Rockets’ James Harden Chases M.V.P. With a Blizzard of Free Throws

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Rockets’ James Harden Chases M.V.P. With a Blizzard of Free Throws


James Harden, center, getting fouled by the Clippers' Chris Paul, left. Through Sunday, Harden had registered 800 free throws, the most in the N.B.A.
ROBERT HANASHIRO / USA TODAY SPORTS, VIA REUTERS
By ANDREW KEH
APRIL 13, 2015
HOUSTON — It was just after the Houston Rockets finished practice Saturday afternoon, and as James Harden sensed that his conversation with a visitor was pivoting to the subject of his supposed ability to coax fouls from defenders, he felt the need to clear something up.

“You know what? I don’t look to get fouled, as people might think I do,” Harden said, darting his eyes left and right to caricature the notion. “I’m not like: ‘Where’s the foul? Where’s the foul?’ as I’m driving.”

His only aim is to score the basket, Harden said, and if any defenders want to swipe at the ball to stop him, they can. But, he added, when he makes a move to the basket, he drives hard, and fouls are sometimes a byproduct.

Still, he was asked, what about the way he flattens out his arms to make them susceptible to being smacked, or how he changes pace on his dribble at counterintuitive times to create collisions, or his tendency to cling to defenders’ bodies even when freer paths to the rim seem to exist?

Harden smiled. “That’s just being crafty,” he said.

Drawing fouls has long been acknowledged as an art and an advantageous skill in the N.B.A., and Harden — if the eye-popping numbers and the testimony from teammates, coaches, analysts and even begrudging opponents are to be believed — has mastered it to an extreme.


At 25, Harden has distinguished himself as one of the league’s great scorers, averaging 27.5 points this season, and when the regular season ends Wednesday, he could win his first scoring title, although he is in a neck-and-neck battle with his former Oklahoma City Thunder teammate Russell Westbrook. The next day, voting for the league’s most valuable player will close, and it is widely thought that the award will go to Harden or Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors.

A crucial factor in Harden’s remarkable season has been his production at the free-throw line. Through Sunday, Harden had registered a league-high 800 free throws and had made 693. Second, far behind, was Westbrook, who had attempted 629 and made 525. Through 80 games — only one of which he had missed — Harden was averaging 10 free-throw attempts, with 8.8 of them successful. Both figures were also league highs.

If he continues apace, he will become just the 11th player in N.B.A. history to sink more than 700 free throws in a season.

“Getting fouled is definitely an art, and he’s very good at it,” Rockets Coach Kevin McHale said, adding that Harden’s body awareness allowed him to initiate contact that works in his favor.

“You either know how to draw fouls or don’t, and I’m not sure you can teach it,” McHale added. “It may be innate.”

Whether or not Harden seeks to get fouled, then, may not be much of a debate at all, and the discord around the subject may simply stem from semantics and questions over the level of intent he brings to such plays. Foul calls are forever a touchy subject among basketball professionals, and Harden’s initial impulse to push back against the notion may come from a hesitance to be viewed as someone who seeks to deceive referees.

Daryl Morey, the Rockets’ general manager, disputed the premise that Harden did anything special to draw fouls.

On the other hand, Harden had no problem with characterizations of his foul-drawing abilities as crafty or instinctive.

Steve Javie, a former N.B.A. referee who analyzes officiating for ESPN, explained that Harden had an uncanny knack for sensing when a defender had entered into an illegal guarding position and initiating contact at that very moment, creating a defensive foul that might not have materialized otherwise.

How does he do it, then? To start, Harden’s tactics would not work if he did not already possess a devastatingly varied offensive skill set. Among casual viewers, he may not inspire the same delight as Curry, who fires shots from absurd ranges and swaggers back down the court before they land, like an action-movie star strolling away from an explosion. But Harden’s intelligence and technical sophistication have won him widespread admiration.

Harden’s most famous moves are the Euro step drive — “He’s the best doing it,” Manu Ginobili, a progenitor of the move, said Friday — and his step-back jump shot, which he can use to create open 3-point attempts. Having perfected those two moves, Harden said, he wanted to learn two more.

He is an elite dribbler and shooter. He starts and stops, speeds forward and back and side to side, a remote-control car with a rocket launcher. That he is left-handed adds a complicating wrinkle for defenders.


“It’s difficult to ever figure out what he’s going to do because he scores in such a variety of ways,” said Terry Stotts, the coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, who knocked the Rockets out of the playoffs last season.

Harden’s array of weapons instills in defenders high levels of respect, fear, urgency and uncertainty and a basic desire to stop whatever Harden might be doing at a given moment. In turn, he plays off these impulses. It helps that he has strong hands and an equally strong grasp of league rules.

