As the calendar approached 2017 Saturday night, Houston’s James Harden decided to provide his own New Year’s Eve fireworks. The triple-double line he dropped on the New York Knicks was nothing short of mind-boggling: 53 points, 17 assists and 16 rebounds — the first 50-15-15 game in NBA history, the finest game of Harden’s career (according to John Hollinger’s Game Score metric, which assigns a rough value to all the good and bad things a player does on the court), and the top performance of the 2016-17 NBA season to that point.But no sooner had Harden finished that outburst than Chicago’s Jimmy Butler responded with his own bit of insane stat-stuffing: 52 points, 12 rebounds and 6 assists against the Hornets on Monday night.