Harden's reputation as one of the game's great scorers, historically, has been cemented this year. In particular, he right now averaging just over 30 ppg over his last 5 seasons. I charted his career path of points per game as a moving 5-season average, and compared to some other prominent scorers over the last 40 years. Here's what it looks like: Harden is the green curve over on the right. He's on track to have the high ppg run over 5 seasons since Michael Jordan (just a hair above Kobe Bryant's and Allen Iverson's best 5 year run by PPG, right now).
Harden's is so much smaller compared to the others...but at least it's sticking straight up and not sagging down like most of the others...interesting...I'm thinking that's significant. But seriously, It would be cool if we could see what his 5 years looks like to those other players' five best years.
To clarify, the chart is a moving 5-season average. Each data point shows a player's average points per game for that season and the prior 4 seasons.
Just something I thought, but if you shrink down those rolling 5-year averages to observation periods equal to Harden's career to date, it would make it clearer how impressive this is. However, it also is a little unfair to players that started out scoring a bunch. Harden was bench bound so that dampens his initial 5-yr average. Shaq, MJ, KD, etc all started off scoring a lot in their rookie campaigns. Edit: like Kobe is a great comparison to Harden (if you're simply measuring scoring output), and Harden's got him in rate and level although he did have shaq for some time.
