James Harden may well be the NBA’s leading MVP candidate. At the very least, he’s on anyone’s shortlist as one of the best in the sport.
But if DeMar DeRozan had his way, Harden wasn’t going to build his résumé Monday night. Not in his house, not against the Toronto Raptors.
It took a career night from DeRozan to do it, but he got it done as a career-best 42 points held off the Rockets in a 99-96 win for the Raptors despite 31 points from Harden.
The win, Toronto’s second in a row, improved the Raptors to 44-30 on the season as they head out on a brief, two-game road trip. With eight games remaining, the Raptors have a fighting chance to break the franchise record of 48 wins set last season. As an added bonus, with the win DeRozan earned some bragging rights over his longtime friend and rival.
Harden and DeRozan came into the NBA together — taken No. 3 and No. 9 respectively in the 2009 draft — and battled each other on the Los Angeles high school and AAU scene well before that. They were teammates on USA Basketball’s world championship team this past summer.
So Monday night was personal, as battles with friends can be.
“It’s definitely cool because we have been playing against each other since we were kids. He’s one of my close friends in the league to this day,” said DeRozan, who also had 11 rebounds in the game.
“The first time we played each other? We were about 12,” he said. “He didn’t have a beard then.”
For most of their careers Harden has walked the more charmed NBA path, emerging as one of the premier players in the game, an MVP candidate and a “max” earner, but DeRozan was the Raptors MVP on Monday.
DeRozan scored 12 points in the fourth quarter while helping hold Harden to just three. His only blemish was a pair of missed free throws with the Raptors up by a point as he drew a foul on Harden with 45.4 left on a night when he got to the line 17 times, making 12.
He made up for it, however. The Raptors kept the ball as the scramble after his second miss turned into a jump ball, where Toronto won possession.
It was “DeRozan versus Harden: Round II” and this time DeRozan drained his jumper with Harden draped on him to put the game away as the Rockets couldn’t get a good look at a game-tying three thanks to another strong defensive possession from DeRozan and the Raptors.
Toronto will need more of it from DeRozan down the stretch as it appears that Kyle Lowry may be out longer than expected with an unspecified back injury that has kept him out of five of the past six games.
"It’s not something where he’s sore, he’s hurt," Raptors head coach Dwane Casey said of Lowry. "He can’t go laterally so he probably couldn’t go if it was a playoff game."
It was a playoff-like atmosphere in the Air Canada Centre as the Harden-DeRozan duel heated up. The Raptors were trailing 76-74 heading into the fourth quarter with DeRozan having 30 points to 28 by Harden.
While DeRozan was buffing his Raptors MVP award candidacy, Harden’s status in the league is only growing. For that reason, DeRozan’s defence on the Rockets star was as important as what he was doing with the ball in his hands.
"I thought DeMar did a magnificent job defensively against Harden," said Casey. "And I thought the way he played defence set the tone for everyone else."
As Harden warmed up alone on the floor of the ACC before the game, there were a few observations to be made about Harden, also known as “The Beard.”
The man can shoot: as he worked his way around the three-point arc he would routinely knock down six, seven and eight threes in a row.
The man has energy: even playing on the second night in a row and after carrying as heavy a load as any star in the NBA, there was no drag to his step. He was bouncy. He was cheery.
And the man is more than a sleight-of-hand artist who fools people in fouling him, like an over-sized version of Raptors’ Lou Williams.
Midway through his warm-up, the 6-foot-6 Harden unleashed a viscous, two-handed tomahawk, out of nowhere, just for fun.
The guy is the total package. But is he the MVP?
Call him biased, but Rockets coach Kevin McHale thinks so as his team has the inside track on the No. 2 seed in the West with a 50-24 record.
"We don’t have this record unless James plays the way he’s played. He’s played at an unbelievable level. There’s only a few guys every year who plays at this level and those guys are always in the MVP talk."
But what makes Harden MVP-worthy is he’s been doing it all season, every night, as steady as the tides, often while swimming against the current. This season is perhaps a little unusual in that the MVP race is so deep and tightly contested. The leader in most polls is Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors, and he may get it on the basis of being the best player on what has been far-and-away the best and most consistent team in the NBA.
Chris Paul of the Los Angeles Clippers runs one of the NBA’s most efficient offences, has weathered injuries to Blake Griffin and is benefitting by more advanced defensive statistics that prove his worth on that side of the ball as well.
LeBron James has been the engine behind the Cleveland Cavaliers’ surge and Anthony Davis is putting together one of the most statistically improbable seasons ever as he tries to single-handedly to lift the New Orleans Pelicans into the playoffs, a fight in which they are tooth-and-nail with the Oklahoma City Thunder, led by their own statistical mountain climber in Russell Westbrook.
But consider the crew that Harden led into Toronto. Missing were Dwight Howard, who is just easing his way into action after knee surgery, point guard Patrick Beverly, out for the season with a hand injury, starting forward Donatas Motiejunas and rotation big Terrence Jones.
It’s been like that all season, and yet Harden has willed the Rockets to the second-best record in the Western Conference.
Long-removed from being the third option in OKC behind Kevin Durant and Westbrook, Harden came into the game averaging career highs in points (27.2), rebounds (5.7), assists (7.0) and has made 59 more free throws (630) than any other player has attempted.
Monday night was no different. On one sequence in the second quarter, Harden drew a foul pursing a loose ball as a Jonas Valanciunas elbow collided with his beard and then drew a shooting foul by coaxing Terrence Ross off his feet, heading to the line for his six and seventh free-throw attempts of the first half in just 13 minutes of playing time.
It was quite a performance, but for one night Harden was the second-best player on the floor, and the second-best from Los Angeles drafted in 2009.
DeRozan saw to that.