Lost in the glorious, overpoweringly bright aura of James Harden’s 57-point game is the smaller, less luminary aura of Danuel House’s 15-point game. He was the second-best scorer on the team, and while his contributions didn’t directly contribute to an actual win (because the Rockets won by more points [18] than House scored [15]), they did contribute to in-arena excitement as well as to my substantial (and growing) selection of Danuel House highlight videos. Those are significant contributions, in my opinion.
However, just as nobody remembers how Smush Parker scored 13 at the same time Kobe scored 81, or how J.R. Smith scored 14 when Carmelo scored 62 (that’s the dude your team waived, Rockets fans), nobody is going to remember the heroic efforts of Danuel House to continue scoring the rock even when it was obvious that the only person scoring the rock should have been Harden. The aura of his performance is, if we’re being honest, completely invisible when held against the heavenly glow of Harden’s game, but it’s still there if you take it to the side and look at it by itself. Such is the curse of the role-player.
I will say that, if I find out that House didn’t invite Harden and the rest of the Rockets to a “House Party” after the game, I’m going to be quite upset.