Perhaps the biggest move made by the Houston Rockets this offfseason was the hiring of Mike D’Antoni. The new head coach projects to be a huge factor for the Rockets offensively. Armed with shooters in Ryan Anderson and Eric Gordon added in free agency, Houston has the potential to be a deadly offensive team.
In order to reach that offensive potential, however, the Rockets need James Harden to buy in. Fortunately, it appears that he has done just that, comparing himself to a former D’Antoni-led team leader (via Calvin Watkins of ESPN):
“I got a little bit of Nash in me,” Harden said later of the Rockets’ sales pitch. “He had his own pace to the game; that’s what I took out of that. You could never speed him up, you could never make him do anything he didn’t want to do, that’s what separated him from any other point guard at the time, which led to two MVPs.”
Harden is obviously referring to Steve Nash who had considerably success in Phoenix in a D’Antoni offense. And he’s not far off base.
While Harden is known primarily as a scorer, his style of play is comparable to the pass-first point guard. At his best, Harden can control an offense beautifully with a mixture of scoring and passing out of the pick-and-roll. With D’Antoni coaching him up, he can only hope to improve on that aspect of his game.
That relationship has already received high praise. Coach K endorsed it immediately after the signing and D’Antoni recently stated he believes Harden could average 12-13 assists next season.
Everyone should be expecting a monstrous season from a motivated and newly-coached James Harden next year.
