The NBA playoffs begin this weekend, and tomorrow night, we'll see the second-seeded Houston Rockets tipoff against the seventh-seeded Dallas Mavericks in their first round series. On the eve of the Western Conference's least-intriguing playoff matchup, Grantland's Kirk Goldsberry published a sprawling feature on Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, the "quintessential tycoon of our time."
For Cuban, a part of earning that tycoon tag, and maintaining it, involves focused shit-talking. Powerful people assert their power in their own grandstanding ways, but for Cuban, talking that talk and then walking all over you has been a forte of his. In the Grantland piece, Cuban gets into giving James Harden a dose of MVP props for carrying that team to 56 wins in the NBA's premier conference while also concurrently slighting the rest of the Rockets.
"There's no more predictable team than the Rockets. You know exactly what they're gonna do," said Cuban. "But James Harden is so good. That's what analytics have begot. Right? Predictability. If you know what the percentages are, in the playoffs, you have time to counter them. Whether you're good enough to do it is another question. Because they are very talented, and James Harden, I think, is the MVP. Because that's not a very good team over there."
Okay, sure Mark Cuban. We all know what the Rockets like to do, because they've been great enough at doing the same thing to win 56 games. James Harden will run the show, collect a billion fouls per game, and dish out passes to open three-point shooters in the corners. The Rockets will rally around this by hitting their Harden-created shots and playing lightning fast basketball. While the individual players around Harden may not be "very good" in Cuban's estimation, frankly speaking, it doesn't matter. The Rockets have designed a team of role-playing pieces that fit well around Harden's modern magic, and they're just fine revolving around that.
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[via SB Nation]
