Harden might not be capable of carrying an offense the way he once was, but he just may be the perfect point guard to elevate the Clippers. Heading into the most consequential playoff run of the Paul George–Kawhi Leonard era, can Harden and his team transcend years of playoff disappointment?
Nineteen years ago, Paul George walked into a Los Angeles skills camp intent on proving he belonged.
He was a scrawny high school sophomore, raised in the L.A. exurbs, who was struggling to get noticed. Inside a gym hosting some of Southern California’s top teenagers, George had a chance to introduce himself. Instead, he left remembering someone else: a junior from Artesia High.
“I didn’t know who James Harden was then,” George says. “But one play stood out.
“It was like a fast break. They throw the ball ahead, it bounces, James catches the ball, goes between the legs, and dunks it. I’m like, all right, I’m definitely in the wrong place here.
“I just—I’d never seen something like that. He was so explosive and bouncy. [From] that point forward … I paid attention to who James Harden was.”
George never forgot that first impression, including last summer, when Harden opted into the final year of his contract in Philadelphia and asked to be traded. But four months of stalled trade talks cast doubt on whether a deal would come to fruition. Clippers head coach Tyronn Lue didn’t believe it would happen until late on October 30, when he got a call from Philadelphia. Harden was on the line. He was excited, and his questions came rapid-fire.
“‘What do you need from me?’” Lue recalls Harden asking in the moments after the trade was complete. “Just asked me questions about the team, about the guys, about what they like, what they don’t, you know, just all the different things a natural point [guard] would definitely ask.
“And as soon as he gets in, he wanted to meet and sit down and talk. It was perfect.”
Harden was never going to make the Clippers perfect. They made the trade anyway because, after four years of searching for the ideal complementary point guard next to George and Kawhi Leonard, the Clippers thought he could give them their best shot at a title in the George-Leonard era. The team’s top basketball executive, Lawrence Frank, had in previous seasons outlined the characteristics he sought in players to put alongside the franchise’s established stars: high levels of skill and basketball intelligence, toughness, elite playmaking, and the size to allow for positional versatility. Harden fit the criteria. He fit their timeline, too—a veteran motivated to win by a closing championship window. Both star wings and Russell Westbrook entered this season with the opportunity to become free agents in 2024.
Making a trade at the start of the 2023-24 season instead of at February’s trade deadline was itself an acknowledgment that the team could wait no longer. Since George and Leonard arrived in 2019, the Clippers have been either too disconnected or too hurt to fulfill their potential. Last season began with a picture of the Larry O’Brien Trophy on a TV in the Clippers’ practice facility; it ended, for the third consecutive year, in a postseason derailed by injuries to either Leonard or George, with their potential together still unrealized.
“We’ve just never been able to see it,” one team source said last April, sighing heavily.
This winter, that potential finally became reality. From December 2 to February 5, the Clippers produced the most consistently dominant and sustained stretch of the Leonard-George era, going 26-5 and briefly rising to first place in the Western Conference. Harden’s presence helped Leonard and George return to All-NBA form, boosted the production of center Ivica Zubac, and provided hope to Clippers fans burned by postseason heartbreak. At the All-Star break, their record was 36-17, the franchise’s best winning percentage at that point in the season in 11 years.
What isn’t so clear is whether they can recapture that form following two months of uneven basketball that not only left them 15-14 after the All-Star break, but also often got them pummeled. Some losses involved fourth-quarter collapses, while others were worrisome enough to spark questions within the locker room about the team’s identity, with Lue going so far as to call his team “soft” in late March. Harden’s production has dipped since its midwinter peak, and he’s dealt with a shoulder injury. Leonard has yet to play a game this April because of knee inflammation, and he’s listed as questionable for the first game of the playoffs.
To get through a first-round matchup against Luka Doncic, Kyrie Irving, and the Dallas Mavericks, let alone win three more series, the Clippers and Harden need each other to do something neither has before: become their best selves in the postseason. One deep run can rewrite years of playoff disappointments, but both Harden and these Clippers are running out of opportunities.
