At noon on the eighth day of the Chinese New Year, the first day of the New Year' work, I held a bowl of instant noodles and listened to Teacher Yang read in my ear for ten minutes. That was the "Yang Kan's Bottom Meal" program that we just launched on Wednesday, Teacher Yang analyzed it, patted his chest and said, I dare to pack tickets, after the Friday trading deadline, Harden is still in Brooklyn.
Friday passed, Harden was gone, and the punch in the face came quickly. The NBA's superstar is not the nameless little fish and shrimp like me, and Harden did not take the management's drawing pie seriously. People say that if they don't do it, they won't do it, the fish will die and the net will break, and they will leave tonight.
This incident also shows a truth from the side: if you reason about the direction of things through a wrong message, even if your reasoning process is not a big problem, you can only draw the wrong conclusion in the end. All of Mr. Yang's reasoning is based on the premise that "Harden did not tear his face with the management", but when Woj broke the rumor that Harden "stood again" in the early morning of Friday, the virtual and vicious snakes of Harden and the Nets management were in vain, and things went in a direction that most people did not expect.
The Nets' secrecy work has been done well, and over the past month, everyone on the Nets (including Harden) has repeatedly reiterated that Harden will stay in Brooklyn, but someone who knows a lot about the 76ers and the Nets' trade process and Harden's delicate relationship with the Nets threw the bomb through Woj, blowing the Nets' whitewash to pieces. When everything was bloodied on the table, the Nets management of the Birds of Prey had no choice but to trade, and in the end they didn't even get either Maxi or Sable. In this confrontation with Morey, the inexperienced Sean Marx suffered a big loss.
When the Nets lost to the Bucks in the playoffs last year, I wrote in the Nets' season summary that no one in a team built through the personal will of superstars was willing to challenge the privileges of superstars. If they keep doing this, the Nets will still be a failure. More than half a year later, the Nets are still resigned to their superstars, causing the situation to deteriorate at a high rate. When all thoughts were lost, the person who was most desperate for victory took the lead in choosing to quit.
At this point, if you look back at the Nets' thriving two years ago, you'll feel like you're in a trance. Jarrett Allen and Caris LeVert were both Nets players. To get Harden, they were sent away from Brooklyn. They're now reunited in Cleveland, and the Cavaliers are currently five wins ahead of the Nets and third in the East.
After sacrificing a large number of quality young players and draft picks to form the Big Three, the Nets didn't get what they wanted. The eagerness and panic shown by the management when the deal was finalized also revealed their timidity in a sense: it was precisely because they themselves were no longer optimistic about the prospect of the team to compete for the championship under the original team structure, and they lacked confidence in leaving Harden in the summer. Max, who was full of spirit in forming the Galactic Battleship, should also reflect on why the league's number one team, which won the league at the beginning of the season, has come to this point in just a few months. The door to the championship was too narrow for the next team to pass. The superstar hug may really be a shortcut to the goal, but the shortcut is still far from the end.
On October 19 last year, during the opening game in Milwaukee, Harden also claimed that he was happy with everything about the Nets: "I love it here, it gives me the feeling of home. Nothing to worry about. "After just 4 months, everything was in the opposite direction.
When Harden came to Brooklyn, his appeal was clear: he was tired of playing in a single-core team that relied on him for everything, he wanted to play alongside other star players (paul and Westbrook were obviously not included in the list of other star players), and he wanted to win championships.
After 393 days, when Harden left, none of his demands were met. When the Nets' Big Three played side by side, the Nets' record was 13 wins and 3 losses, but the sample size of 16 games was too small. He often had to take the old and the weak to play against the best teams in the league, just like the job he did in Houston (the quality of the role players even declined). After Irving's part-time job and Durant's injury, the Nets have suffered a tragic 10-game losing streak, ranking eighth in the East, and look farther and farther away from the championship.
When an avalanche occurs, not a single snowflake is innocent. Now it doesn't make much sense to trace the Nets' collapse to who was responsible. From Irving's refusal to vaccinate and was banned by the team, to Harden's decline in form, Durant being overused, and then to the Nets being unable to withstand the pressure to allow Irving to return, Durant was injured, and the team was scattered, the Nets' collapse really happened too quickly. Gentlemen do not stand under the dangerous wall, it is the nature of human beings to seek advantage and avoid harm, so that Harden once again chose to leave.
There are many people who blame Harden for being able to share the same happiness and not suffering, but if we take the role of Harden, it is actually easy to understand Harden's logic. As the only athlete in the Nets' Big Three who does not have a championship ring, in order to win and good teammates, Harden left his comfort zone and carried a certain degree of infamy, these sunk costs spurred him to keep moving forward, but also made the 32-year-old unable to accept the team's seemingly irreversible decline in a short period of time. Now another question lay in front of him: After escaping from the cage in Brooklyn, was the city of friendship a sea leaping with fish and the sky high as birds flying?
Things aren't so optimistic either. The combination of Harden and the 76ers has many hidden dangers: first and foremost, it is run-in, coaching and health.
In Harden's career, he has worked happily with center players such as downside blockers (e.g., Capela, Clarkston) and space-based interiors (e.g., Ryan Anderson), both of which Embiid rarely played on the offensive end. For every 100 cover he's done this season, he's only 16 down to the basket. And if you just let him do the cover and shoot outside, you feel like you wasted his league-first average of 29.4 points per game — if you reverse, let Harden dribble the ball after halfway and then give the ball to the low Embiid and then watch the scenery at the top of the arc, it's also a waste.
Doug Rivers had to find a way to twist the 76ers, which had been upset mid-season, into a rope. As the championship manager who has just recently been selected as one of the 15 most coaches in NBA history, Hu Baoyi Song Gongming in the NBA world, Rivers has a very high status, but whether it is in the "Empty City" era, Leonard George's double star era or last season's Philadelphia, the locker room he led has repeatedly been turbulent. Throughout harden and Embiid's careers, they are far from the image of Mr. Good, and have clashed with teammates and opponents several times. How to maintain their off-court relationship and how to get them to have chemistry on the pitch will be the top priority for Rivers in the coming months. Moreover, after getting Harden, Philadelphia will undoubtedly become the target of the entire league. The manager, who has been turned over 4 times in his entire career 4 times, is not known for his ability to withstand pressure, he always leads more talented teams to lose to undesirable opponents, can he rebuild the team system in such a short period of time under such great attention and pressure? You know, it's only two months before the playoffs.
Another problem facing the 76ers is health. Plagued by hamstring and hand injuries, Harden's performance this season has slipped markedly from his peak. Embiid played 42 of his 54 regular season games this season, playing a career-rare high in attendance. But with a long history of injuries in the past, it's hard to stay optimistic about his physical condition at the moment. Once he can't stay fit, Harden will face the same dilemma as before, and the Philadelphia 76ers will once again become a team driven by him.
The 76ers do have younger superstars than the Nets, more experienced championship coaches than the Nets, better role players than the Nets, and a general manager who knows how to match his lineup. No one here will inexplicably light the sage before the game, and no one will let the core athletes play a game for 53 minutes. But that doesn't mean his future is smooth sailing, and the ones mentioned above are the dilemmas that Harden may face or even already face.
Harden may not be unaware of this, but he knows exactly what he wants, so he played the face of his own who desperately wanted to come to the Nets last year, and risked being punched in the face again in the future, and he had to toss it like this: The Philadelphia 76ers may also have its problems, but the Nets' situation is a dead end for him alone.
Leave the Nets, leave the dead end, head to Philadelphia, and get a new life.
The face punch video mentioned at the beginning of the article
Let's see what Old Yang said three days ago