The Philadelphia 76ersdidn’t learn from other NBA teams’ mistakes. Daryl Morey thought he could keep James Harden happy, but that has shown to be an impossible task.
James Harden marches to the beat of his own drum, and it’s become more than evident that playing winning basketball has never been much of a priority for him in his career.
That’s why Kevin McHale, who suffered him during his days with the Houston Rockets, claimed to feel quite bad about how his never-ending tantrums could affect Nick Nurse and Joel Embiid next season.
Kevin McHale Feels Bad For The Sixers
“The person I mostly feel bad for is Joel Embiid,” McHale told Heavy. “This guy’s coming off an MVP season, but when you’re team is fractured at the top — when one of the top two players is like, ‘I’m out of here. The guy’s a liar’ — you’ve got no chance of winning. It’s really hard to win when you’re tied together as a group, and it’s really hard to win four seven-game series. That’s with everybody tied together, everybody pulling together.”
“I feel really bad for Nick Nurse, too,” he added. “You’ve got a new coach coming in, and Nick’s like, ‘Oh, boy. This ought to be interesting.’ It just disrupts the entire flow of the team, and it’s totally unnecessary. You can do a lot of stuff behind the scenes. You don’t need to come out and just throw that out there. James started a forest fire with that.”
McHale went through the same thing firsthand and he knows every trick in James Harden’s book. Hopefully, this won’t hurt the Sixers’ chances to go the distance after all they’ve been through.