One Ring To Rule Them All: James Harden and our Obsession with Greatness
We have always been eluded by the idea of greatness. In any one of mankind’s many pursuits, being transcendently great is held up as the end goal. Why try something if you can’t be the greatest to ever do it? Everyone is striving for that place at the top, to be the first name mentioned in a discussion. We all want to build the pyramids, fly to the moon, and discover the cure for cancer. In my opinion, greatness is a falsehood. It is a prison which prevents us from appreciating the benign mediocrity and minor accomplishments of day-to-day life.
Nowhere is this prison larger or more completely surveilled than in the world of sports, where discussions of greatness are expedited by the veneer of objectivity. A player leads the league in a statistic, and they’re the single greatest player at what they do. This is an easy discussion. You go from the quantifiable statistic to the only logical conclusion that can be drawn from it. Is this fun? Does this feel like an interesting and productive discussion? If your answer is “no,” keep reading.
Our infatuation with greatness, especially in sport, makes us beholden to narratives that are much larger than us. With all of the talking points decided for the viewer in advance, they have no option but to listen and nod along. Among all of the great American sports, basketball is one of the most narrative-obsessed. This is in part because our collective cultural memory of legends like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant is still so fresh, but it is also a consequence of our modern media culture, where one must not only be competent, but transcendent, to stand out.
At the end of the day, this conversation is all about the rings that come with a finals victory. The rings are everything. Without them, you’re a nobody. With them, you’re great. As basketball players seek to take their place in the upper echelons of history, they look to the rings as a shortcut. After all, Michael Jordan has six rings. Kobe Bryant has five. These old victories still drive the conversation to an unhealthy degree. Professional basketball has existed for over 70 years in America, and yet we continue to reduce the conversation to the accomplishments of several so-called “great men.”
In recent months, this poorly framed “rings” debate has been applied most heavily to James Harden. Harden is undoubtedly one of the best basketball players alive. Watching him at his finest is to regain one’s appreciation for sport all over again. Despite his controversial playstyle and efficiency at drawing fouls, I still think he deserves the spotlight he has on him right now. Unfortunately, basketball media’s artificial attachment of imaginary stakes to his game is making it a chore for me to even care about his abilities anymore.
James Harden has made headlines for the last few months as he continues to put the Houston Rockets franchise on his back. The instantly identifiable bearded player has been electrifying on the court, single-handedly controlling the flow of the game with his unique isolation-based playstyle. For seventeen games now, he has scored over thirty points a game, breaking Kobe Bryant’s scoring record in the same category. In part, this is because he has been playing with less and less help, having now lost three key teammates to injuries for the time being, giving him more chances to score. Regardless, Harden’s scoring run has become the fodder of ESPN morning talk shows, basketball podcasts, and other venues of wild speculation. If he doesn’t win the finals now, they speculate, he’s not one of the greats. First Take commentator Max Kellerman expects him to choke in the playoffs, and is quick to mention last year’s performance from the Rockets, in which they took the championship-winning Golden State team to seven games in the Western Conference finals, only to lose. Despite the fact that this situation involves multiple taxing playoff series, as well as the actions of coaches, executives, players, and referees, somehow we manage to put all the blame on the back of one man: James Harden. This is an ungodly amount of pressure for him.
I would contend that it’s admirable that James Harden made it to the 7th game against the Golden State Warriors to begin with, especially when one considers the injury of key playmaker Chris Paul earlier in the series. Harden was just as much the fulcrum of his team’s offense as he is now. Last year he averaged 35.4 minutes per game, and this year averages a whopping 37.1 minutes. Can he realistically be expected to put up record-breaking numbers for the entirety of the regular season, then face off in multiple-game series against the best teams in the league, and then somehow still pull through to win the finals? Rational people should be inclined to say no. But our current sports climate says yes. “Kobe would have done it,” they whisper. “Mike could have made it too.”
We can see how the “rings” fetish of the NBA gradually erodes away all of the context surrounding the playoff runs of these players. The tough moments they faced, the great efforts put in by great teammates like Scottie Pippen and Shaquille O’Neal, and all of the poor decisions that they made throughout their careers have been erased by our reductive and individualistic measure of greatness. James Harden is a player made of flesh and bone, and as dynamic and amazing as he’s been to watch, even the greatest players have a limit. In our clamoring to either enshrine him as great or deny him his place in history, we have turned a human being into a living stat sheet, a machine whose only job is to nail the same stepback three-point shot night in and night out. Right now, people are looking at him based on his ability to enter Wikipedia’s “List of NBA players with most championships” article. And that’s a shame.
The discussion around James Harden reflects our inability as sports fans and consumers of media to live in the moment. We are perpetually obsessed with the highlight reel, with the single player overcoming the odds to win it all. This prevents us from watching the game in a normal and well-adjusted way. The NBA is full of great players and great teams. In the Western Conference alone, there is a whole mess of teams fighting for playoff contention, each one hosting players that are great in their own right. Even as Harden dominates the conversation about the Rockets, the media cycle ignores the other players on his team. We don’t have conversations about the gradual improvement of Austin Rivers. We don’t have conversations about PJ Tucker and Gerald Green making enough threes to bail out the team against the Nuggets. And we don’t have conversations about Clint Capela, the recently injured center who has averaged 17.6 points and 12.6 rebounds a game this season. The narrative has become all-or-nothing, and so myopically focused on the legacy of one player that we fail to appreciate anything else.
The worst part is that if James Harden fails to deliver in this season’s playoffs, all of the hype he generated will revert to slander. The media will hate him for his inability to win a ring. They will label him a choker. They might even label his current scoring run a fluke, or otherwise unimportant. To me, that’s poor reporting. If we can’t see the game of basketball for all of the individual plays and achievements that make this sport so beautiful, then we have failed as fans and observers. James Harden has achieved greatness, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else’s standards for him are.
