Adam Silver trying to nerf James Harden and the little Harden Jr's he has created around the league?

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id...trict-unnatural-jump-shot-motions-sources-say

The NBA's Competition Committee met Monday to further explore rule changes to restrict the unnatural motions surrounding jump shots that players are using to draw fouls, sources told ESPN.

The league wants to limit ability of players - including crafty stars like James Harden, Luka Doncic and Trae Young - to lean backwards and sideways, for example - to initiate contact and get to the free throw line.

The NBA has shared a video compilation of player examples with the 30 teams that outlines a number of motions deemed unnatural that used to draw fouls. The NBA and Competition Committee will drill down on specific plays with the league's GM's next week to target examples that'll be recommended to owners to vote to eliminate next season, sources said.

There's growing belief that these many of these maneuvers are contributing to a game that's slanting too much of an advantage toward the offense. While the concentration of these issues is often focused on star players getting much more usage and exposure with the ball, the league sees this as a universal problem throughout lineups and rosters - not only an issue for star players.

 

but.. but.. but .. Steph Curry changed the game lol

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-kids-want-to-be-james-harden-11565100311

Brooklyn Nets guard Joe Harris has spent part of his summer for the last five years hosting a camp for youth basketball players, and he’s learned that being around kids all day is a useful way of understanding the recent history and the inevitable future of his sport.

“In those five years,” he said, “it’s been crazy to me to see how these kids play.”

The first crazy thing he noticed was the number of 3-pointers they were taking. The next crazy thing was that they would come to the gym and begin their warmups from behind the 3-point line, which is something that not even Harris does, and he’s the league’s reigning leader in 3-point shooting percentage. But what he saw this summer was the craziest thing yet.

The kids weren’t just taking 3-pointers. They were taking stepback 3-pointers.

“Everyone wants to be like James Harden,” Harris said.

This seems to make as much sense as trying to grow a beard like Harden’s. His stepback 3-pointer is a bit like his magnificent facial hair: It requires patience, years of practice and even then almost nobody will be able to look like him.

That’s because the shot he’s mastered could very well be the most deranged shot in basketball. Harden makes the stepback 3-pointer look effortless. It’s not. It’s a shot that’s too physically demanding for almost everyone else in the league.

But not even the fact that their favorite NBA players won’t try stepback 3-pointers is enough to deter this generation of youth basketball players.

“The stepback three, in my opinion, has become a problem,” said Allen Skeens, the coach of an elite youth team in Kansas.

This problem will be on full display when the best 13- and 14-year-old boys and girls teams around the world convene this week for the Jr. NBA Global Championship. This celebration of youth basketball might as well be called Hardenpalooza. LeBron James and Stephen Curry are the most popular players among the kids at the tournament, according to NBA data, but Curry and Harden are the most influential. They are responsible for the biggest shifts in human behavior on the basketball court over the last five years.

It took the adults in the world of youth basketball several years to get used to the avalanche of 3-pointers that roiled the sport. Now they’re trying to wrap their minds around the sudden prevalence of stepback threes.

The stepback three is Harden’s highly unorthodox way of creating enough space to shoot more 3-pointers than anyone the game has ever seen. It requires him to do something counterintuitive: step away from the basket. He’s strong enough to shoot with his body pulling him in another direction. The average 12-year-old boy is not.

In that way Harden’s stepback three is more like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s skyhook than Allen Iverson’s crossover or Michael Jordan’s fadeaway jumper. Not everyone who practices it can perfect it. And the great majority of them will look ridiculous trying.

Skeens knows how to have success at this level: His team won the Jr. NBA boys championship last year. But he’s puzzled when he sees other coaches encourage their young players to shoot stepback 3-pointers. He says there’s a good reason that he makes sure his team doesn’t practice this particular shot.

“It’s not a good shot,” he said. “You’re just throwing a ball if you’re 12 years old. You can’t shoot the ball that far.”

As the coach of a youth team in Texas, Aaron Espinosa is used to the odd sight of a stepback 3-pointer, and he’s come to realize there is almost nothing he can do about it. “I get on them all the time,” he said. If one of his players happens to make a stepback 3-pointer, he immediately lets that player know he’s coming out of the game when he misses one. “That’s a bad shot,” Espinosa said, “and I don’t want to reinforce bad shots.”

But the issue is that it’s not a bad shot for Harden. He took a staggering 540 stepback threes last year—more than the total number of 3-point attempts of all but 11 players last season—and he still made 38.9% of them. That return of 1.17 points per shot made this highly inefficient shot more efficient for Harden than the most efficient offense in the history of the NBA.

