The real reason James Harden, Vince Carter & Carmelo Anything never won
Some people are talented enough to headline the show—but they’d rather coast as a fan favorite than train to become a legend. They can code like Zuckerberg in a dorm room but log off when it’s time to iterate through the hundredth failed version. They’re good—sometimes really, really good—but they stop where it gets uncomfortable. It’s the difference between being passive in a championship game and demanding the ball in the final seconds. Between auditioning for American Idol and grinding through vocal drills long after the cameras are gone. Pop culture celebrates the glow-up but rarely shows the grind-up—the early mornings, the rewrites, the reps when no one’s watching. It’s like what Isiah Thomas said, the ‘secret’ to winning is that ‘its not about basketball’, the secret to winning is everything else you must do to become a winner.
This is the NBA we’re talking about, so every player in this league at one point was the best player in their world. Whether it was Chris Duhon or Mateen Cleaves, every player in the NBA is skilled and the lucky ones are really, really skilled. This is not to disparage the players I want to talk about but more shed a light on what I believe separates the Lebrons, Kobes, Dirks, Duncans from Carmelo, Vince Carter and James Harden. All these players are damn good players and when you even further silo them into the latter and the former there are still massive differences between these players. No one is going to mistake Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordans maniacal leadership styles with the more inclusive, high emotional EQ styles of a Dirk Nowitzki or Tim Duncan but every one of these players no matter if you hate them or love them, they put in the work, there is no way even watching Dirk on defense that you would not say that guy was not trying. And there it is, the door opening slightly ajar showing the difference between these Tier 1’s vs the Tier 2’s of Carmelo, Vince and James.
Leadership exists in two ways: by example or vocally. These guys did neither, they were never vocal, never wanted to be the bad guy in the locker room, they’d rather play basketball win or lose and enjoy hanging out with the boys afterwards and there is nothing wrong with that. The issue I have is then don’t demand max contracts, don’t give us the BS press conferences telling the media about what it takes and doing whatever is required to win an NBA championship. Winning at any level is not always clean or easy, it takes difficult conversations and pushing people in ways that are uncomfortable to get where everyone eventually needs to be. Michael Jordan got into a fist fight with Steve Kerr because he didn’t think Steve was tough enough and boy he found it, do you think Vince was yelling at Richard Jefferson about missing a switch or James at Clint for not boxing out or Carmelo at Kenyon for not putting in the effort? No, because they knew it was a straw man argument, how can you yell at someone about something you don’t do every damn game? You can’t.
If I ever stand on any argument, it will be that bad defenders do not care about winning, not really. I’m no Kobe, but I have played basketball my entire life and playing defense is all about effort, wanting to beat some to the spot, giving multiple efforts on the same play and doing that over and over again until you wear down your opponent. Its not easy, in fact its damn hard and in no time your back and your joints and your lungs will start to feel it and for players of their caliber to be below average to downright terrible defenders play after player, quarter after quarter, game after game, year after year is utterly inexcusable. I laugh at the argument of ‘they’re saving themselves for offense because they have such a high burden’, that’s a lazy mans first year at uni argument that does not hold up to scrutiny. I would argue that pushing yourself on both ends, in the aggregate, will always be better for a team than going 90/10 effort level offense defense. Are you telling me Trevor Ariza and PJ Tucker loved seeing defender after defender blow by James Harden so they had to react, make the rotation and rotate back to their original defender because heaven forbid Harden would make that secondary rotation. I am sure they would tell you they would do it all over because it got them to the western finals, but that’s my whole point it didn’t get them to the finals or eventually to a championship because players like this that are supposed to be the leader of a team and that has a trickle down affect – good and bad. They see you missing assignments and not caring about half the basketball court and they see how much more they have to do to pick up the slack and eventually as that builds it gets to a tipping point that you don’t make that last extra effort in Game 7 and you lose that series every time. This game is closer to football than it is to 100m dash, the NBA is a battle of attrition, its 82 games + 16 to 28 mores playoffs and people wear down, physically and mentally, so when day after day you see your best player get preferential treatment and slack on defense, it becomes harder and harder to make that last effort.
