James Harden saga feels long ago for the Sixers: ‘I don’t know if anybody’s even mad anymore’
A bizarre scheduling quirk means the Sixers have waited nearly five months to face Harden with his new team, following the early-season blockbuster trade with the Los Angeles Clippers.
LOS ANGELES — Nick Nurse could not get out of Crypto.com Arena Friday night before being asked about the next opponent his 76ers will face Sunday in the same building.
Technically, that’s the Clippers. But, really, it’s James Harden, the former disgruntled Sixers guard who was on the roster this season before being sent to Los Angeles in a blockbuster trade.
But to the Sixers, that saga feels like it happened in the distant past. A bizarre scheduling quirk means they have waited nearly five months to face Harden with his new team. Even stranger, both Clippers matchups are in the next four days, capped by Harden’s (and P.J. Tucker’s) return to Philly on Wednesday.
“I don’t know if anybody’s even mad anymore,” Nurse quipped Friday. “Are they?”
That’s because so much has happened since an awkward start to the season, after Harden opted into the final year of his contract and simultaneously requested a trade from the Sixers, then later in the summer called president of basketball operations Daryl Morey a liar.
That left Nurse (in his early public-facing days on the job) and teammates to field near-daily questions about Harden. The former MVP arrived late for training camp in Fort Collins, Colo., and later held one five-minute media session that compared his situation with the Sixers to a bad marriage. He went through a physical “ramp-up” — then a re-ramp-up — after leaving the team during the preseason, and did not travel to the season-opening road trip at the Milwaukee Bucks and Toronto Raptors. Finally, the late-October mega-deal with the Clippers, Harden’s preferred trade destination, broke in the overnight hours.
After that, the Sixers rolled along without Harden. They sat in third place in the Eastern Conference standings in late January, and in the afterglow of Joel Embiid’s 70-point outburst against the San Antonio Spurs and Tyrese Maxey’s All-Star ascension. But Embiid tore his meniscus during a disastrous road trip to close that month, and the Sixers have floundered to stay afloat while the reigning NBA Most Valuable Player is recovering from surgery. They are 9-19 since Jan. 22, have slipped to eighth place in the Eastern Conference standings entering Saturday, and have recently struggled so mightily to make shots that it left Nurse frustrated and flabbergasted following Friday’s loss to the Lakers.
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The Clippers, meanwhile, initially sputtered while implementing Harden, before hitting a midseason surge that had them looking like an NBA title contender. They entered Saturday in fourth place in the West, but had lost four out of five games before two get-right victories at the lowly Portland Trail Blazers. And Harden was circulating on social media earlier in the week, when he curiously contested teammate Kawhi Leonard’s three-point attempt in Portland. He said after the game that he was trying to “create a great vibe for this team” and “give something to laugh about, some excitement.”
Sunday’s matchup is also a reunion for the players who joined the Sixers from the other side of the trade.
Nico Batum’s son, Ayden, sat with him while holding court with French reporters inside the visitors’ locker room late Friday. KJ Martin flashed a big smile when asked about being back in the city he considers his hometown, and where his family still lives. Robert Covington, meanwhile, is still on the Sixers’ roster but is back in Philly rehabbing a knee bone bruise that has kept him out for more than two months. Marcus Morris Sr. was traded again at the deadline, while new rotation players Kyle Lowry, Buddy Hield, and Cameron Payne were not even with the Sixers during the Harden conundrum.
Those vast lineup changes are why Maxey feels like the Harden era’s rocky ending feels like a “long, long time ago.” He reiterated late Friday that he did not take Harden’s trade demand personally, and calls him a “lifelong brother” that he still keeps in touch with regularly.
Which means he is looking forward to Sunday afternoon, when they will finally match up on the court.
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“I tell him all the time [that] he did a lot for me in his short time here,” Maxey said Friday. “Not just for my basketball skills, but for my basketball mind and my basketball confidence. I’m already a confident person. But when James Harden — as somebody who’s an MVP, scoring champ, assist champ, all those things — believes in you [and] he wants you to go out there be ultra-aggressive, even when he’s on the court and Joel’s on the court, you can’t do anything but appreciate that.
“It’ll be great to play against him and compete. Knowing him, it’s going to be fun.”