Basketball followers have been infatuated with Kevin Durant’s upcoming free agency for well over a year. Derrick Rose couldn’t help but mention his chance to cash-in on the league’s skyrocketing salary cap even though it won’t come until the summer of 2017.
Fans, players, coaches, owners, agents, and everybody else in between is both excited and horrified by the looming prospect of free agency in the modern NBA. And why not? Multiple superstars have changed teams since LeBron James’ landmark decision of taking his talents to South Beach in 2010, and countless other less notable free agent signings have shifted basketball’s balance of power. Games may be played during the regular season, basically, but their fate has never been more influenced by the summer.
Welcome to the NBA in 2015.
But as the Houston Rockets will be thrilled to know, not everyone is as intrigued by free agency as basketball’s overwhelming majority. In a sprawling feature story by Jonathan Feigen of the Houston Chronicle, James Harden says he has every intention of finishing his career with the team that helped launch him to superstardom.
Signed through the 2017-18 season, when asked if he intends to play the rest of his career in Houston, Harden did not hesitate.
“Definitely,” Harden said. “Definitely it’s going to end here.”
The reigning MVP runner-up was traded to Houston from the Oklahoma City Thunder in a blockbuster deal before the 2012-2013 season. After he immediately signed a max-level deal with his new team, many openly wondered if Harden – who was coming off a dismal NBA Finals performance against the Miami Heat – could ever become the franchise cornerstone Daryl Morey and company were so clearly anticipating.
The 26-year-old answered that question with aplomb during his first season with the Rockets and has continued improving ever since, emerging as perhaps the most devastating offensive player in basketball last season. His much-maligned effort on the defensive end drastically improved, too.
Harden, vocal detractors be damned, will be a perennial MVP candidate for years to come. And unfortunately for the league’s other 29 teams and all fans of the free agency frenzy, it seems as if his still burgeoning career will end the place it was reborn: Houston.
[Via Houston Chronicle]
