Austin Rivers joined the Houston Rockets the day before Christmas, immediately jumping into the Rockets rotation and playing 31 minutes in the team’s victory the next night over the Oklahoma City Thunder. In the past month, Rivers has been indispensable to Houston, averaging 37.6 minutes per game and acting as the primary ball-handler for the majority of the infrequent time James Harden is on the bench.
Despite being fully entrenched in the Rockets offense, Rivers told Sports Illustrated that he doesn’t have a thorough knowledge of the team’s playbook yet.
“I still only know like three or four plays,” Rivers admitted in the locker room before the Denver game. “Mike [D’Antoni] just lets us go. And, obviously, James Harden. Just get the f— out of his way. Let him do the heavy lifting.”
The next day D’Antoni chuckled when he heard Rivers’s explanation of Houston’s system. “He’s got good grasp of the offense,” D’Antoni said. “He has a real good grasp.”
Much has been made of Harden’s historic season, in which he has set multiple scoring records in the non-Wilt Chamberlain division, forced other coaches to aim to hold him under 50 points, and generally expanded the previously-conceived boundaries of what one individual can do in a modern NBA offense.
Harden has been stretching these limits ever since Mike D’Antoni arrived in Houston. His usage rate has gone up from 33.3 percent in their first season together in 2016-17 to 39.0 percent this year. For comparison, Russell Westbrook used 40.0 percent of OKC’s possessions during his MVP campaign in 2016-17. As of last week, Harden had run more isolation plays than any other team in the league. According to Tom Haberstroh of NBC Sports, Harden has scored 59 consecutive baskets for a total of 202 points without an assist since last receiving a pass for a score from Clint Capela against Orlando on Jan. 13.
Within the regular season, it’s hard to find an argument that Harden shouldn’t be carrying more and more of the Rockets’ offensive load. His efficiency has improved in this three-year stretch under D’Antoni, as his true shooting percentage has increased from 61.3 to 62.2 percent. The team has been first or second in offensive rating throughout this time. Harden finished second in MVP voting during the first year of of D’Antoni’s tenure as Houston finished third in the West; he won last year’s award when the Rockets had the best regular-season record; and he is the favorite to do so again with his club making a midseason charge.
The problem, of course, may surface in the playoffs, where Harden has yet to showcase the same individual brilliance in a Rockets uniform. This is not to suggest that The Beard somehow wilts under pressure – this is the same James Harden who has hit numerous clutch shots and who powered the Thunder to its only NBA Finals appearance with his heroics in the 2012 Western Conference Finals. Harden has the ability to be dominant whatever the situation, but it remains an open question how much stamina he will have to single-handedly carry Houston not only into the playoffs but through multiple rounds, particularly as his running mate Chris Paul continues to recover from his latest injury. We’ve seen Harden submit one of the weirdest burnouts in playoff history in Game 6 of the Western Conference semifinals in 2017 and no Rockets fan wants a repeat of that.
D’Antoni is one of the most creative offensive minds the NBA has ever seen, and though no one would deny the effectiveness of what he has built in Houston, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to hand the ball to Harden and allow him to go to work. The simplicity of the Rockets offense belies some of its ingenuity, but it’s hard to believe that D’Antoni doesn’t have a few more tricks up his sleeve to help diversify his team’s attack or allow Harden a breather now and then.
For now, Houston might be content to run the three or four plays that Rivers knows. That hasn’t been a winning proposition in May thus far, but Harden has been pushing the limits of what we think we know about the NBA for a while now. He might have more left in him.
