[Wall Street Journal] James Harden’s Secret Talent Is Slowing Down

Strong post content to avatar expression correlation.

Well played.

 

Finally a player an athlete of my caliber can imitate!

 

Anyone care to post the full article?

 

here's the bulk of it, hopefully the formatting is okay

James Harden’s Secret Talent Is Slowing Down

The Houston Rockets’ star is ordinary by many physical metrics. But his deceleration is superhuman—and that explains how he dominates the NBA

Houston Rockets' James Harden, left, drives on Minnesota Timberwolves' Kris Dunn during a game on Jan. 11.

PHOTO: JIM MONE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

By BEN COHEN
Feb. 9, 2017 2:10 p.m. ET

Santa Barbara, Calif.

Most players in the NBA are more intimidating than Houston Rockets guard James Harden. He isn’t uncommonly tall, doesn’t jump especially high and can’t run all that quickly. His wingspan is ridiculous for a normal human being but only barely above average in his profession. There is almost nothing about his physical makeup that seems exceptional.

“By all these traditional performance metrics that we track, he’s prettypedestrian,” said Marcus Elliott, the founder and director of the Peak Performance Project, which has analyzed the biomechanics of hundreds of NBA players.

But something unexpected happened when Harden came here for a closer examination last spring. There were actually several areas in which Harden was an outlier—not only among basketball players, but among thousands of athletes Elliott’s lab has studied. And they were all related to the same underlying trait.

Harden has a hidden advantage: deceleration. His braking system is the best in sports. Harden is the fastest at slowing down.

Once you notice his ability to stop, you start to understand his entire game. This is the skill that allows Harden to improvise off the dribble. It’s why he can screech to a halt when he’s driving, swerve in the lane as other players skate past him and step-back with enough separation to sneak off a jumper.

Houston is good this year because Harden is great, and Harden is great because of this obscure, imperceptible edge that even he didn’t recognize until recently.

“You can tell on the court,” Harden said. “Athleticism, for me, is not being able to jump the highest or run the fastest. It’s being able to control it. If you’re

not able to control it, you’re just a loose cannon. I’m athletic in my own way.”

What he’s doing has distinguished Harden even in a season of superlative NBA performances. Kevin Durant has never been such an efficient scorer. Stephen Curry is starting to resemble the supernova of last year. Isaiah Thomas is better in the fourth quarter than anyone in decades, Russell Westbrook is averaging a triple-double and LeBron James is still LeBron James.

But the frontrunner to win the NBA’s most valuable player award is Harden. He’s averaging 28.9 points per game while also somehow leading the league with 11.4 assists per game. His efficiency and usage have never been higher. And the Rockets have emerged as the NBA’s surprise contender with a 38-17 record that puts them behind only the Golden State Warriors and San Antonio Spurs in their conference.

The question is how Harden plays the way he does when everyone on the court knows exactly what he’s trying to do. The answer can be found by coming to an old, converted music venue in this sleepy town near the ocean.

For the last decade, NBA players have been making the pilgrimage here to the headquarters of P3, a warehouse-like space where they see a hanging print of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” when they walk in. They strap reflective markers on their key joints—the same way videogames are made—and perform a series of movements on the force plates embedded into the gym’s floor. The entire battery of tests can last about two hours, and the athletes leave with an incredible trove of biometric data. There is no basketball hoop in the entire building.

It’s places likes P3 that have used a richer understanding of the human body to redefine athleticism in recent years, and the NBA has embraced its approach more than any other league. There are fewer players on each team, they work on guaranteed contracts that give their employers incentives to keep them healthy, and they’re in a league with younger owners who made their fortunes using information to find edges. That explains why 46% of players on NBA opening-day rosters had been scrutinized by P3, according to the company.

Harden became the latest NBA player to be tested not long after the Rockets lost in last season’s playoffs. Elliott didn’t know what to expect. He doesn’t watch much basketball and had never seen Harden on the court. He also thought Harden seemed bashful for a player of his caliber.

