10 Reasons Why James Harden Was the First Half NBA MVP

Image via Complex Original

NBA discussion has become more nuanced over the years, allowing for the inclusion of more stats to build a case for the league’s best player. But the game has always been, and will always be, about buckets.

Harden has been getting his points better than anyone this season, registering a hefty 27.1 points per game on the year. He’s also one of the most efficient scorers, shooting 45.5 percent from the field, 87.8 percent from the line, and 38.9 percent from deep on almost seven treys per game. He lets it fly early and often, but his efficiency justifies the gunning.

Harden’s defense became something of a running joke last year; screen grabs and videos mocking his lack of effort popped up across all forms of social media. It was one of the reasons people didn’t take the Rockets seriously as title contenders despite their one-two punch of Harden and Dwight Howard.

He’s put a lot of the critics to rest this season with genuine effort and improvement on that end. Already lauded as one of the league’s best players while he was lackadaisical on defense, it only seems fair to consider him for MVP now that his work on the other side of the ball is catching up.

If you aren’t satisfied by traditional box-score stats, you’ll be happy to know that Harden’s season is rated highly by a bevy of advanced metrics. VORP (Value Over Replacement Player) ranks him in a tie at the very top of the league list. Win Shares, which attempt to approximate how many wins a player is worth to his team, also count Harden at the very top, with his 10.5 outclassing Anthony Davis’ second-place 10.1.

Upon Dwight’s arrival in Houston, the pairing of Howard with Harden looked to be the start of another NBA superteam. When healthy, Howard has looked closer to his Orlando self than he ever looked playing alongside Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles. Health, however, has continued to be an issue for the Houston’s big man.

Even without his co-star, Harden has powered the Rockets to third in the West, a feat that grows in stature when you consider the division in which Houston plays. The Rockets have survived the Southwest—home to Memphis, Dallas, San Antonio, and New Orleans—going 13-4 without Dwight. “The Beard” is the primary reason.

Team basketball is more en vogue than ever (see: Hawks, Atlanta, and San Antonio), but there’s still a certain romance to the alpha-dog scorer overcoming extra help and the opponent’s best defenders. In Harden’s case, he hasn’t always gotten the better of them—that’d be a Herculean feat—but he never stops coming, and he uses failures to fuel his next barrage. Look no further than his evisceration of Jimmy Butler for evidence of that.

Harden is more than just a high-volume scorer—he’s also Houston’s primary creator. Counting his assists (6.7 per game) paints him in a favorable light, but considering the rate at which he dishes out dimes is even more favorable. Harden’s 34.8 assist percentage is nearly double the rate of his next closest teammate, highlighting just how dependent the Rockets are on his creation skills.

Need a bucket in crunch time? There’s almost nobody better than Harden. He ranks second in clutch scoring behind Kevin Durant according to the NBA’s stats database, and his three-point percentage soars to a mind-boggling 52.6 percent in the game’s tightest moments. Despite the fact that teams know that he’s the one who’s getting the ball, they can’t seem to stop him.

Some of the West’s best players are probably Harden’s main challengers at this point in the year, and though there are some viable candidates, no one is doing more with less than Houston’s star. As for Golden State, the West’s best team, Klay Thompson’s emergence is responsible for the Warriors’ jump as much as anything else, while Harden is buoying the Rockets through bouts of uncertainty without Howard. If LeBron is able to surge back into the race, Kyrie’s excellence can similarly be counted against him. Only Davis, whose team is on the outskirts of the playoff picture, has a role as vital as Harden’s.

So just how much do the Rockets crumble without Harden? They’re 4.1 points worse without Harden on the court, which doesn’t sound like an enormous difference. Think again—if you can believe it, he’s the only player whose absence creates a net-negative for Houston. Every other player on the roster—including Howard—sees the team get better without his inclusion. That seems almost impossible.

There’s nothing that James Harden hasn’t done for Houston, whether it’s knocking down triples, helping his teammates, or even cleaning the glass. He’s the best player at his position by a country mile, and he contributes to the game in more ways than any of his competitors. Nobody has played better in the season’s first half, and nobody deserves the MVP honor more than Harden.