Whether or not to imitate Harden is an especially tricky issue in China, the home of Yao Ming, who gave the country with the world’s biggest population a compelling reason to root for a team in Houston. Yang Xing, the coach of the Chinese boys team at the Jr. NBA championships, said through a translator that he discourages his players from taking stepback 3-pointers, even if that happens to be the signature move of the Rockets’ star player.

Other coaches have decided to meet their players in the middle. Craig Stratford has kids from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam on his Asia Pacific team, and he doesn’t mind when they pretend to be Harden. He just doesn’t want them practicing their stepback and sidesteps from behind the 3-point line. “We actually use it more from the mid-range,” he said.


James Harden himself is helping to breed this army of miniature clones. The young players at his camp this summer went home with autographs, photos and the graduate degree known as the “exclusive James Harden signature move certification.”

“These young kids, they’re learning very fast,” Harden said last season. “They’re on Instagram. They’re watching basketball. And they’re going out working on this move. It’ll be a normal move very soon.”


A future with players dribbling out the shot clock and launching stepback 3-pointers (and maybe even traveling along the way) like Harden sounds like a bleak dystopia to some NBA executives. The way the Rockets play is the New Jersey Turnpike of offense: as ugly as it is effective. It works for them only because they have Harden. But the history of basketball suggests that innovations are sneered at until they slowly become acceptable. “Hopefully the move that I’m doing, the stepback and the way that I create space, is ahead of its time,” Harden said.

The players at the Jr. NBA Global Championships are the ones who are going to determine how basketball looks a decade from now. And it might not be long before doing their best impressions of Harden means they’re flaunting another, more inventive move.

“You’ve got to find ways of creating an advantage every single year, and that’s what I’m doing,” Harden said earlier this summer. “I’m going to come up with something more creative.”

 

CREATORS NEVER FOLLOW

 

i guess the media will keep running with this curry changed the game nonsense, similar to their kevin durant is the best player on the nets take to try and not have people do critical thinking on their own

no young player in the nba plays like steph curry. I have seen a huge growing trent of incoming rookie guards over the years like ant edwards and quickley of the knicks all copying hardens moveset. Hell markelle fults was taken over jayson tatum because of a simple harden comp

all the media can do is try and downplay hardens name in the hopes that he wont be remembered 20 years from now, but hardens numbers and the style at which he plays will copied for years to come. The media thinks that by not rewarding harden with all-nba selections and mvps. That will deter players from seeing hardens game as useful. Thats the only reason he has hasnt won more mvp's. They already crying about luka and his style of play haha. PLZ LUKA AND TRAE WE WANT YOU TO PLAY MORE LIKE STEPH CURRY

 

the league has tried to nerf harden, this will make 4 times i think since the start of 2016. In the 2015-2016 i believe it was putting emphasis on the side swipe move which durant created but harden started to abuse like crazy in the 2016 season and call more side-outs. In 2016-2017 the league nerfed harden and changed what constitutes a 3 shot foul after billy donovan and many other coaches complained that year. In 2017-2018 the league went and changed what constitutes a "gather." And now in 2021 here we are once again.. same old story

 

Man believe it or not I used to think the refs screwed us in 2018 because Scott foster just didnt like cp3 and harden. But now I’ve become wiser that a more sinister plot by the league office was at play. Adam silver flat out did not and does not want any player winning a title with James hardens style of play. That’s why the warriors were always allowed to get away with so much against us in the playoffs. It was basically the future of the NBA at stake for the league when you had hardens style of play in direct contrast with steph currys. The league purposefully assigned foster to officiate game 1 and game 7 of the western conference finals in 2018. Which were both rockets losses. We were the better team, but we weren’t playing the way the league saw fit so they screwed us. The cp3 injury and the 0-27 basically took the league off the hook for that screw job. But the league got the result it wanted which was the warriors motion offense defeating the rockets isolation offense. Little did they know that hardens imprint had already been growing in the aau circuit and youth leagues across america during this time.

Now the league is taking this even more seriously as the younger stars of today including bigs like Joel embiid are taking a little of hardens game and applying it to their game on the court. I would not be shocked to see an emphasis on off-ball fouls being called to reward players for moving without the ball more

 

isnt this an unnatural shooting motion

 

I knew my last post would bring you out from behind whatever curtain you were hiding behind. Like clockwork