James Harden—career earnings $300 million, melting into the captain's chair of an Aegean yacht—is the butt of a few jokes. The Hollywood Squares stage of his career seems close at hand. The best work well in the rearview, macerating bloat mortared together by bad plastic surgery. It is less dignified than, say, LeBon determinedly making it work with whatever he's got left, Kevin Durant punctuating long injury lay-offs with 40-point pyrotechnics. Which is funny, because Harden has never begged us to love him the way those two have. He's one of our least plugged in superstars. I'm not sure if I buy Thugger's claim he "doesn't have internet," but he doesn't seem to care what's on it. The guy simply wants to fill the stat sheet and retire to the strip club. That the former makes him famous—people want to hear what he has to say, boasts or explanations—is not really his problem. The strip club has security.

The latest buzz, which might have shifted pitch by the time you're reading this, is that Harden is headed back to Philadelphia. The other option is easing into a presumed semi-retirement in Houston. It speaks to where Harden is at in his career, what we gauge as his capacity for reinvention at what will soon be age 34, that it's assumed the former path will be roughly as consequential as the former. In short: my man isn't winning anything, anyway. Milwaukee and Boston are better than Philly. The Heat are tougher. The Knicks or Cavs might be able to knock the Sixers out of the playoffs, if they expose their jaw or Joel Embiid tweaks his back. Outcomes have been decided, at a cosmic level. There were spells when Harden could have won titles, '18 in Houston and '21 in Brooklyn, but those specific windows have elapsed, as has some more general one. 

Your ideas about other people solidify, over time. You bind their behavior; it becomes almost impossible to have novel ideas about what they might do. If your dad ever told you that he loved you, you'd disbelieve something: either him, or the reality you're living in.

Harden's big game record is about as bad as you imagine it is, and staggering in its breadth. In five tilts against Miami in the 2012 Finals, he averaged 12.4 points per game on 37.5 percent shooting, with 3.6 assists, 4.8 rebounds, and 2.4 Turnovers per game. Then Oklahoma City lowballed him, flipped him to Houston, and he became a scoring machine in all circumstances except the most important ones. Here's how each of his next 11 seasons ended:

Game 6, 2013 First Round, against OKC: 26 points on 7-for-22 shooting, 7 assists, 6 rebs, and 4 TOs

Game 6, 2014 First Round, against POR: 34 points on 9-for-15 shooting, 6 assists, 4 rebs, and 4 TOs

Game 5, 2015 Western Finals, against GS: 14 points on 2-for-11 shooting, 5 assists, 6 rebs, and 12 TOs

Game 5, 2016 First Round, against GS: 35 points on 12-for-23 shooting, 6 assists, 6 rebs, and 7 TOs

Game 6, 2017 Western Semis, against SAS: 10 points on 2-for-11 shooting, 7 assists, 3 rebs, and 6 TOs

Game 7, 2018 Western Finals, against GS: 32 points on 12-for-29 shooting, 6 assists, 6 rebs, and 5 TOs

Game 6, 2019 Western Semis, against GS: 35 points on 11-for-25 shooting, 5 assists, 8 rebs, and 6 TOs

Game 5, 2020 Western Semis, against LAL: 30 points on 12-for-20 shooting, 5 assists, 6 rebs, and 6 TOs

Game 7, 2021 Eastern Semis, against MIL: 22 points on 5-for-17 shooting, 9 assists, 9 rebs, and 4 TOs

Game 6, 2022 Eastern Semis, against MIA: 11 points on 4-for-9 shooting, 9 assists, 4 rebs, and 4 TOs

Game 7, 2023 Eastern Semis, against BOS: 9 points on 3-for-11 shooting, 7 assists, 6 rebs, and 5 TOs

These are the crudest measurements we've got, but aggregated they express a deeper truth. Clutch endures as a concept in part because we don't understand it. The analytics-brained, the message board atheists of the sport, want it not to be real and your more romantic traditionalists—i.e. the guy bylining this—insist upon it without backing it up with actual substance. You sputter about pure, obliterative will. Need bucket, get bucket. The notion of being good for something, whether LeBron for 35-7-7 in a closeout game or Steph from deep in a particular moment. The example that comes to mind is Dame Lillard from the logo in 2019. The cold-blooded certainty of it. A 25 percent shot that somehow had a 100 percent chance of going in. Maybe we are talking about the portent of something, confirmed. (And never betrayed. We've obviously never thought swish only to see the ball clank off the back rim.) At any rate, it exists. Sure as this dim room, and this cold High Life.

We've determined that Harden doesn't have it. And because we're title-obsessed and the aesthetic dimension of his game is narrow, we've more or less condemned him. He is the league's most talented also-ran, career totals spinning upward and dazzling Game 1 displays curdling into late seres disappearing acts. Jibes about his puffiness and bollard-like mobility. It all feels a little bit unfair or disrespectful but the counterpoints to it—about craft and empty accomplishment—are thin. And the play, which has way more heft than our idle commentary, doesn't arrive.

Mike Breen, at the 1:41 mark of an ECF Game 7: Harden. Another one. Bang! And that's 45 for James Harden!

You can imagine this stuff but you can't make yourself buy it. Only James Harden can make it real. Is he interested in that? Maybe that's not the question. At age 22, age 28, age 31, the force of what he wanted wasn't enough. That doesn't mean it won't be enough next year, but the odds are long. In our sense of things, which seem at times like this infallible, they stretch into infinity like an ever-expanding horizon.