James Harden Is the NBA Playoffs’ Unlikeliest Hero
There’s a bunch of old guys hanging around the NBA playoffs, and it’s getting a little creepy.
The ongoing second round is lined with teams that seemed toasted. The Los Angeles Lakers, led by a 38-year-old LeBron James, played like ass for most of the regular season before making some desperate, last-minute roster changes and clawing into the playoffs as a seventh seed. After conquering the indignity of the play-in tournament, they faced off against a young, exciting Memphis Grizzlies squad and claimed victory when everyone on the Grizz lost their minds at the exact same time.
The Lakers are locking horns with the Golden State Warriors right now: the reigning champions and the league’s undisputed dreadnought, despite being slow and uninspiring all year, and unable to win on the road away from the comfort of their warm beds and rocking chairs. Even so, they eventually toppled the Sacramento Kings—young, exciting, totally new to this playoff thing—who weren’t able to break through their older brother’s iron psyche in the first round. Then there’s the Miami Heat, who were actively bad all year, right up until the point when Jimmy Butler, the NBA’s ornery prince of personal grievance, walked into the playoffs, flipped his internal switch from “Shorter Paul George” to “Michael Jordan,” and absolutely crushed the top-seeded Milwaukee Bucks, dumping the league’s best player into a premature summer vacation and the LinkedIn profiles of grindset job-seekers everywhere. The Phoenix Suns, on the ropes against the Denver Nuggets, have some solid young players, but they also have Kevin Durant’s widening bald spot to contend with, and they’re praying for the return of Chris Paul: still irritating and less than 6 feet tall in his 39th year on Earth.
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The old refuses to die and the new refuses to be born. The last generational turnover happened hard and fast; titans were crushed one by one by the flaming fist of LeBron’s mid-career apotheosis and by Golden State’s reality-warping shenanigans. But even after Giannis Antetokounmpo solidified his position as the best player in the league by winning a whole-ass NBA title, the ancient ones have stuck around and keep eating in the playoffs, even if they sucked the moon out of the sky during the regular season. If you crave the warm, damp embrace of nostalgia, you think this is cool. But if you’re easily bored, like me, it’s become annoying. When will the NEW thing happen?! I’m tired of the OLD thing, man!
There is, however, one older player who’s dominating in the playoffs and has managed to warm my cold heart. James Harden, the bearded irritant of the 2010s, isn’t the foul-shooting machine he once was on the Houston Rockets. But he is vibrating with mystic energy in the Philadelphia 76ers’ second-round matchup with the Boston Celtics, and is the catalyst for their 3-2 series lead going into a game six at home tonight.
Going into this series, one was inclined to declare the Sixers hopeless. Their recent teams have had a lot of trouble against the Celtics, their second-round opponent. Their best player, league MVP, and omnipresent two-way beast, Joel Embiid, is dealing with a sprained knee that kept him sidelined during games one and two and visibly gutting it out through the remaining matchups.
But Harden, feeling the ticking clock and the sense that this is probably the last clean shot he’s gonna get at the big one, has emerged from the haze of his late career slumber and brought it on Embiid’s behalf. He dropped a whopping 45 points in the Sixers’ game one victory; a bearded, cunning pirate facing down a squad full of cut, spry navy boys, robbing them blind, stuffing lucre into a burlap sack, shooting, stepping back, changing speeds, popping off screens from “B-Ball” Paul Reed, and hurtling himself at the rim, possession after possession, employing method and strength in lieu of speed, driving anyone who guarded him into light madness.
Watch him isolate against Marcus Smart, a good, canny defender. Starting around mid-court, he tries to use a screen to clear his defender, but Smart, extremely difficult to screen if nothing else, is unaffected and stays on him. Harden dribbles to the three-point line and steps back. Smart, knowing full well that this possession is out of his control, now employs an exaggerated stumble back, and Harden’s arm makes incidental contact with his torso. His grift doesn’t pay off, and Harden sinks the step-back. Smart watches the ball go in, slouches, and turns back dejectedly, fully aware that his three-card monte grift couldn’t help him against the king of the bullshitters.
