The MVP race has been a dead heat between Russell Westbrook and James Harden all season long, and with just a few games remaining, it’s still so tantalizingly close that you could make a strong case for either outcome.
Both entered the NBA with the Thunder nearly a decade ago with a tremendous amount of raw potential – they went No. 4 and No. 3, respectively, in the 2008 and 2009 Drafts – and have come a long way in terms of developing into the superstar players they are today. Yet neither was a surefire bet early on in their career.
Warriors coach Steve Kerr went on The Dan Patrick Show on Tuesday and talked about what it was like watching them both play in college, and when asked who he thought at the time would turn out to be the better player, he offered some interesting – and potentially controversial – thoughts on the topic.
“I watched Harden at ASU because I was with the Suns as a GM, so I saw him a lot. And you could see that he was a gifted passer” Kerr said. “It would’ve been hard to imagine all of this, but I thought it was pretty easy to see that he was gonna be a helluva player. Like a lot of guys who end up being an MVP, like Steph Curry, you can’t really quite envision it because you don’t really know what’s inside a guy and how he’s going to react to being in the league, how he’s going to handle himself, how he’s going to work, and how he’s going to develop.
“I thought you could see it a lot easier with Harden in college than you could with Westbrook. Westbrook was amazing, but he was just an athlete at UCLA. He didn’t even play point guard, really, and I think he was there for two years, and he was just so explosive, but it was harder to see what he would become, whereas Harden, I think you could kind of see the game and the passing ability, kind of the all-around nature of his play.”
The temptation here, of course, is to see this as some sort of dig at Westbrook, lest we forget that Kevin Durant has been in a sort of Cold War with his former teammate since leaving OKC for the greener pastures of the Bay Area last summer. Couple that with Steph Curry choosing Harden as his MVP recently, and you can make of it all what you will.
The truth is that he probably just answered a relatively innocuous question as honestly as he could, but since that doesn’t fit the ongoing narrative of their purported beef, let’s go ahead and start cranking up the outrage generators!
