Pretty soon these writers spitting the truth are going to get tired of dismissive comments claiming they just don’t realize Harden’s step-back is a travel, and start writing entire articles about the delusion of salty fans claiming travel, especially those who also claim only Luka does a step back without travel. Pretty soon, after we win a chip, the truthers in the media are going to fight back and laugh at the “Curry doesn’t get those calls” and “Luka is Pure” crowd, by showing video of Giannis, McCollum, Luka, DeRozan, Kemba, and Kyrie all doing the very identical step-back to Harden, and asking them if they practice his move, and think he dribbles. And they are quoted as saying, “no travel, that’s silly, we’ve just been trying to get into the refs heads about it, in hopes they call it, until we learn it ourselves.” Pretty soon, the sports world will be flooded with players saying Harden doesn’t travel, but they are duplicating it, yet not at same percentage.
Article Formatting might be off. NBA James Harden Is the Outlier of the NBA The league’s reigning most valuable player has elevated his game this season. These charts explain how. There has always been something odd about James Harden. He was a sixth man coming off the bench when the Houston Rockets bet on him as their franchise superstar. His game is so idiosyncratic that the superhuman ability that made him the NBA’s most valuable player is that he slows down faster than anyone in the league. Even his most notable physical attributes are eccentricities. He’s a lefty with a stupendous beard. There has never been a player like him. And he’s now doing things that have never been done on a basketball court. Harden is taking a pickax to every traditional idea about how the game should be played. It’s not only that he’s averaging 33.7 points per game and nearly 40 points over the last month as he rescued Houston’s season. It’s the way that he’s doing it that’s even more remarkable. Rockets general manager Daryl Morey says there’s a case to be made that Harden is the single greatest offensive player of all time. Harden strengthens that case every time he steps on the court. He’s breaking the sport on a nightly basis. Here’s how. Jan. 9, 2019 9:08 a.m. ET By Ben Cohen James Harden Is the Outlier of the NBA - WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-harden-nba-outlier-charts-115... 1 of 4 1/9/19, 3:06 PM The Rockets use Harden more than ever, and it’s more than anyone in NBA history other than Russell Westbrook in his first season without Kevin Durant. But there is something other than a phenomenal amount of facial hair that distinguishes the last two MVPs. Westbrook is delightfully inefficient. Harden is deeply efficient despite his volume of shots. The case that he’s a generational force can be found in the number of points that he creates. It’s not just his scoring. Harden’s teammates are in position to get layups and 3-pointers when other teams sell out to stop him. The result is that he’s producing at historic levels. Over the last three seasons, Harden has scored 30.5 points per game and his assists have led to 23.4 more points per game. He’s directly responsible for more points per game over three years than anyone since at least 1997, according to NBA data. There are two strips of paint on the court that Harden has exploited to become the virtuosic scorer that he is: the 3-point line and the free-throw line. His 3-point shooting this season is silly even by Stephen Curry’s standards. Harden manages to shoot more than 12 threes per game. Twelve! Last week, when he took 23 in an overtime win over the Golden State Warriors, Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni responded in the only appropriate way: He couldn’t stop laughing. Harden is on pace to shoot more 3-pointers than anyone who has ever played in the NBA. If he keeps chugging along at this preposterous rate, he will have launched 40% more threes than anyone other than Curry. And yet 3-point shooting isn’t even the most effective part of his game. What makes him unlike anyone who came before him is that he does his worst damage at the freethrow line. No one who has averaged more than four 3-point attempts per game has taken as many foul shots as Harden. He also happens to be an excellent free-throw shooter. A trip to the line is more productive for Harden than an open three. Harden’s ability to create his own shot is unparalleled, and the Rockets have empowered him to wring that skill for all that it’s worth. Less than 50% of Harden’s threes were unassisted as recently as the 2016 season. That number is now a record 86.7%. There is nothing in today’s NBA that is more useful than being able to shoot off the dribble—not height, not wingspan, not Instagram followers—and Harden might be scraping the ceiling of how much one player can possibly shoot off the dribble at this point. James Harden Is the Outlier of the NBA - WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-harden-nba-outlier-charts-115... 