“Some of the guys show up and want to show us what freaks they are,” he said. “Harden was the opposite of that. It was almost like he was apologetic about the fact that he wasn’t going to blow us away.”

And he didn’t blow them away. At least not in the way that NBA players have always been evaluated. Harden’s lateral acceleration placed him in the 36th percentile and his vertical acceleration in the 54th percentile of players studied by P3. “He’s basically at the NBA norms in most acceleration metrics,” Elliott said. “But his deceleration metrics are off the charts.”

They were surprised when they saw those numbers. Harden’s “eccentric force” —which sounds like it should be the name of his next Adidas sneaker but is actually the force he generates when he stops his downward momentum —ranked in the 98th percentile. And his “rate of eccentric-force development” was in the 99th percentile.

“I didn’t know before I was tested, but I can feel the difference,” Harden said. “I know what I’m great at and what I’m not great at—and I use it to my advantage.”

That’s apparent in the way he plays. Harden relies on the stepback jumper more than anyone in the NBA, and his ability to decelerate is what frees him for the split-second he requires to get a shot off. That’s why it’s basically unstoppable.

This is an underappreciated part of playing basketball. There are people around the sport, in fact, who believe that changing speeds is the single most important characteristic in the game today. “You look at the best players in the NBA, and they can go full speed with a dribble and all of a sudden—stop,” said Rockets forward Ryan Anderson. “It’s impossible to guard.”

Harden vexes his defenders when he drives, too. But it’s not because he blows past them. It’s because he stops before the guy stuck guarding him can react, leaving him no choice but to foul Harden, who has led the NBA in free throws for the last three years.

To play this way requires an extraordinary amount of body control. It’s more common to see players who are better at the exact opposite: accelerating quickly and decelerating slowly. But there’s a reason they don’t start in the All-Star Game. “Those systems aren’t built to survive,” Elliott said. “It’s like a Ferrari with a Volkswagen’s braking system.”

Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni says Harden reminds him of a player who exploited his system to win two MVP awards: Steve Nash. But acknowledging the ability to slow down as an elite type of athleticism is such a radical idea that even D’Antoni, who happens to have a more radical basketball mind than most coaches, hadn’t considered it. He realized it was a distinct skill only after thinking: “Why can’t everybody do that?”

Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com

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the man could stop on the tip of a dick

 

It's the pole on which that basket hangs.

Harden loves him poles - be it stripper poles or basketball poles

He just takes it easy and in his own space doing what is needed when he approaches it

 

Let's hear you say that after challenging him in a game of chicken where you both run full speed towards the edge of a cliff.

Score - Beard: 1, DreamShook: Dead

 

When I tried to slow down that fast I flew out of the windshield...

 

I'm sure I would survive. My super power is common sense.

 

Beautiful

 

Kragle is the true super power. Harden has found it. Just put some under the shoes and boom you're the MVP.

 

I see he's put a healthy amount all over his teeth too.

 

It's hard to think of who the others might be or might not be when it comes to having this slow down skill. But I think of:
James Harden
Sam Cassell
Luis Scola
Eddie Johnson
Scott Brooks
Juwan Howard
Jim Jackson
Kyle Lowry
Matt Maloney
Rodney McCray
Glenn Rice

Rockets who could not slow down or played recklessly fast:
KJ McDaniels
Corey Brewer
Tyron Lue
Walter Berry
Vernon Maxwell
Chris Jent
Allen Leavell
Nick Johnson
Stromile Swift
Sam Dekker


And then there is Trevor Ariza, who slows down on every drive at the last second so that he can make an awkward attempt at a layup.

 

The inertia of that ass.

 

Lulz

 

That slowing down ability that Harden has may not seem special or anything, but it's what makes him great. We all know Harden is different from every other NBA stars. His style of play is incredibly unique, because he just takes his time and plays the game to his own pace. As he continues to grow, his patiences for the game will improve and he will continue to be even more lethal.

Special ability is slowing down doesn't seem awesome like explosiveness, leaping ability, or insane wingspan, but it is special in its own rights. Everything has a balance to it. James Harden's ability is unique and effective. It's not flashy but its lethal.