Harden, Trae Young Match 40-Point Triple-Doubles in Same Game

When one dude's capable of going off for a kajillion points on any given day, this was bound to happen sooner or later.

Someone else finally joined him in posting video-game numbers, so for the first time in NBA history, two opposing players turned the Houston Rockets' 122-115 victory over Atlanta's Hawks into an historic occasion:

• James Harden surprised no one with is 41-point, 10-board, 10-dime performance, while
• Trae Young rose to the moment by compiling 42 points, 13 rebounds, and 10 assists.

 

As usual in the ATL, a crowd roughly 5000 tickets short of capacity was on hand to see it.

Too bad they didn't have another Ashley Madison Night promotion scheduled for last night.

It turned out Ashley Madison was really an army of fembots back then. Who knows what she is now, but no matter what, dudette would surely have had a better shooting percentage than Harden.

 

Harden gets headlines for his prolific scoring, but his efficiency rate contines to be less than breathless.

This game was a perfect example. The former Sun Devil went a lousy 9-34 (26.4%) from the field, including a 4-20 performance (20%) from the next area code.

As usual, dude's point total was saved by his 19-23 productivity from the stripe, which begs the question why the Hawks and others don't take a hint from the Dubs and lay off fouling him. That they don't is clearly a concept for higher minds than ours.

 

Young, frankly, looked like Harden 2.0 on the night:

• Dude was a slightly more respectable 11-30 (36.7%) from the field, which included
• Going 4-11 (36.3%) from beyond the arc and made up for all those misfires at the line,
• Posting a 16-18 result with an audience along the lane.

Here's what the spiffed up highlights package made this duel look like:

 

Each team picked up 16 o-boards. That's 32 second chances. Hopefully, some came on Harden's 25 misses and Young's 19, cutting down on what woulda been a combined gross of 44 empty possessions.

Ever hear how the 24-second clock came to be?

Back in the 1950s, teams could hold the ball forever, and some did. Like when the Fort Wayne Pistons beat the Minneapolis Lakers, 19-18, on 22 Nov 1950.

 

It still took the league four years to figure out some sorta shot clock was needed.

That's when Danny Biasone, owner of the Syracuse Nationals -- now the Philadelphia 76ers -- came up with a plan:

 

These days, there are now roughly 200 possessions per game. Not that many missed treys result in an o-board, so let's guess it at four per team. This drops empty possessions in the Harden & Young display to 36.

That's 18% of the game's possessions -- almost one in five -- where everyone else on the court coulda just waited for Harden and Young to get in a game of H-O-R-S-E.

 

So, hooray for history and all that, but it took a whole lotta nothin' to make it.