Hindsight is 20/20. Foresight is not.
So, arguing with the benefit of hindsight will annoy people. Still, if it’s contrary to a view that you’d expressed with (deeply flawed) foresight, it’s responsible.
All of which is to say, I thought Fred VanVleet over James Harden was the right call. Now, I think it was a mistake.
So, here we are.
Rockets had their reasons to pick VanVleet
It was the summer of 2023. It was a simpler time. The Rockets did not know “what they had”, so the prevailing assumption among fans was that Alperen Sengun, Jalen Green,
and Amen Thompson would be populating All-NBA teams for time immemorial.
The front office was presumably not operating under the assumption. Still, figuring out what they had was an imperative. So, bringing in a high usage guard could be counterproductive. If Harden was carrying the group to wins, how could we learn about the group?
Fred VanVleet was coming off a season with the Toronto Raptors in which he had a 23.2% Usage Rate. That’s not egregiously high, and it was easy to imagine him scaling down. Harden’s 2022-23 Usage Rate with the Philadelphia 76ers was just 24.9%. That’s barely higher, but the year before, he was at 28.3% with the Brooklyn Nets.
Perhaps Harden would have treated Sengun with the same relative deference with which he treated Joel Embiid. Perhaps. Yet, even 24.9% was too high. In VanVleet’s first season with the Rockets, his usage dipped to 19.7%. Harden hasn’t dipped below 20% since his 2010-11 rookie season. For context, his Usage Rate this year is 28.6%.
Moreover, what’s Harden’s value if you scale down his usage? VanVleet is a more active off-ball player. He’s also a far better defender.
This wasn’t strictly about basketball, either. The Rockets wanted a culture-setter. VanVleet brought everyone a copy of “Chop Wood Carry Water: How to Fall in Love with the Process of Becoming Great” by Joshua Medcalf. The forever aloof Harden was more likely to bring Gucci bags full of honeybuns.
It seemed clear that Ime Udoka wanted VanVleet, and the Rockets wanted to shape the team in Udoka’s image. They wanted defensive intensity. So, there were plenty of good reasons to pick VanVleet over Harden:
As it turns out, none of them were good enough to justify taking the lesser player.
Rockets picked the wrong guard
VanVleet missed this season, so let’s look at 2024-25. Harden averaged 22.8 points and 8.7 assists per game with a 4.3 Box Plus/Minus (BPM). VanVleet averaged 14.1 points and 5.6 assists per game with a 0.9 BPM.
Yes, there’s context. Again, there’s defense. Harden also turns the ball over far more often. That’s all true, but here’s the grander, more substantive truth:
Harden is much better than VanVleet.
It’s easy to say now. We now (basically, depending on your level of optimism and/or delusion) know that the Rockets have a platoon of talented young players who are not franchise-altering. Perhaps we don’t learn that with Harden in the fold.
Alternatively, the goal was to build a winning team. Perhaps it was wiser to bring in the best players possible and let the chips fall. Moreover, usage isn’t so strictly delineated that Harden would erase everyone. There’s a world where, yes, Sengun finishes pick-and-roll alongside Harden very often, but Harden’s Philly usage stagnates, allowing Sengun an Embiid-sized piece of the pie.
It’s particularly easy to say when VanVleet is injured. Yet, as easy as it is to say, I felt compelled to say it. I thought VanVleet was the right move, and now, I see that it would have been better to go with Harden:
See how easy that is?