Photo by Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images
By mid-November, the Clippers were in the middle of a losing streak that would reach six games. It was only a few weeks into Harden’s tenure, and the team’s stars couldn’t figure out their roles together.
“We had a film session after the first few games when we were struggling and, in front of everyone, Ty stopped the film,” Zubac said. “He was like, ‘Anyone here have something against it if James runs more pick-and-roll?’ And no one said anything. He was like, ‘There you go. Do your thing, man.’”
Harden’s description of himself as a “system” during his introductory press conference sounded, to several scouts and executives within the league, like a glaring lack of self-awareness; to Lue, it sounded like a good idea. Let Harden play his preferred style, and the Clippers could then get Leonard his preferred post-up isos and George his looks along the wing. So, after early signs of turbulence, Lue tossed Harden the proverbial car keys.
“One thing I want to make sure is everybody that plays for me is comfortable,” Lue tells The Ringer. “And so I understand James coming into a new situation, he didn’t want to step on guys’ toes and he didn’t want to do too much. And so I just wanted to let him know in front of everybody, like, everybody is OK with you running pick-and-rolls, and everybody’s OK with you taking your shots and being aggressive. So, you’re our best pick-and-roll player.”
Something clicked into place. The team that was making the league’s fewest passes became one of its “happiest,” Lue said, because “we’re getting easy shots, and shots that they normally wouldn’t get.” The team that gets the fewest wide-open shots became the fourth-most efficient offense. Winless for half of November, the Clippers went unbeaten for three weeks in December. In December and January, Harden posted his lowest usage rate since his third pro season—with Oklahoma City—but the Clippers were incredible with him on the floor. The team immediately began hitting internal benchmarks that coaches had set as their blueprint: 12 or fewer turnovers, 36-plus 3-point attempts, 24-plus assists, at least 24 transition points per game. Atlanta’s Clint Capela, Harden’s frequent lob collaborator in Houston, saw déjà vu. “Whenever you have a player that gives you the ball that much in the game, it gives you confidence and you get better and you get used to it,” he said. “And I feel that this is what he’s trying to do with this team.”
The Clippers learned dimes came with demands. Soon after his arrival in L.A., Harden asked Zubac to stay after to learn the guard’s preferences by drilling one pick-and-roll after another. The extra sessions have continued ever since, with backup big men, backup guard Bones Hyland, and rookie forward Kobe Brown drawn in, too. The new guard was trying to establish mindless repetition, the kind forward P.J. Tucker experienced in Houston, when Harden whipped passes to spots on the floor where thousands of plays had told him a teammate would be open. In Harden’s debut, he found Zubac rolling to the rim with a pass between the defender’s legs, even when Zubac didn’t believe he was open. “I kind of liken it to a quarterback where it’s like you almost want to be able to throw passes blindly,” Clippers center Mason Plumlee said. “You want to know where guys are going to be without having to visually see that they’re there.”
Coaches recognized Harden’s ability to be a setup man when he was asked to be a leading one. While playing under Kevin McHale in Houston from 2012 to 2015, Harden was used primarily off the ball, optimized to score in bunches. Yet “you could tell early on that, once he knew where all the pieces on the board were, he was going to pick you apart,” said Timberwolves coach Chris Finch, who was part of McHale’s staff. “Before he starts, he’s one of those guys that takes a snapshot of the floor, knows exactly where all of his plays are going to be made. And guys that can make all four passes and score for themselves at all three ranges are almost impossible to guard in pick-and-roll, and he’s one of them.”
Both Lue and Doc Rivers, Harden’s former coach on the Sixers, agree: There are few guards who can so consistently turn pattern matching into points, using recall and muscle memory from facing thousands of defensive coverages to break down a single possession.
“James sees things like only the savants,” Rivers tells The Ringer. “I was a point guard, so I usually see [plays develop], but when the guys came down he hit somebody else that I never saw. I was like, holy shit, that’s way advanced.”