James Harden only made it the WCF because Chris Paul came in and took that leadership burden from James, same with Carmelo’s one WCF appearance coming after they traded for Chauncey, another all-star leader who took away the leadership responsibilities. In both these situations they became free to do all they ever wanted to do, put the ball in the basket, hit the showers and hit the clubs. Vince also made the conference finals once in his career and had a tailor made opportunity to re-write his story when he was trade in the summer of 2009 from New Jersey to Orlando. Orlando after losing in 5 hard fought games in the NBA finals thought they needed an upgrade of juice at the wing so they turned to Vince Carter coming off a year averaging 21/5/5 on .44/.39/.82 shooting splits. Vince had a team that every dynamic wing would dream of; He had high-level shooting all around him (Reddick, Lewis, Nelson, Barnes, Pietrus) and arguably the greatest rim running threat in NBA history (Howard) where all he had to do was pick and roll all game long and make the defense pick their poison, and what did he do with all these gifts? 14 ppg / 4 rpg / 2 apg on .367/.211/.833 shooting splits in the 2010 Eastern Conference Finals and an absolute dud of a performance in the decisive Game 6 (17 points on 15 shots) with Jeff Van Gundy during the game openly questioning whether his brother Stan should sub Vince out in the 4th quarter for JJ Reddick who had 7 points shooting 2/7 from the field at that point. What’s worse, his contemporary Paul Pierce, picked in the same draft 5 spots later averaged 24 ppg / 8 rpg / 4 apg in the same series on .512/.448/.839 shooting splits. I don’t ever want to hear someone ever try to argue Vince Carter was better than Paul Pierce. They did not want to do the heavy lifting, the constant pick and rolls, the drives to the basket, the physicality it takes to do that over and over again to an aggregate that ends up winning the game. That’s the beauty of sports, its right there in front of your eyes, these players have the same training, the same tools available to them to become the best version of themselves and you can see when some of them elevate and when some of them are cool with making all-star games and getting max contracts.
To me this is one of the reasons why Dirk eventually won his NBA title in 2011, he talked about it, losing the 2006 finals and then in the first round of the 2007 playoffs and how it ate at him, he and his lifelong coach and mentor, Holger Geschwindner went on a desert retreat in Australia, no phones or anything because he could not grapple with the idea of failing for his city and his team. Shawn Marion saw that. Jason Kidd saw that. Jason Terry saw that. Tyson Chandler, DeShawn Stevenson, JJ Barea, Brandan Haywood they all saw that and were ready to run through a brick wall for Dirk in those playoffs and it worked and with Dirk powering the offense and the balance of the team anchoring the defense, the Mavs won the 2011 NBA title. Dirk so overcome with emotion, left the court after the buzzer ended and cried in the Mavs locker room. One of the assistant coaches had to come get him and plead to come back out to accept his NBA Finals MVP tropy. Dirk was a winner.
Vince once said it was ‘BS’ that he didn’t try in Toronto and his stats in NJ went up because of how they used him, is anyone believing that? This is the mid-2000s we’re talking about and there was only one way to play halfcourt NBA basketball and that was ISO’s and a lot of them. It didn’t matter what team you were on, if you were a premium scorer, you were getting ISOs all game long and he did that in Toronto and he did that in NJ so this narrative that Toronto ‘mis-used’ him and was why he averaged 15.9 ppg in his last year with Toronto before being traded is absolute BS, I mean really was this because of how New Jersey used Vince?
Like I said before, the is not to disparage these guys who are all sure fire first ballot hall of famers, but I wanted to articulate a thought I’ve been seeing for decades, to try and put on paper the reasons why some players win and some players come up short time and time again. It’s the same dumb argument I always see about basketball players vs hoopers, an argument I will never give any credulity to because its really about do you look like cool playing or do you not? So Nick Young is a hooper and JJ Reddick isn’t? Cool.
I hope anyone reading this can also decipher, I am not talking about the Charles Barkleys, Patrick Ewings and John Stocktons of the world, those guys were all champions who just never got over that hump but they all made the finals and put the work and no teammate on any of their teams would say any less.
