Kendrick Perkins Uses 2012 Miami Heat Finals Team To Clap Back At James Harden
ESPN analyst and former NBA player Kendrick Perkins is once again calling out his former Oklahoma City Thunder teammate James Harden.
When asked if the Clippers' Big Three of Kawhi Leonard, Harden, and Paul George is the best in the league, Perkins disagreed by alluding to Harden's postseason shortcomings. He brought up the 2012 Finals against the Miami Heat, where Harden averaged 12.4 points on 37.5 percent shooting.
"James Harden's talking about it's hard for the haters to be found, I'm sitting right here," Perkins said on a Thursday segment of NBA Today. "I'm not hating, I'm just calling the facts and the fact is y'all did struggle when you first arrived in Los Angeles. Now y'all are playing well, but in the end no one cares. We wanna see what you do in the postseason. You forgot I was your teammate when we went the NBA Finals, and we couldn't find you when we lost to the Miami Heat. So we wanna see it happen."
Harden and Perkins were teammates during that Finals series, losing to Miami in five games. The Thunder were still a young team facing a Heat squad boasting LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. However, Perkins doesn't resort to this as the only instance of Harden underperforming in the playoffs.
"We did watch you quit on Doc Rivers and the Philadelphia 76ers when y'all should've beat the Boston Celtics," Perkins said. "We watched when Chris Paul was in Houston and went out, and you couldn't close the series. So at the end of the day, we're not watching what you're doing in the regular season, because we saw what you did with Joel Embiid last season. We're watching what you're gonna do when it matters the most, and that's in the postseason."
He gave Harden credit and called the Clippers "the biggest threat" to the Denver Nuggets in the Western Conference. However, he wants to see if Harden can do it in the playoffs this year.
Jayden Armant is a contributor to Inside the Heat. He is a student at Howard University. He can be reached at or follow him on Twitter @jaydenarmant.
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