Sixers

I’m Not Saying this is a James Harden Burner Account, but it Sure Looks Like One

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Sep 7th, 2023 · 2:45 PM EDT

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Temporarily breaking the Sixers moratorium because this one is goofy.

Shout out to CB reader Rob, who found what could be some sort of James Harden-adjacent burner account, or dude’s biggest sycophantic fan. Rob notes that a “random person started a Reddit account on May 23, 2023 – 9 days after the Sixers were eliminated from the playoffs.” The account name is “Otherwise_Warning922,” no profile photo obviously, and they do all of their posting in r/NBA and r/Sixers. There are a LOT of posts, but the vast majority are about James Harden, typically going to great lengths to defend him.

Here’s a sampling of recent posts:

• “whats funny is the media narratives are what have convinced you that guys like embiid have been better than harden lmao. harden having “chokes” but still been significantly better than most all time. dude averaged 35 ppg against the best team of all time. what has embiid done vs any good team ,let alone a team like that?… harden gets shit on cuz he gets compared to top 15 players, because the team that stopped him had 2 top 15 guys on it & he still took it 7. he’s held to a higher standard because he’s been better than the mfers u glaze”
• “harden at embiids age already had conference finals appearances as the #1 option tho lmfao. even jimmy couldnt get embiid there, & a post injury/aged harden is the only reason embiid sniffed a game 7 vs boston… i dont care about media narratives. harden never had an agent so he was never info trading with hacks like ramona shelburne to put out puff pieces for him.”
• “Ramona has tried to get her anti harden articles to hit for like a month. She’s the same one that pulled that “HE WANTS TO BE THE #1″ shit out of her ass”
• “if (Daryl Morey) valued harden, harden would have been given a contract. that is all the other GM’s need to know when it comes to what they’d offer for him when he can walk in a year/try to force his way out. if morey wanted something real for him, he should’ve given him a tradeable but realistic contract”
• “Its crazy you guys are just washing away the season he had lmao. He improved from his first year there, got the assist title, and fed Embiid the MVP (go check Embiid’s % of assisted FGs; that’s Harden) while shooting his highest 3pt% and having an efficient 20/11. That’s not 1+1 production bozo”

This guy has hundreds and hundreds of Reddit posts. Most are about Harden, but he gets into some GSW stuff with Kevin Durant and Steph Curry as well. I could only scroll back about two months, but here’s an earlier post on the Boston series:

“Harden is the only reason that series went 7 lol. Embiid doesn’t even have a chance to not choke if Harden doesn’t drop 2x 40+ point games (more 40 pt games than Embiid has his entire playoff career btw)”

One of the common themes is blaming Joel Embiid for a lot of what went wrong in the playoffs:

“again, without Harden, there is no game 6 or 7. the whole team was shit for most of the playoffs and the MVP OF THE LEAGUE had one of the biggest dropoffs (again) of all time. an aging harden outplayed him. won’t get into vertical spacing or how both the nets and the celtics were able to take advantage of clogging the paint because embiid doesn’t ever roll to the hoop, but lmao @ blaming harden and doing this whole “hE QuIt aGaiN” bit when he has more conference finals appearances than your entire franchise does in over 20 years”

Other themes include explaining why Harden left Houston, making excuses for his Brooklyn tenure, and related apologist stuff. Whether he’s right or wrong is ultimately not relevant, since the question here is more about who this person is. It’s certainly strange and flags go up. The antennae are erect. There are SO MANY replies that surely it can’t be Harden just sitting there on his phone, shitposting nonstop on Reddit. Or can it be? Nobody thought Bryan Colangelo would be fired because his wife created a bunch of burner accounts to shit talk anonymously, but that was a very real thing.

If it’s not Harden, it’s Harden’s biggest fan, or his mother, or his agent, or his agent’s agent, or his agent’s intern, or someone connected. There’s no “otherwise_warning922” Twitter or IG account, and nothing on Facebook either. Perhaps people with more time and social media savvy can find something out. Here’s the guy’s account if you wanna knock yourself out.