As Harden torched the Celtics again in game four, dragging the Sixers to victory when the whole universe seemed poised to put this series to bed, I wondered why I was experiencing so much affection for him. After all, the rest of the old guys playing their little old head games have driven me up a wall, and it’s not like I have a wealth of warm nostalgia for the Harden years in Houston.
I think, deep inside, people know that the 33-year-old hasn’t ever really gotten the respect his résumé commands. Harden is a 10-time All-Star, a six-time All-NBA First Teamer, and the league’s MVP in 2018. He was a one-man offense, a terror on the hardwood, impossibly skilled for his size, strong enough to live in the nightmares of anyone who tried to body him at the rim or above the three point line.
But at a time when the Golden State Warriors were unstoppable, he was cursed to ply his trade in the Western Conference: barren soil that only brought death and disappointment to anyone who dared to farm for victory in the playoffs. Harden’s teams lost to the Warriors in the playoffs on three separate occasions in four years, sticking the poor guy with the “Underwhelming” label during a time when the whole league was getting turned into dust by a squad that was playing perfect basketball. An incredible talent, unlucky enough to be matched up against an atomic bomb.
But Harden never really reaped the sympathy of the masses during this time. He might have been an underdog on paper, but he was also The Gamesman. And it is hard to love The Gamesman.
His propensity for flopping is well known by all people, though I personally find tricking the referees to be hilarious and good, so I never held it against him. But some people, operating with antiquated notions of “honor” and “fair play,” were driven to distraction by this sort of thing. Or, perhaps, by his lackadaisical approach on defense. Or his active social life. Or his propensity for playing himself into shape. None of this particular stuff ever bothered me, really. I think every NBA player should be a cheater who burns the candle at both ends and comes into camp 15 pounds overweight.
But even I have to admit that the aesthetic product of the 2010s Houston Rockets teams was… a little much. Harden took a flop here and there, of course, but he also drew extraordinary quantities of foul shots in hundreds of other little ways: leaning into his defender on drives to the rim, using a pump fake to goad his defender into reaching in on his jump shot. In a vacuum, this is a product of Harden’s mini-spatial genius; there has never been another NBA player with that level of command over his micromovements, the ability to always be playing two games at the same time. There’s basketball, the game where you dribble and pass and shoot a ball into a hoop, but also “basketball,” the meta game that emerges when you introduce referees into the equation, where you scratch out whatever little advantage you can by edging your body forward or back by inches.
But watching it… well, that could be a little tedious. He took TONS of foul shots—never the juiciest part of the game—and the feeling of him catching the ball and driving into the teeth of the defense, seeking contact, over and over and over, was often mind-numbing. Those Rockets teams, with their trebuchet three-point shooting and their star player optimizing every possession to acquire foul shots, were the designated “everything that was wrong with basketball” team of that generation. In this, Harden couldn’t get the hosannas he was normally entitled to as an MVP-caliber dude.
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But time goes on, the world changes, and yesterday’s pest can become today’s hero. The Philadelphia 76ers are playing underdog in this series to the Boston Celtics, who are the new, disimproved, “everything that is wrong with basketball nowadays” squad: a group of cloying nothings, binding together to play a style best described as “the 2017 Warriors, playing from the depths of a never-ending K-hole.” The Warriors’ Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, murderous jump-shooting assassins who haunt your dreams, have been replaced by the Celtics’ Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, two players who play default basketball, opting out of anything flashy or creative in favor of sharing the ball and optimizing their output for proper offensive victory. Draymond Green, the dirty, long-limbed second rounder who seems like he’s playing three seconds in the future, is played in this version by Marcus Smart, an overrated defensive guard who flops like, well, 2016 James Harden.
Against the Warriors, Harden was an irksome gamer and gunner playing the dystopian version of the Warriors’ high-octane efficiency. But against the Celtics—that team’s antecedent nightmare version—Harden is bringing the thunder to mere basketball players. He looks like a baller and a hooper; a heroic Kenny Powers figure informing us that actually, he plays real basketball, he ain’t tryin’ to be the best at shooting drills. He is the man for this moment.
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