The Knicks have discovered the strategy to stop James Harden: put the guy with a freakish wingspan on him, and bait him into taking a flaccid stepback three. This works best if Harden has already taken a bajillion shots and is super tired, so he doesn’t feel like driving or even elevating on his triple tries. I don’t know if the Knicks didn’t realize they had solved that Harden puzzle or what, because he still dropped 61 on them. That’s a failure of coaching, in my opinion.
More bad news for the Knicks: they only play the Rockets one more time this year, so they only get one more chance to use Mitchell Robinson as the Harden-stopper. Other teams can take notes and try to replicate their success, but how many of them have a freak like Robinson on their team? Not many. Maybe not any. Robinson is truly alone in his freakiness.
Now if only he could stop fouling ALL THE TIME. He’d be pretty good if he wasn’t an unstoppable foul machine, “unstoppable” in that you literally cannot stop him from fouling.