The DARK SECRET About James Harden's Extension

James Harden’s extension with Philly could be hiding a dark little secret, and it has a lot to do with this all white party where he was going crazy along with his teammates Joel Embiid and P.J. Tucker and it has a lot to do with this guy, the organizer of the party itself, and owner of the Sixers until recently.
Sounds curious right? So let’s go deeper. What up everybody, my name is Stefan and this is Heat Check. Let’s get into it.
To give you a good idea of what possibly took place, let’s go back in time to 2013.
The Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokorov tried to build the Brooklyn Nets into a championship team. After acquiring the likes of Deron Williams, Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, Joe Johnson they needed a final piece to their puzzle, but didn’t have much cap space to work with.
Brooklyn managed to sign Andrei Kirilenko, who was a 10 million dollar per year player at the time, for only 3.1 million.
The entire league was furious. Owners and general managers knew that the Russian connection between Kirilenko and Prokorov could be in play for a payout under the table.
So as Woj wrote at the time:
“The insinuations are unmistakable: Around the NBA, there are calls for the commissioner's office to investigate the possibilities of side deals and Russian rubles ruling the day”
Despite all the outrage in the NBA and the investigation, the league couldn’t prove anything.
But a player leaving 70% of a potential payout on the table while at the same time being buddy-buddy with the owner is highly suspicious.
And this is how we get to James Harden. He had a 47 million dollar option for the upcoming season. At age 33 the logical thing would be to either take that and sign probably his last big deal after the season, or opt out of it, and get a 3 year 150 million contract as it was reported that he could get. Both of these are safe bets.
But funny enough he did neither. Instead, Harden signed a 2 year contract worth 68 million dollars, and as everyone is writing, took a 15 million dollar pay cut to help the Sixers bring PJ Tucker and Danuel House in hopes of winning a championship.
Thing is, he is leaving much more than that. Because at the end of those 2 years, he would be 35, much older, much slower and deteriorated so there’s no chance a team would offer him as big of a contract as he could get now.
So the potential loss for him could be huge. But that is potential loss.
Because, speaking of a buddy-buddy relationship, Harden is really close with the former owner of the Sixers and the guy who organized the party Michael Rubin.
Not only is he extremely wealthy- owning Fanatics- the world's leading provider of licensed sports merchandise, but he is tremendously influential, as seen by his connection to the all the A-list stars at his party but also the fact that he helped facilitate this extension despite having already sold his stakes in the team. So this is what ESPN’s Bobby Marks had to say about the friendship between Harden and Rubin, and the potential implications on this deal:
So I let you be the judge. Whatever the case may be, Philly was able to build a contending team and they could be dangerous next season. That’s it for now, subscribe and talk to you in the next one. Peace out.