James Harden has named the one team he had ‘real hate’ for in the earlier days of his career.
The former MVP is playing for his fifth team in the NBA, but is yet to win a championship.
He has gone to the NBA Finals once with the OKC Thunder as part of the Big 3, including Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and himself.
After his stint with the Thunder, James Harden moved to the Houston Rockets as he wanted to be the star on his team.
This proved to be a great decision as he went on and became a pure scorer, making All-Star and All-NBA teams before also winning the MVP trophy in 2018.
Despite all the success he has had in the regular season, the NBA championship still eludes him and one of the reasons behind this is the Golden State Warriors.
Harden led the Rockets for nine years before moving to the Brooklyn Nets in 2021.
In his time at Houston, the ‘Beard’ faced the Warriors multiple times as they were the Rockets’ Western Conference rivals.
But often the Warriors were victorious due to the presence of stars like Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and later Kevin Durant.
However, there were times when the Rockets would win games and one such instance was in a 2019 regular season game between the two sides.
Harden made a clutch shot with less than three seconds left on the clock to lead the Rockets to a 135-134 win.
It was one of the best game winners and Harden has expressed why that was a special one for him.
“First of all, just being in Oracle, those were some heated battles and heated times. It was like real hate, on my side at least, just because we had to get through them,” said Harden when talking about the Dubs.
“This was a regular season game, but it was always a battle between us. That shot in Oracle felt different.”
Although Harden has proven he can still perform, scoring 50 points in a game this season over the Detroit Pistons, the 35-year-old spent the peak years of his career with the Rockets.
He won an MVP award with them and led them to deep playoff runs several times, but the team did not have enough to win a championship.
Harden’s furthest playoff run with the Rockets was in 2019 when he led them to the Western Conference Finals, but he was once again outdone by the Warriors in Game 7.
Despite that he scored over 18,000 points for them and leads the franchise in assists, triple-doubles and three-pointers.
While championships are essential to cement the legendary status of a player, Harden will be an exception as far as the Rockets are concerned, because his contribution to the team was special.
