The Oklahoma City Thunder are hoping a trio of NBA stars can lead them to glory over the next few months, but Russell Westbrook pairing with Paul George and Carmelo Anthony is very different from what could have been.
It’s old news for everyone by now, but Westbrook played with two other NBA superstars in Oklahoma City in Kevin Durant and James Harden. The latter was traded away by the Thunder and grew to be a star with the Houston Rockets, and the struggle to get past the Golden State Warriors in the Western Conference later saw Durant join said Warriors and win an NBA title last spring.
It’s a topic everyone involved in has covered in the past, but Harden briefly lamented the breakup in his GQ cover story, which was released on Thursday.
Asked to look back on the 2012 trade that sent him to Houston after they failed to win an NBA title against the Miami Heat, Harden said he couldn’t believe the Thunder would give up the “perfect puzzle” that was Westbrook, Harden and Durant.
In 2012, Oklahoma City shocked the league by trading Harden to Houston, at once ending the Thunder trio and immortalizing it. By this summer, all three should have MVP awards; two of them wouldn’t if the Thunder had stayed together. And yet Harden says he still thinks about that team every day. “It was the perfect puzzle,” he tells me, reliving the end for the thousandth time. “How do you give that up? How do you let that go?”
Looking back on possibilities is always easier than actually making those possibilities happen. But as Harden closes in on his first Most Valuable Player award it’s hard not to think about what could have been for the Thunder. Westbrook was as good as ever for the Thunder this year, and Durant could have always gone off searching for a title in Golden State, but perhaps that wouldn’t have happened if the Durant-Harden-Westbrook trio got to continue to develop together.
