In their effort to surround Harden with the pieces he needed, the Rockets reinvented the blueprint for NBA offenses. They launched threes with reckless abandon and stopped playing traditional bigs altogether to maximize their spacing. The influence of Harden’s offensive genius can be seen nightly across the league, as shooters seek to replicate the step-back jumper he has all but perfected. But for all his points and regular-season success, Harden has never propelled the Rockets into the NBA Finals. Some of that is due to the misfortune of facing tough competition like the stacked Golden State Warriors. And some of that is due to Harden not showing up in prime-time.
Harden is a three-time NBA scoring champ, seven-time All-NBA player, and he was the 2017-2018 NBA MVP. His list of superstar accolades is long, but he has come up short in the playoffs.
Harden’s postseason struggles initially began before his time in Houston, when he was still a sixth man for the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Here is a look at how his postseason career has gone.
Early-career struggles
The 2012 Thunder represent one of the great “what if’s” in NBA history, as they possessed a trio of future MVPs. Despite their youth, Oklahoma City reached the NBA Finals, where they faced one of the godfathers to the modern superteam, the Miami Heat. As the team’s sixth man, Harden did not shoulder the same offensive burden he does today. However, his notable failure to record double digits in three of the five games was one of the many contributing factors leading to LeBron James’ first championship.
Every NBA superstar is afforded the opportunity to learn from playoff failures at the start of their careers. What defines the trajectory of their career is how they respond. The legend of Kobe Bryant is not complete without the story of his four fourth-quarter airballs as an 18-year-old in an infamous playoff loss to the Utah Jazz in 1997. For Harden, however, the 2012 Finals were an omen.
Harden’s first two postseasons with the Rockets ended in first-round exits. And while he averaged over 26 points per game in both series, he did not top 40 percent shooting from the field in either one.
In 2015, his third postseason with the Rockets, Harden finally made his first conference finals as his team’s alpha dog.
The birth of a rivalry
Harden is the type of scorer who can win a playoff game single-handedly. But his scoring outbursts have come in situations like the one below where a victory for the Rockets merely meant avoiding a sweep.