2 of 4 1/9/19, 3:06 PM The most devastating shot in Harden’s arsenal is the stepback 3-pointer. It’s what makes Harden a true basketball revolutionary. NBA players have always been permitted two steps after their last dribble before they shoot. Harden’s eureka moment was that he could simply take one of them away from the basket. (And sometimes more than one.) He’s taken nearly twice as many stepback 3-pointers as any NBA team this season. But not even a number that staggering does enough to capture the rate at which he’s launching shots that are so difficult that most players don’t even bother trying. Harden led the NBA by attempting 0.9 stepback threes per game in 2017 and 2.4 per game in 2018. He’s now taking 6.2 per game. He’s already taken more stepback 3-pointers this year than he did all of last year. Houston lets Harden be Harden. They are built around his sui generis talent. The Rockets are the NBA’s best team in isolation, and they play in isolation more than any NBA team. That’s almost entirely because of Harden. There are hermits in the woods who enjoy isolation less than he does. Harden led the league with 6.8 isolation possessions per game two years ago. Last year he increased that number to 10 possessions per game. But this year he’s basically quarantined himself. Harden works in isolation for 15.2 possessions per game. He gets the ball, and the Rockets scatter. To say there are no players who clear out everyone on the court as much as Harden is not exactly fair to other players. There are no teams that play in isolation as often as Harden. Harden has an edge when he decides to isolate his defender. By then he’s carefully handpicked the person he wants to guard him. That person tends to be the other team’s worst perimeter defender. Harden proceeds to torch him. Harden has several means of humiliating the poor guy he chooses to guard him. He tends to be meticulous about his deliberations. He’s willing to use all 24 seconds of the shot clock if that’s how long it takes for him to get the look that he wants, and Harden is why the Rockets take the most late 3-pointers in the league and make them at the highest percentage. This is not always the most thrilling style to watch. Harden is the NBA equivalent of Brutalist architecture. He embodies function over form. There are times when seeing him perform at sublime levels is about as exciting as watching a fishbowl. But he knows precisely what he’s doing. Harden dribbles the other team into submission as he weighs the pros and cons of his roasting methods. He dribbles and dribbles and dribbles until it’s time for him to decide. It turns out that how players shoot after a certain number of dribbles is one of the many statistics the NBA tracks with its fancypants cameras, and Harden has already taken more 3-pointers after seven or more dribbles than any NBA team in the last six years even though he’s only played 36 games. He has more shots after that many dribbles than the Sixers, Pelicans, Bulls, Nuggets, Clippers, Timberwolves and Knicks combined. There was one play in Houston’s latest game that happened to be peak Harden. It was the purest distillation of his peculiar form of havoc. He dribbled. He isolated. He kept dribbling. He dropped his defender, shot a 3-pointer and somehow got fouled along the way. It was the sort of play that you didn’t need a chart to understand. Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com James Harden’s overtime 3-pointer against the Golden State Warriors last week was the shot of the NBA season. PHOTO: KYLE TERADA/REUTERS James Harden Is the Outlier of the NBA - WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-harden-nba-outlier-charts-115... 4 of 4 1/9/19, 3:06 PM
So apparently there might be a time limit for the article to be read for free. It asked me to subscribe, I clicked the "x" and read the article. Left the article up in one of my tabs, I come back to read it again, and the article is subscription only now. For those first time clickers, read the article before it's subs only, I guess.
Is is possible get Harden's true shooting percentage of layups? I know he will definitely be much better than Kobe, but I'll be very interested to see how far away he is from Lebron in that regard. Aside from this year's Giannis, Lebron is the best perimeter player in the history of NBA to finish near the rim. It'll be remarkable if Harden is not too far away from Lebron's level in converting layups.
So trying to think through this and your approach. I’m guessing Kobe scored Loren points through the same ages. And I’m guessing Harden hit more threes. And I’m guessing FTM are at least close.... Harden maybe leading. So is the implication then that Kobe just took a lot more mid range shots and made some of them. Lol. Has to be it right? Guess the Kirk chart for Kobe would show that. Or basketball reference but I’m not doing that math. But in either case when someone says Harden is the only guy since Schayes who is a top scorer yet has more FTA than FGA the response is because he’s eliminated mid range shots and replaces them with FTs which is great.
