There are tons of stats and summaries and analyses out there on the first round playoff matchup between the Houston Rockets and the Oklahoma City Thunder. With the Rockets stealing home court advantage yesterday in OKC to go up three games to one, we take a look at how each team’s respective All-Stars, Russell Westbrook and James Harden, match up in terms of their most important stats…at least to us. Their signature sneakers.
Here’s how The Beard and The Brodie compare on average points per sneaker.
Key Insights
- Westbrook had his highest average points per game in a Black/Black/Orange colorway that he wore only in the month of March and in one game in April.
- Both players averaged over 29 points per game in the two colorways they wore most often.
- Harden and Westbrook both wore exactly five colorways where they beat their regular season average for points per game.
Before we dig into what sneakers each player wore when recording their triple doubles, we need to explain the data a bit in order to best comprehend things.
- “Triple Double Rate” is calculated by dividing the number of triple doubles each player scored in a specific colorway by the total number of times they wore that colorway. For example, Harden has a triple double rate of 50% in the Cargo colorway, because he wore the colorway four times and scored two triple doubles. 2 / 4 = 50%. Got it? Good.
- The number that appears in parenthesis next to each triple double rate is the total number of triple doubles each player notched while wearing that colorway.
Key Insights
- Harden “stirred the pot” most often when he wore a colorway three and four times.
- Harden recorded a triple double only 29% of the time that he wore the Pioneer colorway but had the most triple doubles while wearing them with six total.
- Both players wore exactly six different colorways where they beat their regular season triple double rates.
Our last chart takes a look at the sneakers that Westbrook and Harden each performed their best in when considering key offensive stats — points, assists, rebounds, triples doubles. We also added in a data point to show how many times they wore their best colorway.
Key Insights
- Westbrook was wearing this colorway of his Jordan 30.5 PE when he recorded his 42nd triple double of the regular season, breaking Oscar Robertson’s record of 41 from the 1961-1962 season.
- While Harden’s individual stats were the best in the BHM colorway, the Rockets only won 40% of their games when he wore this pair.
- Excuse our poor photoshop skills on the picture above of Westbrook’s 30.5 PE, but there are no official photos out there of his kicks yet.
In Conclusion
It’s worth noting that all of Harden’s sneakers are essentially GR’s and have been readily available to the public. In fact, there are five colorways available right now on adidas’ website. On the extreme other end of this spectrum, all of Westbrook’s sneakers are custom PE’s that combine the upper from the current Jordan 31 and the sole from last year’s Jordan 30, and are entirely unavailable to the public.
Harden’s sneakers have decent resell activity on StockX with the “BHM” and “Imma Be a Star” colorways reselling for the most with average prices of $200 and $177 respectively, versus their retail price of $140. The current highest bid for Westbrook’s Jordan 31 “Why Not” that releases on April 29th is $300, versus its retail price of $200. As always, we will be keeping our eye on the sneakerhead data as this first round playoff series progresses and as we get closer to April 29th.
Speaking more generally, sneaker history has shown that only Mars Blackmon can explain performance on the basketball court entirely by footwear. Money, it’s gotta be the shoes! However, when it comes to real NBA players, like James Harden and Russell Westbrook, as much as we would like to connect their personal performances to their sneakers, we can only come up with loose correlations. But it sure is fun to play with the data.
Shout out to Ben Berry for helping us by collecting all of the data on what sneakers Westbrook and Harden wore in every single regular season game. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.
