The Clippers were disappointed this season because Harden was unable to win after being targeted.

On June 10, the smoke of gunpowder in the 2025 NBA playoffs disappeared, and the Los Angeles Clippers fell outside the threshold of the Western Conference semi-finals again. This luxury battleship, which has three giants, Leonard, Paul George and James Harden, has only achieved a mediocre record of 47 wins and 35 losses this season. The performance of being eliminated by the Mavericks 2-4 in the first round of the playoffs is in a dazzling contrast with the expectations of "the favorite to win the championship" at the beginning of the season. When fans point their fingers at Leonard who frequently rested or George, the data reveals a more cruel truth: the success and failure curve of this team is always closely entangled with the bearded man wearing the No. 13 jersey.

**Harden's dependence: Sweet poison**

During the regular season, Harden's average of 16.4 points and 8.5 assists per game seemed dull, but the advanced data exposed the fatal weakness of the Clippers system - when Harden was on the court, the team's offensive efficiency was as high as 118.3 (the top five level in the league), and when he sat back on the bench, the number plummeted to 106.7 (compared with the Pistons). This cliff-like gap is infinitely magnified in the playoffs: Harden was absent from the first round of G4 due to tight hamstrings, and the Clippers scored only 89 points in the game, setting a record for the lowest score in a single game in the season. Head coach Tyron Lu's tactical board is full of options for "Harden holding the ball to start" so that when the opponent takes out double-teams, other players seem to have been cast as if they have been cast a fixed curse - George's catch-and-shooting percentage drops by 9%, Leonard's back-on singles are surrounded by three people, and Zubac's pick-and-roll route is completely locked down.

**The targeted vicious cycle**

Mavericks coach Kidd made a defensive textbook for the entire league in the series: Doncic, who is 2 meters tall, faces Harden with Levley II at any time to defend. This combination of "forward line wraps + inside line sweeping" has made Harden's per game soar to 4.2 times. What's even more fatal is that when Harden was forced to get the ball out, the second-hand handling ability of other Clippers players was fully exposed - non-Harden's offensive rounds in the playoffs, with a net loss of 12.3 points per 100 rounds. Zach Lowe, a famous basketball analyst, pointed out: "The Clippers are like a precision sports car, but all steering wheels are connected to Harden's right hand. Once this right hand is tied up, no matter how strong the engine is, it is difficult to move forward. "

**Twilight of historical superstars**

35-year-old Harden is experiencing the strangest slope of his career. His three-point shooting percentage dropped to 33.1% (the lowest in his career), and his signature breakthrough fouls averaged only 3.4 games (less than half of the Rockets' period). But what hurts more than the data is the change in the game temperament: in the last 5 minutes of the life-and-death battle in G6, Harden chose to pass the ball twice in an open position, and the argument of "I believe in teammates" in the post-match interview triggered an undercurrent in the locker room. ESPN reporter Wo Shen revealed: "Leonard's team believes that Harden lacks the killer instinct, while Harden's camp complains that Ka's health management disrupts the chemistry. "This kind of mutual blame atmosphere has caused the team to repeatedly miss defense and violate the offense in key battles.

**The concentrated outbreak of structural defects**

In-depth analysis of the Clippers' dilemma, Harden is just the first Domino. In order to get him to send off the forward players such as Batum and Covington, the lineup was weak; George's contract renewal was unresolved to affect the stability of the locker room; Leonard's curse of retiring for the fourth playoff injury in five years is still continuing. But all these hidden dangers were briefly covered by the "Harden system" - the highlight moments of the regular season defeating the Nuggets and Celtics made people mistakenly believe that the Big Three found a way to coexist. It was not until the bayonets in the playoffs that the fact that this team did not have Plan B at all was revealed.

Looking back at the summer of 2025, the Clippers' failure has long laid the groundwork. What they bet on future draft picks is not the championship puzzle, but a doping agent that makes the whole team addicted. When Harden's "system itself" failed in the high-end game, the entire team fell to the ground like a giant whose spine was pulled away. Perhaps Doug Rivers' evaluation that year still applies: "James (Harden) can let you win all the games you should win, but in those battlefields that should not win, you need another kind of DNA. "The Clippers are paying expensive tuition to ignore this sentence.