Atlanta Hawks: Kent Bazemore Explains Why He Got Mercilessly Roasted by Harden

Kent Bazemore of the Atlanta Hawks took to Twitter to explain his lowlight against the Houston Rockets.

Earlier this week, the Atlanta Hawks faced off against the Houston Rockets and James Harden, as usual, was able to score 30+ points against the Hawks.

By scoring those points, that meant Harden had scored at least 30 points against every team this season. Wow.

While that is a wild stat, perhaps the most notable highlight came when Harden made one of the Atlanta Hawks’ best defenders, Kent Bazemore, look silly as he drove to the basket:

The Beard is one of the toughest covers in the league, as any defender will attest, and even a disciplined and talented defensive player like Baze will get clobbered off the dribble by such a skilled tactician sometimes.

The surprising part of this is that Baze wanted to sculpt the narrative regarding this “Shaqtin’ a Fool” moment himself, and he did. By popping open the Notes app on his phone and delivering an X’s and O’s breakdown of why he made the choices in guarding Harden that led to him getting cooked and then roasted across social media accounts the world over:

Bazemore’s passing reference to Winging It refers to his podcast on The Ringer podcast network with Vince Carter and Annie Finberg, and clearly, Baze wanted to get in front of any discussion of his foibles on the podcast.

Despite getting obliterated by Harden off the dribble (a noble failure if there ever was one), Baze is easily one of the best perimeter defenders the Atlanta Hawks have, and sometimes offense beats defense if the offensive player is among the best in the NBA (like Harden).

Baze is awesome, and even though he seemed like a likely trade candidate, I’m glad he remained on the team past the trade deadline this year.