Harden’s most idiosyncratic maneuver involves holding the ball away from his body, like a waiter balancing a tray of tempting hors d’oeuvres — or as Harden refers to it, “the cookie jar.”

“Just when you think you can reach and get a steal, he takes his arm up into your arms, and that’s an automatic foul,” said Markel Brown of the Nets, who helped hold Harden to 15 points in a Feb. 27 game. “You’re fouling him, but he pretty much made you foul him.”


Harden colliding with Alonzo Gee of Portland. “Getting fouled is definitely an art, and he’s very good at it,” Rockets Coach Kevin McHale said.
DON RYAN / ASSOCIATED PRESS
Such a loss of self-determination is common among those who guard Harden. He isolates defenders, stares them down, flinches, twitches, and moves his eyeballs. If the opponent loses his equilibrium, Harden accelerates, clipping a piece of hip or shoulder or leg on the way.

“He’ll lull you to sleep,” said Cory Joseph of the Spurs. “He gets you on your heels, almost moves you where he wants you, and then he works his angles to get contact and a foul call and also get his shot off.”

Thus Harden punishes defenders for even a split-second of laziness. “As a defender, you better be doing everything right,” Harden said. “I’m talking about hands out of the cookie jar, sliding your feet, straight up.”

Even after he has passed a player, Harden has an innate sense of how to change pace and position his body to outwit the defender. As Clyde Drexler, a former Rockets player who now does television commentary for the team, said: “When he gets by you, he doesn’t let you get back into the play. He keeps a hand or a body on you, so you’re always behind him.”

That technique was on display last Wednesday in a game against the Spurs. In the first quarter, isolated near the baseline, Harden performed an arrhythmic hopscotch to get around Tony Parker. At that point, Harden could have surged ahead, but instead he slowed down and let his free left arm hang behind him. Parker, who had spun to give chase, knocked into it, and a whistle blew.

Parker pirouetted, palms out, flabbergasted. He pleaded his innocence to Brian Forte, the referee who had made the call. “You know what he does,” Parker said to Forte, shaking his head.

It seems to have dawned on some opposing coaches that the best way to stop Harden from scoring could be to stop playing basketball altogether. Two nights later, the teams met again, and the Spurs employed a strategy of intentionally fouling forward Josh Smith, who was shooting 49.6 percent from the foul line through Sunday.


For all of Harden’s proficiency at the line, the Rockets started this week shooting just 71.5 percent from the foul line, the fourth-worst mark in the league.

At one point in the second half of the game against San Antonio, after yet another intentional foul, Harden started yapping good-naturedly at Gregg Popovich, the Spurs’ coach, and the two proceeded to have a sportsmanly conversation.

“I said, ‘Come on, Pop, you’ve got to stop doing this now,’ ” Harden recalled the next day. “And he was like: ‘I’m not going to give you the ball in the fourth quarter so you can get it going. This is me slowing you down, stopping you, so you can’t get a rhythm.’ The strategy worked.”

Few other attempts to stop Harden — or keep him off the line — have worked. Harden scored 50 points on March 19, 22 of them on free throws. Four days later, he scored 44 points, 21 of them from the foul line. No other player this season has had even one game in which he made 20 foul shots.

Harden, who is 6 feet 5 inches, will become just the fifth player of that height or shorter to lead the league in made free throws since the N.B.A. and the American Basketball Association merged in 1976, according to ESPN statistics.

Trevor Ariza, Harden’s teammate, said Harden’s aggressiveness had broad benefits.

“It works for all of us because he gets us to the bonus really, really fast, just because of his strength and craftiness,” Ariza said. “He’s figured stuff out that nobody else could, and he’s making it work for him.”

When Harden first began to figure things out, it was partly to get hamburgers. At Artesia High School in Lakewood, Calif., he had a relatively passive disposition on the court, and his coach, Scott Pera, felt a need to change that. On top of various other drills and motivational tactics, Pera challenged Harden to get at least six free-throw attempts every game. If Harden fell short, he did extra running. But if he got six, Pera had to buy him pizza or a burger or some other greasy treat.

By the time Harden graduated from high school, he had procured quite a few burgers.

“To be a great scorer, you need to get to the foul line,” said Pera, now an assistant coach at Rice.

Since then, Harden’s mind-set has remained the same, but the potential rewards — a scoring title, an M.V.P. Award, a championship trophy — are rather different.

 

I think this is probably the best article I have read in a long time In regards to the mindset of harden. He is pretty self aware and I love the banter between him
And pop.