https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-kids-want-to-be-james-harden-11565100311 By: Ben Cohen 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.” Bottomline is that regardless of what the media and a few casuals say, james harden is loved and watched by tons of people every game. Believe it or not he is probably 3rd in the nba when it comes to attracting large tv ratings behind curry and lebron.
a ton of trainers and youth coaches are telling these kids to study James Harden...the way he sets up his defender for a blow by with the dribble, uses subtle change of pace, how he manipulates defenders, etc, and yes, even how he draws fouls...there is a lot to take away from his game and try to apply to your own NBA players are studying him as well from Bradley Beal with the stepback to Kawhi on better ways to draw fouls