It’s clear that James Harden has forgotten how to play basketball.
Hear me out - this is not to mean that he isn't still great at basketball, nor is it to mean that he suddenly is not one of the best players in the league. This is a discussion of the new rule changes in the NBA this year, and how they have affected Harden up to this point - It’s not that he can’t play good basketball, it’s that he’s literally forgotten how.
Harden arrived in Houston in 2012 right as advanced analytics were completely transforming the game. In just a few years, Steph Curry up in Golden State would rain threes from all over the court en route to his first MVP and NBA Championship, officially ushering in the three-point revolution. What we learned in almost the blink of an eye was simple: threes and free throws, threes and free throws, threes, and free throws. If it wasn’t a three-pointer or a dunk, analytics said not to do it. The mid-range shot became like an old legend of past inefficiencies. Think about how the players who only shot long twos - the LaMarcus Aldridge, Demar Derozan, even Dwyane Wade types - suddenly made less sense until they adapted their games.
Enter the James Harden era in Houston. With the league frantically looking to copy the Warriors amidst the analytics movement, a coach in Mike D’Antoni who was all about offensive firepower and efficiency, a GM in Darryl Morey who was truly ahead of the curve and cared about analytics, combined with a generational offensive talent in Harden, a basketball specimen was created.
Harden learned how to take advantage of the NBA’s rules in a way that nobody else had before. He figured out how to contort his body to get the foul call almost every single time he drove to the basket. It was simple: after breaking down his defender, he would take a dribble towards the basket, at which point he would extend both his arms with the ball out. By getting his arms out and low and driving them up, he was sure to make contact with the defender's arms. At other times he would even employ the infamous arm-lock, quickly and expertly wrapping his off-arm around the defender’s arm and going up with the shot to make it look like he got tangled up. This, combined with his instinctual move to cock his head back, was a guaranteed trip to the line.
That wasn’t even all, and there were a million other ways that he took advantage of the game. For years, the NBA has had an incredibly strange aversion to enforcing traveling violations (something which is, by contrast, enforced at even the second-grade level). What resulted after a few years was Harden’s stepback, one of the most unguardable moves in the history of the sport.
He transformed into a model of the theory of basketball thinking at the time. He avoided the mid-range area like it was the plague, and yet he still racked up scoring titles. It was really strange to watch.
But it worked. Harden averaged 36.1 PPG in the 2019 season, and 34.3 PPG in the 2020 season, among countless other 25+ PPG scoring seasons. He was absolutely unstoppable, and the crazy part? In those two seasons, nearly 70 percent of all of his points came from either three-pointers or free throws. He completely wired himself how to play in this new style, and it was almost like a cheat code; he was a basketball robot that figured out the league.
So, in its infinite wisdom, the NBA finally decided this season that they should change some of the rules that allowed players to take advantage of the refs so easily. No more lunging into the defender after a pump fake, no more ball-handlers stopping after a screen and letting the defender run into them, and no more of everything Trae Young and James Harden do.
The result? Harden is attempting 6.8 free throws per game, his lowest since playing with OKC 12 seasons ago.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way. He is out of shape, potentially still dealing with a hamstring injury (aka the longest-lasting hamstring injury ever), and the refs are just calling fewer fouls than they used to overall.
But Harden, in particular, has been affected by these rule changes. Watching him, it's clear that he hasn’t been able to adjust (yet) to how the game is now officiated. For years in Houston, he was a robot that knew exactly what buttons to push to get what he wanted. Now, it’s like a robot that has grown a consciousness for the first time and is second-guessing each decision in a way that it didn’t before.
When he goes into the paint, Harden’s initial instinct and priority is to try and draw a foul - it is NOT to just finish at the rim. But now, as he gets to the rim, and as he starts to lean sideways like he’s always done, he remembers the new rules. He hesitates, and that hesitation forces him to either go up passively or just dribble or kick it out. He’s less quick than he used to be, and so when he’s breaking someone down on the perimeter, he does a stepback but then remembers that he can’t jump forward anymore to draw the foul.
Just watch him play closely, and this will all be apparent. There is something off about his game. He is clearly thrown off of his rhythm, unable to just play within the flow of the game instead of hunting for fouls. Everywhere on the floor, especially when he has the ball in the paint, there are slight hesitations, slight movements that he begins, and quick stops, like he has something in the back of his mind.
The point is that the NBA’s rule changes have not only affected James Harden because they stopped calling as many fouls. That was how it started, and Harden’s numbers were down. But after a number of games, when he realized that the refs weren’t calling what they used to, the psychological aspect kicked in. It’s not only that the foul won’t be called, but it’s that Harden knows the foul won’t be called, so he plays differently.
After years as a Houston Rocket, Harden can’t remember how to play like a normal basketball player. He can’t remember how to move off-ball, how to attack the basket with the intent to score, and most of all, how to play within the rhythm of the game.
This is not to say, of course, that he won’t be able to figure it out. James Harden is an incredible basketball player, and truly great players should be able to succeed no matter what the conditions are. In fact, the reason this article is being written at all is because of how shocking the extent to which Harden has struggled so far. Maybe it's more about his injury or that he hasn’t played himself into shape yet, but he definitely has been thrown off.
It seems unlikely that he won’t be able to adjust his game as the season rolls around. And for the Brooklyn Nets sake, it’s important that he does. With Kyrie Irving out indefinitely, and with diminishing returns from some of the veterans, the ceiling of the team will be determined by Harden’s contribution to the team. Harden needs to get comfortable, and get comfortable quickly - the Nets’ season depends on it.
