I wonder what will the Celtics look like if we give Kyrie the same freedom as Harden.
If all was tailor-made for him like for Harden or LeBron in Cleveland, then I'd guess he would be 30+ PPG a great efficiency and we would have a better record than we have today.
Or we'd be like the Cavs pre-Lebron and not very good.
Even if they looked better I'm not convinced that the Harden approach is sustainable for long term success. The Rockets came VERY close to beating an unmotivated Warriors team, but Harden definitely ran out of fuel late in the series. The entire team was running on fumes.
I would never use the Rockets as the model for team building, at least not for the long term.
Oh no question it drains the crap out of him, it is one of the reasons he rarely tries defensively (not that he would be great, but if he tried he would certainly be better). It is hard enough to go full bore like that on one end of the floor, but no one can do it on both ends of the floor.
And that was more my point about Kyrie, a player that is constantly getting hurt without that sort of strain. Boston would be much closer to what it looked like with IT4 that last year i.e. a terrible defensive team that lives and dies by its injury prone PG. It would be a fine regular season team when Irving was healthy, but a pretty poor playoff team even if Irving was fully healthy.
That will always be why the Rockets struggle in the playoffs against other elite competition, but at least they have Harden who is a better player than Irving, is larger than Irving and more able to take the wear and tear, etc. They also in theory have Chris Paul who is (or at least was) a great player in his own right. That is why the Rockets can work that way and they were frankly a Chris Paul injury away from making the Finals (and most likely winning them - though the Cavs would have fared better against the Rockets than the Warriors from a stylistic match-up). I do wonder if the years of this style are going to catch up to Harden earlier than otherwise might be indicated by normal seasons, age, etc.