Tracy McGrady: James Harden must be dealing with ‘internal bulls–t’

Tracy McGrady believes James Harden isn’t being completely honest.

With Harden seemingly set on playing for the Los Angeles Clippers this upcoming season despite opting into his $35.6 million player option for next year with the Philadelphia 76ers, McGrady thinks the guard may have some “internal” issues that are factoring into the trade request from a title-contending team.

“I don’t understand for the life of me what James Harden is doing,” McGrady said in an interview with GQ Sports. “I look at all the teammates he’s played with. James has probably played with more Hall of Famers than anybody in the league, and he doesn’t have a ring to show for it. I don’t know what he’s looking for. And maybe there’s some internal bulls–t that is going on that we don’t know about.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me to leave the MVP, and the Eastern Conference, where you have a shot to at least play for a championship. It’s got to be something deeper than what you know. Get over it, man.”

A potential internal struggle that Harden could be facing is his willingness to deal with Sixers president of basketball operations Daryl Morey, whom he reportedly has a “fractured” relationship with now.

“The relationship between James Harden and Daryl Morey, it’s essentially severed,” Shams Charania said on an episode of ‘The Rally.’ “It’s essentially fractured throughout this process. There’s no longer that valve of open-minded, open-ended trust that we’ve seen over the course of 692 games that Daryl Morey and James Harden have been together in Houston and in Philly.”

McGrady, a Hall of Famer, understands what it’s like to be a superstar talent who hasn’t won a championship. The forward was a seven-time All-Star and seven-time All-NBA selection but only advanced past the first round once in 2013 as a reserve for the San Antonio Spurs.

For Harden, who has earned plenty of individual accolades as a player, leaving Philadelphia most likely also means leaving the best situation for him to compete for a championship. But the 2018 MVP is notorious for leaving teams high and dry once he feels ready to leave.

During his last year with the Houston Rockets, he came into training camp out of shape and refused to play for stretches of the season before he was inevitably traded to the Brooklyn Nets. He essentially did the same thing with the Nets, resulting in his trade to Philadelphia.

Morey would love to keep Harden in Philadelphia alongside league MVP Joel Embiid but if anything is true about the 10-time All-Star, it is that he always gets what he wants when it comes to trade requests.