The 76ers offensive rating is the highest it's been in over a decade at 121.5. Their Assist to turnover ratio is 1.98 which is also the highest it's been for over a decade.
Could this be a Nick Nurse effect? Unlikely considering the Raptors offensive rating during Nick Nurse's tenure and departure remained similar so he doesnt necessarily have the effect of the legendary coaching trio Mike Dan Tony on a team's offense.
This does not take away from the fact that he is a very good coach but clearly the removal of James Harden has opened the Sixers offense into a less stagnant and more motion oriented offense.
Now for a look at James Harden's Clippers:
The Clippers offensive rating as of now is the second lowest it's been in 5 years at 112.9. The only year their offensive rating was lower was 2021-22 where PG only played 31 games and Kawhi missed the whole year due to ACL tear. We can conclude that adding James harden to the clippers SO FAR has been detrimental to their offense
Why is the offense worse?
Obviously as you can see, they run a very iso heavy offense with 3 streaky iso-players. On any given night 2/3 of the iso-heavy players are inefficient. Last night as we saw both Harden and PG were the inefficient iso players which led to them losing to the Jokic-less Nuggets.
James Harden in particular looks to be losing steam as the season goes a long. In his last 5 games, he's been averaging 15 5 and 8 on 33/34/72 splits. If this production continues, obviously this Clippers team will have had the worst offense they've had in over 5 years.
What have you observed about the James Harden effect?
Anyone who watches the games and doesn't think like at least 50% of the offensive upgrade is because of Nurse is crazy. You could argue if we still had Harden he wouldn't have fit into Nurse's new system, but I guarantee you if we still had Doc we would still have a stagnant offense, Harden or no Harden.