Seeing James Harden And Russell Westbrook On The Same Team Brought Back All The Feels
It’s my responsibility to you to make sure you catch all the summer happenings involving NBA players in games you didn’t even think you cared about. What are you going to do instead, work? Please. Well, this past weekend was the second year of James Harden hosting his celebrity basketball game as part of his JH-Town Weekend, where all the money raised goes to his foundation 3 The Harden Way. The foundation/weekend helps the people of Houston and is a great event. But that’s not the point of this blog. The point of this blog is during this weekend when it came time to lace them up, we got ourselves a little basketball reunion of a couple MVPs. I’ll admit, I may be on an island with this, but seeing Harden and Westbrook play together again made me miss the OKC days. I know we’ve seen them on All Star teams together before, but for some reason watching those highlights brought back all the feels. My brain went on to think what may have happened if they had won that 2012 Finals, and really how rare it was that one team had so many goddamn MVPs. I got irrationally angry that Sam Presti wanted to keep Serge Ibaka over Harden and I’m not even a Thunder fan.
The three main pairing of KD/Harden/Westbrook was a team best +10.1 back during that 2011-12 season, and when you add in Collison and Ibaka, they were a team best +21.9. They were just so goddamn nasty, it’s no surprise they were probably one of the biggest NBA “what ifs” in history. Now obviously each of those three have done well for themselves since they split, and who knows if Harden is able to flourish like he has in HOU if he was still in that OKC system, but I feel like as basketball fans we were robbed by them being together for just 3 seasons.
While I’m confident in assuming we won’t ever get a Westbrook/Durant pairing in any of these fake games because they hate each other’s guts, it’s still cool to see 2/3 of the band get back together. Both look ready for the season, and I base this analysis on their ability to shit on a couple scrubs and rappers, but that feels pretty bullet proof in my opinion. I like videos like this because even though we’ll never truly know what these would have looked like as teammates in their current stages of their careers, these runs give us a glimpse as to what could have been. I’m sorry if this triggered any OKC fans that may be reading this blog, but if it’s OK with everyone I’d like to hop in a time machine and go back to a time where we all thought the Thunder were going to own the NBA for the foreseeable future.
Man this was awesome…