Growing up in Los Angeles, Harden says he studied three central influences who “formed me into who I am”: Kobe Bryant for his dynamism; Paul Pierce for his physicality, stepbacks, and midrange jumpers; and Manu Ginobili—a fellow lefty—for his downhill drives, side steps, and twisting finishes at the rim.
He’s still watching. Harden’s off-court reputation may be characterized by stories of late nights, but people close to him say he isn’t credited enough for how much, and how closely, he studies basketball. During Clippers bus rides, Harden has been known to find a teammate or staffer watching another game on their phone and peer over their shoulder, commenting on what he’s seeing. It has helped him build a memory bank of opponent tendencies, which has helped Harden become a trusted post defender, in particular. One longtime league talent evaluator believes that only Chris Paul is as adept at saving a possession by knowing where an opponent will place the ball, then stripping it.
Walking the back hallway of Crypto.com Arena in early March, Harden was asked whether he felt his court vision was underappreciated, compared to his scoring.
“I think my entire game is underappreciated,” he told The Ringer.
Despite Hall of Fame credentials, including the 2017-18 MVP and seven All-NBA selections, plus a spot on the league’s all-time top-75 list?
“Yeah,” he said. “Still can have the credentials, but people won’t still quote, unquote ‘respect’ it, or appreciate. … I don’t know what it is.”
It could be because Harden’s brilliance has yet to translate to a postseason breakthrough. Whether because of more focused opponent scouting or the wear and tear of his preferred style, Harden’s playoff résumé features its share of dispiriting moments. Even last postseason with Philadelphia, Harden had vintage performances, notably 45- and 42-point games in two second-round wins against Boston, but also disappeared at times, including in two chances to close out the Celtics.
Harden’s play down the stretch of this season resurfaced some of those old concerns. Injuries to himself, Westbrook, Leonard, George, and Zubac have at times forced Harden to shift back into scoring mode rather than orchestration. His shooting percentage has dipped every month since its December peak as he’s tried to shoulder a heavier load—he alone hasn’t been able to pull the Clippers out of what Frank has characterized as a teamwide “lull.”
At this point in his career, getting his team back on track will require not only the flashes of his old, dominating self, but also something new from Harden. “It’s different when you play for a team when you’re just the man solely,” Lue said. “You don’t have to do all the other things that other guys have to do because you’re making every play, you’re in every pick-and-roll, and so it’s totally different now. The conversations with James are, ‘You gotta do other things.’”
Just as Lue saw fit to empower Harden, he has also challenged him during daily talks. The two have known each other for years and, as former point guards, have been able to build a foundation of trust. Lue respects Harden’s career evolution from a sixth man to an MVP to a willing orchestrator, and Harden respects Lue’s willingness to shape-shift and coach based on instinct.
Their mutual appreciation has led to discussions that one person familiar with them described as the most “high level,” in terms of strategy, Harden has had with a coach since he and Mike D’Antoni achieved liftoff together in Houston.
Harden has discussed with Lue the finer points of screen placement. Lue has told Harden he must use slot cuts and baseline cuts to open space when he doesn’t have the ball. December’s turnaround was keyed by Lue imploring Harden to initiate the offense faster, ratcheting up the intention of the half-court offense; while Harden could ask for multiple screens in a possession to get just the right look in Houston, in Los Angeles the Clippers need to get to their second or third action to find the roster’s other future Hall of Famers. That communication, and the recognition that L.A.’s success hinges on the interplay of its stars, pulled the team out of one rough spot already, in November. Can it work again? On a roster filled with many quiet personalities, Harden has been key to driving home that point, Lue said.
“He’s talking to the guys like, ‘Man, it’s not about your minutes, not about shots, it’s about winning—like, who gives a fuck if I take five shots, four, it don’t matter, all that matters is winning,’” Lue said. “Like, ‘We’ve all done everything you could possibly do, except win a championship, outside of Kawhi. So like, it doesn’t matter.’ That’s been his message since he’s been here. … When you get that message from a guy of his stature, that means a lot to everybody else.”
