a star happy, might count as that.
