Latest news with #Harden
USA Today
12 hours ago
- Sport
- USA Today
‘Unfinished business': Chris Paul on reuniting with former Rockets co-star James Harden
Six years after their reportedly acrimonious split as Rockets co-stars, Chris Paul and James Harden are teammates again with the Los Angeles Clippers. Six years after what appeared to be an acrimonious ending to their time together with the Houston Rockets, legendary point guards James Harden and Chris Paul are NBA teammates again. This time, it's with the Los Angeles Clippers, where Harden has played for the last two seasons and where Paul agreed to sign as a free agent this month. At Paul's introductory press conference, he reflected on his time with Harden in Houston, including a viral clip that seemingly showed them arguing on the bench during the 2019 playoffs. Paul's comments, as transcribed via Bleacher Report: We talked about it, and talked about the history of being there in Houston. And it's funny, because that clip that goes around. ... It was a lot of stuff, funnier and stuff like that, than that. That was just sort of our relationship. But I think that's what made that team so good. We got on each other in different situations, but that team, I can honestly say, is one of the funnest teams I have ever been on in my career. James is one of those guys that loves to be in the gym, all day long. And so it's wild, that you get that opportunity again. After those two years, and the success that we had, we definitely know we have unfinished business. From a Houston perspective, Paul's two years with the Harden-led Rockets brought lots of winning but a painful series of 'what could have been' musings. During Harden and Paul's first season together with the 2017-18 Rockets, Houston finished with a 65-17 record that remains the best in franchise history. They led the 2018 Western Conference finals over the defending NBA champion Golden State Warriors, 3-2, before losing the final two games and the series due in large part to Paul's ill-timed hamstring strain in the closing seconds of Game 5. In 2018-19, and with a roster that lost key defenders such as Trevor Ariza and Luc Mbah a Moute during the previous offseason, the Rockets (53-29) never quite recaptured the same form. Falling short of expectations may have contributed to the alleged friction between Harden and Paul, and the latter was shipped to Oklahoma City in the ensuing offseason as part of a controversial trade bringing Russell Westbrook to Houston. A little over a year later, Harden himself asked for a trade, and Houston opted to reset and rebuild with young talent during the 2020-21 through 2022-23 seasons. Now, six years after their split in Houston, the former All-Star guards are together again with the Clippers. With Paul now 40 years old, he's taken on more of a secondary role in recent seasons, which could perhaps make this reunion bid and its playing style a bit more to Harden's liking. Led by newly acquired superstar Kevin Durant, Harden's former teammate in Oklahoma City and Brooklyn, the 2025-26 Rockets are widely viewed as being among the West favorites. With Paul and Harden joining forces again in Los Angeles, a potential Clippers-Rockets showdown in the 2026 playoffs would have no shortage of storylines. Last season, Houston (52-30) finished No. 2 in the West, while Los Angeles (50-32) was two games back in the No. 5 spot. From there, both the Rockets and Clippers were then eliminated in competitive first-round playoff series that required all seven games to decide. This offseason, each team is hoping that influential veteran acquisitions — such as Durant, Dorian Finney-Smith, and Clint Capela for the Rockets and Paul, Bradley Beal, and Brook Lopez for the Clippers — can help them level up during the season ahead. More: Former Rockets James Harden, Chris Paul to reunite with Clippers
USA Today
3 days ago
- Sport
- USA Today
Kyrie Irving gives take on Nets trading James Harden for Ben Simmons
The Brooklyn Nets were once considered one of the marquee teams in the NBA when they had Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving on the roster to guide the franchise to a championship. During the 2021-22 season, Brooklyn traded James Harden to the Philadelphia 76ers in exchange for Ben Simmons, a decision that Irving reflected on a few years after the fact. "I'm gonna say that out loud, but when that happened and we got Ben, a lot more pressure started to come in on our franchise," Irving said during a recent livestream on his Twitch channel. Irving has spent some time this offseason addressing some of his past with the Nets, including playing with Durant and for head coach Steve Nash, but the Simmons-Harden trade is just part of Irving's journey in Brooklyn. "Not only do we have this going on, but also we have a situation that Ben is dealing with where everybody trying to micromanage the spun narrative like he's doing this, he's doing that," Irving continued. "So, it wasn't a fair trade at the outset, right? It was not at all. I didn't feel like that was a fair trade, but at the same time, when it happened, he went to our division." To Irving's point, the Nets did not appear as formidable as they did with Harden on the roster, especially since Simmons was unable to play during the 2021-22 campaign due to back surgery. With Harden on the team during the 2020-21 season, Brooklyn had the best season that the franchise has had since the 2013-14 campaign as Harden, Durant, and Irving made it to the Eastern Conference Semifinals in 2021. While the end of that series will come down to whether Durant's shoe was just too big for the Nets to take the season further, it became clear that Harden wanting out was the beginning of the end for Brooklyn. More to Irving's point, Simmons wasn't able to recapture the form that he was once had during his All-Star days with the 76ers and the Nets eventually had to waive Simmons once his value became too low to pull off a trade.
