Did James Harden Wear A Fat Suit To Get Traded?

the year is 2018 and the houston rockets have the best record in the league finishing with 65 wins led by their mvp james hardin who averaged 30 points nine assists and five rebounds a game the team would meet the golden state warriors in the western conference finals a team that featured the likes of steph curry clay thompson and kevin durant the series would go to seven games where the rockets would have to deal with the loss of chris paul and would hit their biggest cold streak of the season missing 27 straight 3 pointers but somehow still kept the game fairly close and would end up falling just short this is a crazy scenario to look back at the rockets had a real chance at winning that game a victory that would have put them in a very favorable matchup against the post kyrie irving cavs this would have changed a lot of the narratives around the league james hardin would now have an nba title on his resume and it really would have changed the way we look at that warriors team now just three years later this rockets team is in a whole new situation since then they would eventually trade chris paul for russell westbrook then go trade russell westbrook for john wall this rockets team just isn't in a position to compete for a title like it was three years ago due to this rocket superstar james harden looked at the timer of his career ticking and decided to get off this team in favor of a team with a real title shot by any means possible the question i want to try to find the best answer to in this video is that james harding wear a fat suit or at the least go out of his way to appear like he had put on more weight to tank his trade value now this isn't going to be a simple question to answer so i think we really need to go back and look at james harden's weight throughout his career he's never really been a player especially in recent seasons to have an impressive physique for years james harden's weight has been a headline for both opposite reasons it seems every year we're either talking about the fact that he's gained a ton of weight or that he's skinnier than ever let's just look at some of the most recent james harden weight stories leading up to last season a video came out of james hardin boxing where he clearly looked bigger than usual this caused everyone to go crazy even some people thought we were going to see a different james harden which obviously wasn't true then when the nba was suspended a picture of james harden came out on a hike or something of that nature where he looked noticeably thinner so we need to keep in mind that due to james harden's unique build his weight has been a conversation for years now now this really all started when james harden took the court for the start of the season where this picture was taken when i first saw this picture i and i think most were shocked at first i thought kendrick perkins had come out of retirement but no it was one of the greatest scorers the league had ever seen supposedly still in his prime i mean in this picture it looked bad harden truly didn't look like a professional athlete now this wasn't the only time this season where pregame james harden looked like he'd been enjoying the all-you-can-eat buffets more pictures from pre-game shoot-arounds came around where he looked let's say out of shape at the time of these pictures coming out most people didn't really look at them as an effort to get traded as soon as possible rather a product of how he spent his offseason leading up to the year following his trade request james harden had been filmed on several occasions partying in the middle of a pandemic some of these instances came just weeks before the start of the nba season while his teammates were at training camp preparing for the start of the season it was clear that hardin had not been putting in a lot of effort into preparing for the upcoming season especially if that meant he was going to be wearing a rocket's uniform but when james harden got traded and took the court pregame for the brooklyn nets the narrative switched on its head it truly looked like in some of these pictures he was in as good of shape as ever this made everyone look at this weight situation more like a 200 iq play to get traded rather than a product of his offseason but whether it was intentional or not i think everyone wanted to know if our eyes aren't deceiving us how in the world did james harden lose what appears to be a matter of 30 or so pounds in a few days now i'm not a medical expert or anything like that but i have heard of some crazy weight swings in sports so let's take a look at some of those an example of extreme weight gain would be charles barkley leading up into the 1984 nba draft charles barkley was focused on getting his weight under control as the philadelphia 76ers had promised him that they would take him at five if he was available and got his weight under 285 pounds but barclays plans quickly changed when he realized that due to some salary cap changes if he was going to go to philly he would earn just 75 000 not quite the number he was expecting coming out of college due to this he came up with a plan a pretty simple plan centered around the fact that if he gained weight he would make more money in just 48 hours he would pack on 20 or so pounds through trips to denny's where he would eat massive meals consisting of pancakes eggs bacon sausage and hashbrowns washed down by milkshakes he would end up weighing in with philly at 302 pounds but the funny part of this story is that the 76ers still ended up drafting him i think some of the best examples of extreme weight loss come from the combat sports such as boxing and mma in the ufc it's common to see fighters cut anywhere from 5 to 25 pounds in a matter of days leading up to their fight so that they can weigh in for their weight class sometimes these cuts can exceed 30 pounds some of the biggest fighters in the sport such as anderson silva khabib and conor mcgregor have been known for huge differences in their daily walking way compared to what they weigh in on the scale the night before the fight a lot of times some of this is done just through the intense training in the weeks leading up to their fight but a lot of times these fighters are actively trying to cut huge amounts of weight just hours before stepping on the scale they do this in a lot of ways a lot of times pretty dangerously but for the most part the main focus is to try to reduce their body's water weight to as low as possible and then replenish it as much as possible in the 24 hour period between the weigh-in and actual fight now by no means am i saying that james harden has been using any of these methods for appearing drastically different in a matter of days but i think it's an interesting possible answer if you think this was done naturally now the fun one that everyone is talking about in the title of the video is the possibility that hardin never was as heavy as he appeared and was wearing a fat suit one of the craziest nba theories i've ever seen this is a question that's been all over social media over the last few days now this seems extreme but i actually think it's an interesting possibility solely due to when these photos were taken everyone is citing these photos of how he looked in the pre-game not necessarily how he looked in game these warm-ups he's pictured in are sleeved meaning that he could have been adding some kind of fake weight during the pre-game while the cameras were on with the attention for his weight to become a national story hopefully reducing his trade value making it easier for contenders like brooklyn philly miami and milwaukee to get a deal done with houston this is interesting as in this scenario it gives him the possibility to get the suit off ahead of the game now i don't think it'd be easy to pull all this off between shoot around and tip off but hey i'm not gonna rule it out now the big issue with this theory is obviously how we looked during the actual games and how he played during these games on the season as a whole it hasn't been quite the james harden numbers we're used to but if you think james harden developed such an in-depth plan to hurt his trade value that involved a fat suit i think you would expect him to perform much worse on the court but in the first three games of the season he averaged 37 points and 11 assists shooting with great efficiency the last possibility is that james harden actually didn't do anything at all involving his weight we've decided to take the select few images of hardin and act like that's what he looked like at every waking hour we need to remember again that hardin has always been a heavier player for his position something that some people argue helps his game that prioritizes getting to the free throw line these images could purely be a product of a combination of posture camera angle the type of clothing remember he most likely had his whole uniform under those warm-ups as fun as it is to think about james harden wearing a fat suit or cutting an insane amount of weight in a matter of days i think i'm leaning to there not being any validity to these theories at the end of the day personally seeing with my two eyes james harden on the rockets to start the season and then in his recent nets debut where i still don't think he looked like he was in great shape i think the crazy fat suit rumor is nothing more than just that

Channel: JimmerRange

Views: 666,872

Rating: 4.9085007 out of 5

Keywords: jimmerrange, jimmer, range, jimmer range, nba, james harden, james harden nets, james harden fat suit

Id: btf3ifapGIE

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021