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In an early-January game against the Grizzlies, Harden held the ball several feet behind the arc when he spotted George deep in the paint with an inside position on his defender. Like a quarterback threading a pass to a well-covered receiver, Harden lobbed the ball in George’s direction.
Thrown too short, the pass would have been a Grizzlies steal. Too long, and it would have landed out of bounds. But Harden threw the ball on a perfectly parabolic arc, over two Memphis big men to a spot where only a spinning George could catch it. Without needing to dribble, George caught the ball and laid it in, then pointed to Harden as the Clippers jogged back on defense.
Nearly two decades after George first encountered a high-school Harden producing one-man highlights, their dynamic has shifted. Now, Harden is more often playing the role of setup man, with George and Leonard acting as the stars of the show.
At its best, the Big Three has been everything the Clippers hoped for after they added Harden in October, with input from George and Leonard. All three stars are happy living in Southern California, and they seem to appreciate the ways their games mesh on the court. When Harden hit a season-changing game-winner while falling down to beat Houston in November, George was the first to rush over to lift him up, with Leonard right behind. Harden’s ability to still draw two defenders on the ball “opens up the floor for all of us,” Leonard said in January.
Harden’s playmaking, specifically, also ensures that Leonard and George “don’t have to get tired of bringing the ball up just trying to get to their spots, and then isoing with only a few seconds left,” Zubac said. Relative to past point guards like Reggie Jackson, Rajon Rondo, John Wall, and Russell Westbrook—who were also acquired with input from Kawhi and PG—Harden has proved most able to bring the Clippers’ vision of an elite team built around two star wings to life.
Yet how much time is left for this era of the franchise is a prime topic of speculation around the league. Westbrook, who owns a player option this summer, is 35, Harden is 34, George is 33, and Leonard is 32. Harden will be a free agent but feels comfortable within the organization and would like to return. When Leonard signed a three-year, $152 million extension in January—which was one year and many millions less than he was eligible for—he caused a stir by saying that his conversations with Harden and George indicated to him that “for the most part, everybody is coming back.”
Extension talks between George and the Clippers have been ongoing since September but have yet to yield a deal. If an agreement isn’t signed by June, George can pick up his $49 million player option or opt out to enter free agency. George has repeatedly stated his intention of retiring as a Clipper, but rival executives are watching Philadelphia, which will have max cap space this summer and is reportedly interested in teaming George with Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey.
For a long time, holding together one of the league’s most expensive rosters was a matter of how much luxury tax team owner Steve Ballmer was willing to pay. Yet one year into the NBA’s new collective bargaining agreement, the calculus is changing as the full, onerous effects of new measures to penalize top-spending teams are implemented. The rules will further restrict the Clippers’ tools to build their roster through the draft, free agency, and trades. Even the league’s wealthiest franchises have a pain point, and even teams that are the most all in have to consider when to pivot.
On top of that, the Clippers will open their new Inglewood arena next season. In theory, a roster of Southern California–born All-Stars would be a marketing dream. But that depends on whether these Clippers can prove enough in this postseason to be considered real contenders in a conference that is getting younger and more competitive by the season.
The team’s scorched-earth December and January showed a proof of concept that this time might be different—that the right guard, with a healthy wing duo featuring a two-time Finals MVP, could lead the franchise to its first title. One rival scout still considers a healthy L.A. the biggest threat to Denver in the West. And it is that evidence of championship credibility that has raised the pressure on Leonard, George, and Harden to deliver. When the prospect of trading for Harden emerged last summer, that trio agreed they would be able to make it work; by making the deal, the Clippers bet the future of the franchise that they were right.
All that seems assured is that, in the coming weeks, there will undoubtedly be a moment like the one George witnessed nearly two decades ago. A rebound, a fast break, the ball thrown ahead to Harden … and everyone stopping to pay attention, watching to see what comes next.
Andrew Greif covered the Clippers and the NBA for the Los Angeles Times for six seasons.