Chicago Tribune
5 days ago
- Business
- Chicago Tribune
Editorial: With a month to go before CPS must approve a budget, leaders' lack of seriousness is on display
When can a budget crisis not fairly be called a crisis? Perhaps when the crisis is something that's been obviously coming for months, if not years, and demanded action long ago. Members of the Chicago Board of Education appointed by Mayor Brandon Johnson, as well as the interim Chicago Public Schools CEO hired out of Johnson's administration, are calling for Gov. JB Pritzker to order a special session of the legislature to bail out a district facing what it says is a $734 million budget hole for the coming school year. The requests for the special session came this week, a little over a month before the Aug. 28 deadline for the school board to finalize its budget. Needless to say, there won't be a special session. Pritzker and the Democratic leaders of both the House and Senate have made it clear repeatedly that the state itself is tapped out and can't furnish hundreds of millions to bail out CPS. That school board President Sean Harden, who serves as the mayor's chief CPS mouthpiece, would seek a special session at this late stage is revealing of how unserious Johnson and his allies are about properly managing a system that by any measure is tremendously bloated. The time for legislative sessions, special or otherwise, was months and months ago. The mayor, in fact, didn't include a CPS bailout among his requests for help from Springfield in the past spring session — precisely because he knew it would go nowhere and might jeopardize his other asks. So, as Johnson has demanded in vain for over a year, Harden and other mayoral allies on the board once again are talking about taking on hundreds of millions more in high-priced debt just to get through the next school year without having to make meaningful budget cuts. And, unlike in the spring, when a minority of school board members took advantage of a supermajority requirement for budget amendments and rejected Harden's request for authority to go deeper into debt, this time around Harden needs only a simple majority to add more liabilities to the balance sheet of the nation's largest municipal junk-bond issuer. Meeting that threshold likely won't be a problem. Eleven of 21 board members are Johnson appointees. Of the 10 elected in November, seven consistently have resisted Johnson and Harden's reckless financial maneuvers to date. But that's not enough opposition to stop CPS from lurching substantially further toward insolvency if Harden and interim school Superintendent Macquline King choose that route. For CPS, there's a short-term issue and there's a long-term issue. Both should concern every Chicagoan. Over the longer haul, the district will have to consolidate a large number of schools and rationalize its workforce. As it stands, CPS is sized for a student population far larger than the 325,000 actually attending Chicago's public schools today. We will have more to say on that larger matter later. The short-term problem — next year's shortfall — can be addressed in part by forcing the city of Chicago to pay the $175 million Mayor Johnson has insisted CPS should shoulder for the Municipal Employees' Annuity and Benefit Fund, a pension fund serving nonteaching employees of CPS, as well as some workers for the city and other agencies. By state law, that pension plan is the city's obligation, but Johnson and his predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, strived to get CPS to take on some of the plan's funding responsibility. CPS did so in years when it was flush with federal pandemic cash, but refused to do so last year so that it could pay for teacher raises negotiated as part of a new four-year collective bargaining agreement. Given the district's financial strains, there's no good reason to float junk-rated debt to cover that cost now, especially when not obligated by law. So without the $175 million pension payment, the true deficit should be more like $559 million. That's not a small amount to cut, even in a budget well exceeding $9 billion. But, still. This predicament could be seen a mile away, and Johnson — backed by his former employer and erstwhile ally, the Chicago Teachers Union — has insisted since taking office on generous yearly raises for teachers who already are among the nation's highest-paid while also opposing the consolidation of any schools and associated job reductions. About a third of CPS schools are at less than half of student capacity, and many are at a third or lower. The CTU/Johnson strategy from the beginning has been to do next to nothing about a foreseeably dire budget situation — in fact, make it significantly worse — and wait until the crisis got so acute that the state or some other benefactor would swoop in to the rescue. That's fiscal and managerial malfeasance. Why should it be rewarded? Oh, yes. The children. Perhaps the most pernicious facet of this game-of-chicken strategizing is that hundreds of thousands of Chicago students rely on CPS, and the city's future depends in no small part on giving those kids a good education. By now, a majority of Chicagoans have caught on to CTU's true purpose, which is to bolster its membership ranks no matter how low CPS' student population drops. That doesn't stop union leaders, of course, from attempting to paint those who reject the never-ending requests for hundreds of millions or even billions in tax increases as cold-hearted opponents of educating Chicago's kids. But the rhetoric increasingly doesn't land, especially given how CTU's very own former organizer sits on the fifth floor. We feel terrible for the families who will bear the brunt of the likely cutbacks to come. But this challenging upcoming school year unfortunately is the price we will have to pay for epic mismanagement. Once they see no knight in shining armor coming to the rescue, these unserious people tasked with running our schools finally must take some accountability and begin the process of making difficult decisions about the future of CPS within the means available to support it.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
