Harden’s ability to adapt sets him apart in NBA
When league created a rule to stop him, Rockets guard changed his style of attack
After just another jawdropping performance, James Harden was sitting shirtless at his locker stall, checking his texts.
It was the middle of April, and he had just scored 44 points in the Houston Rockets’ playoff opener, a slower-paced and slightly weird game for the NBA’s fastest and boldest team. Harden had been frustrating for Minnesota and impossible to stop and, how to best put this, most valuable for the Rockets.
“What did he want? A free throw, a three-pointer, a layup?” Timberwolves guard Jimmy Butler said after. “He got whatever he wanted.”
Harden looked content as he scrolled his phone, and somewhere buried under most of the other messages was a text from Scott Pera, who coached Harden in high school and as an assistant coach at Arizona State.
“Good luck,” it read, and considering Pera said he has texted Harden before every game over his nine NBA seasons, he gave up on creativity long ago.
Pera, now the head coach at Rice University a few miles from Toyota Center in Houston, has watched Harden systematically go from good to great to MVP front-runner. He has paid unusually close attention to the 28-year-old guard’s intelligent play and ability to find loopholes in certain league rules, and it makes Pera chuckle when he thinks about how all this started a dozen or so years ago outside Los Angeles.
Harden was a sophomore then at Artesia High, and talented as the young shooter was, his voice wasn’t the only thing that seemed soft. So one day after practice, Pera picked up a pad and smacked Harden with it, knocking his skinny behind to the floor.
Harden looked at his coach, a mix of confusion and anger, and got up and faced the pad again.
“He just wanted more, give me more, show me more,” the coach said. “A lot of days of just banging into him to make him understand he could take the hit and then his creativity and his mind just took over.”
That’s the most effective thing about Harden. He’s 6-5, and at 220 pounds not known as much for his physical dominance as fellow MVP candidate LeBron James, yet he has combined his physical gifts with those of his mind to become one of the world’s most dominant basketball players. How else to explain this season, combining a new league rule ostensibly meant to limit Harden along with Houston’s addition of nine-time allstar Chris Paul, and somehow the Rockets’ best player has been more lethal.
Years after Pera introduced Harden to his pad, Harden would become so skilled at drawing fouls, so blatant at it, that the NBA ruled last year that ballhandlers couldn’t initiate contact and also be the victim of a shooting foul. The “James Harden Rule,” has wound up being a heftier challenge for game officials to enforce than the player it’s named after. Harden nonetheless led the NBA in free throws. But he adapted anyway, disappearing into a gym last summer.
With an already devastating step-back mid-range shot, Harden decided to expand his weapon to long range. Harden made 36.7 per cent of the 722 three-pointers he attempted, and for the first time since 2012, a player besides Golden State’s Stephen Curry led the league in made threes (Curry did miss 31 regular-season games).
It was just another weakness Harden identified in himself, defenders and the league, and the Rockets have been the favourites to reach the NBA Finals because of his ability to exploit those things.
Harden’s mind seems to work differently, teammates and former coaches said, and his NBA career underscores that. He has existed and thrived as a sixth man and an anchor of Oklahoma City’s run to the NBA Finals in 2012, been unleashed as a franchise player with the Rockets with almost unlimited freedom, and been paired with Paul this season in a kind of basketball social experiment.
Harden has been overlooked and double-teamed and turned loose, and it doesn’t matter, because his superpower is adjustment, and it’s maddening and frustrating unless you root for or play with him.
“He sets a culture for this team,” said Gerald Green, an NBA veteran who said Harden is perhaps the most unusual and effective team leader he has played with over more than a dozen seasons. “Even when he tells us, ‘We’re going to do this today; we’re going to have a meeting today,’ he wants (input from) everybody.
“He’s the one that calls the shots. But he lets everybody have a word.”
So many years after Pera challenged Harden, opening a wormhole of ways to exploit a game and its supposed limitations, he now watches his former player keep on reinventing himself.
“He just knows himself so well,” said Pera, who will keep texting Harden, knowing the man who checks them after the game is perhaps the league’s best player at creating his own luck.