SALT LAKE CITY — James Harden is known for being able to draw contact.
Ask players around the NBA, and they’ll say the Houston Rockets star makes his living at the free-throw line, that he waits for players to get off their feet, that he gets the veteran treatment from the officials, who will give him foul calls despite a lack of contact.
“He’s an expert at it,” Donovan Mitchell said on Saturday night after the Utah Jazz lost 120-110 to the Rockets. “He’s mastered it. You know, that’s what he does.”
Ask Harden, and he’ll say that the referees don’t respect his game enough.
Famously during last season’s playoffs, Harden and Rockets front office personnel waged a media battle against the officials, offering their own internal report that concluded they had been robbed of 93 potential points against the Golden State Warriors in 2018 Western Conference Finals.
There are also instances in which players feel like they make an identical move compared to one Harden has, and yet they will get whistled for offensive fouls where Harden does not.
Take Saturday night’s game. There was obvious frustration from both Mitchell and Mike Conley on plays in which they felt they made the same moves Harden had earlier in the night, and yet weren’t getting equal treatment from the officials.
In the play above, Harden dances a little with Royce O’Neale guarding him before lowering his shoulder into O’Neale and knocking the Jazz defender to the ground (there may have been some hopeful acting from O’Neale, but that’s neither here nor there) before letting loose.
The fact that Harden misses the shot attempt did not make the Jazz any less angry when, later in the game, Mitchell was called for an offensive foul on the play below.
Now, Mitchell does extend his arm out farther than Harden did, but for the sake of argument we’ll say that the plays are incredibly similar and yet called differently by officials.
“There were times where we definitely got frustrated, I’m not going to sit here and lie to you,” Mitchell said when asked about the situation, “but it’s a matter of what you do next.”
Here’s the rub: Yes, Harden is great at drawing fouls and sometimes the officials side with him. He was responsible for drawing a game-high eight fouls on Saturday. But, as far as officiating goes, the Jazz were the foul beneficiaries against Houston, with only 14 fouls charged to the Jazz versus the 25 charged to the Rockets.
Additionally, Mitchell drew seven of the Rockets’ fouls, not far off from the eight that Harden drew.
Conley’s frustration came when attacking the lane against Houston. I could give you at least three examples like the one below where Conley drives and then comes away with his hands up, pleading with the officials, believing that his defender made contact.
After the above play, it was only seconds later that Harden drove into Conley on the other side and was the recipient of a trip to the free throw line. The frustration mounted and took its toll.
Here are the cold hard facts about the situation: It absolutely doesn’t matter how frustrated the Jazz guards get, or if there is even any truth to whether or not Harden is getting easy whistles.
The frustrated reaction to a missed call is often worse than the missed call itself.
The time that the Jazz spend sparring with the officials, rather than getting back on defense, can be detrimental to the game. Additionally, the mental and emotional space that players allow this type of frustration to occupy does not translate to game-winning basketball.
Mitchell said it’s what the team does next that matters, and when it was all said and done, Conley echoed those sentiments.
“It was frustrating, but that wasn’t the reason that we lost,” Conley said. “If anything, we focused on it too much, I know I did in particular. I got a little angry with that and lost a little focus there and that’s on me. As a team we have to learn and keep moving forward and control what we can control.”
This Houston Rockets team — as they have the past two years — could very well end up being the Jazz’s opponent come playoff time. If this is something that is going to get under the skin of the Jazz players, they need to either get over it or learn to channel that frustration in a more productive way.
“There were calls that (Harden) got frustrated and they got frustrated, but they were able to move on,” Mitchell said. “That’s the biggest thing that we can take away from that.”
It’s good advice across the board for the Jazz right now. There are going to be little things throughout the game that don’t go the way they want, but they have to get out of their heads about it and move on to the next play.