Kyrie says the Nets could've won multiple titles with him, Durant and Harden had some things go a different way: "It's sad to say it was a failure without a proper context"
Kyrie says the Nets could've won multiple titles with him, Durant and Harden had some things go a different way: "It's sad to say it was a failure without a proper context" originally appeared on Basketball Network. Now, in 2025, it's obvious that the Brooklyn Nets' construction of a Big Three back in 2021 wasn't a good move. On paper, the trio of Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and James Harden seemed unstoppable, but in reality, they were nowhere near the ultimate goal to win the NBA championship. However, people forgot how many positive moments the team had, too. And maybe, had the few dominos fallen a different way, today, we would've talked about them in a different way. A special first year That's at least what Kyrie thinks when he spoke about the Nets during his recent stream. In fact, he says he'll always remember that first season they had together when Brooklyn played like a frontrunner to win the championship. "That first year that we were all together was really special. We had veterans, we had young guys, we literally breezed through a regular season. It was so easy. And I gotta give everybody their flowers that were in that locker room because we really came together at the right time," Kyrie explained before continuing about what-ifs of the situation. "You know, I get injured, James [Harden] gets injured in those playoffs, we don't know what could've happened. We only played a few games together and we were 13-3, I believe. It's sad when we look at this time to say it was a failure without a proper context for how all of this ended up playoffs, if KD's foot doesn't hit the line, or things work out differently, maybe we're sitting here multi-time champions, a few of us got MVPs. We can go into hypotheticals, but it was a tough environment for all of us," Kyrie to a championship than it seemed The 2021 Nets were a second seed in the Eastern Conference with a 48-24 record, in a season that was shortened to 72 regular-season games due to COVID-19 pandemic. In the playoffs, they dominated the Boston Celtics in five games before facing off against the future champions, the Milwaukee Bucks, where KD's foot on the line that Irving mentioned happened. It transpired in Game 7, when Durant hit what appeared to be a crazy turnaround three over P.J. Tucker to give the Nets the lead with one second remaining, just to have the replays show his foot was on the line. The game went into overtime, where the Nets lost. Also, as Kyrie mentioned, most of that series KD played without an injured Irving and Harden and Durant averaged a ridiculous 35.4 points, 10.6 rebounds and 5.4 assists per game without them. In Game 7 alone, he had 48 points, nine rebounds and six assists. Nobody scored more points in the history of Game 7s. The bad thing is, the Nets failed to build on the positives from that season. They were never close to the top of the Eastern Conference again, which Harden apparently already sensed by requesting a trade less than a year after that series vs. Milwaukee, as he ended up with the Philadelphia 76ers. Kyrie did the same shortly after and he went to Dallas Mavericks and Durant was the last to leave for the Phoenix Suns. Since the split up, Irving is still with Dallas, Harden has left Philly for the Los Angeles Clippers and Durant was traded this offseason to the Houston Rockets. None of them won the championship after the split and Kyrie was the closes to do it in 2024, losing the Finals to the Boston Celtics in five story was originally reported by Basketball Network on Jul 25, 2025, where it first appeared.
USA Today
6 days ago
- Sport
- USA Today
Former Sixers star James Harden comes in ranked No. 34 on all-time list
It's ranking time in the NBA offseason as everybody gives their thoughts and opinions on who the best player in the world is and debates on where each player ranks in the history of this great game of basketball. Former Philadelphia 76ers star James Harden is one of the best players to ever play this game and he showed off his skill in his 1.5 seasons in the City of Brotherly Love. He averaged 21.0 points, 10.6 assists, and 6.4 rebounds per game while leading the league in assists in the 2022-23 season playing next to MVP Joel Embiid. The Beard was then sent to the Los Angeles Clippers early in the 2023-24 season as he looked for greener pastures. Bleacher Report ranked their top 100 players of all-time and Harden came in ranked No. 34 on the list: Harden's best years came with the Houston Rockets, where he led the league in scoring three straight times from 2017-18 to 2019-20 and concluded a run during which he also led the NBA in free-throw attempts per game in seven of eight seasons. One of the most devastating pick-and-roll forces the game has ever seen, Harden also developed into an unstoppable isolation threat. Elite quickness, strength and craft made it impossible to stay in front of Harden, and then he perfected a step-back three-pointer so deadly that opponents actually preferred to play defense behind him. An extremely heliocentric star who has led the league in usage rate twice, never consistently defended and couldn't lead his team to a title, Harden has more than his share of detractors. Harden's time with the Sixers was short, but it was memorable as he was the one who led an efficient offense and made life easy for Embiid on that end of the floor. He was also influential for Tyrese Maxey as he earned his first All-Star appearance in 2024.
