Five ways the Thunder can stop James Harden

4. Make Harden use energy on defense

PSA: James Harden is not a great defender, and he’s probably not even a good defender. Trevor Ariza and Patrick Beverley take a lot of the defensive load from him while Harden usually hides on the team’s worst offensive weapon.  Harden’s main problem on defense is that he gets lost frequently. He loses his man on backdoor cuts and slashes to the rim.

Against OKC, the Rockets will most likely try and hide Harden on a player like Andre Roberson, who they know isn’t going to burn them from deep. Some wrinkles OKC could use are having him constantly cutting to the rim and force Harden to expend energy chasing him around or using him as the roll man in pick & roll action.

We saw Billy Donovan use Roberson in that way in last year’s playoff series against the Warriors. From the video above, using Roberson as the roll man can create problems for teams that try and hide weak defenders on him. Roberson is an underrated finisher around the rim and showed that he has the slashing speed to get away from a weaker defender.

Donovan certainly won’t hesitate pulling out every wrinkle he can to expose James Harden defensively, especially if they get down a game or two in the series.