When James Harden and Russell Westbrook share the court this season, the Rockets are +8.9 points per 100 possessions. That is fueled by a surprisingly good defensive rating that has them giving almost exactly a point per possession.
All of that is much better than many pundits predicted, as they questioned how to isolation players with questionable defensive chops would fit together.
Not Paul George. He thought this would work from the start, as he told Ohm Youngmisuk of ESPN.“I knew it was going to work,” George said at the morning shootaround before the Clippers face the Rockets on Friday night. “Russ is a winner. Russ wants to win, Russ does whatever it takes to win. My time playing with him, Russ doesn’t really have an ego. He puts his ego to the side.
“He allowed me to be myself, he allowed me to be comfortable. And I had one of the best career [years] I had while playing alongside him. Russ is a heckuva teammate.”
James Harden — averaging 38.4 points, 7.5 assists, and 5.8 rebounds a game — would likely agree with George.
George, however, surveyed the situation with Westbrook and OKC — after Damian Lillard and the Trail Blazers knocked them out in the first round — and decided to move on and team up with Kawhi Leonard with the Lakers. He may have liked Westbrook as a teammate, but the two of them (with that talent around them and few ways to make real upgrades) had limits on how far they could go.
That remains the question about these Rockets, one that is not going to be answered until next April at the earliest.
