Daily News | James Harden’s sixth sense: What makes playmaking critical to the Sixers star’s game
James Harden dribbled up the left side of the Wells Fargo Center court, before stopping just shy of the halfcourt line to cock the ball behind his head with both hands. The 76ers’ star guard then delivered a bounce pass — with backspin — between two sprinting Toronto Raptors, which pounded the floor just outside the top of the key and then landed in the grasp of Tyrese Maxey at the right elbow, allowing Maxey to finish a crafty reverse layup perfectly in stride.
Harden will next orchestrate a Sixers offense aiming to knock off the mighty Boston Celtics — potentially without an injured Embiid for at least part of the series that begins Monday night — and advance to the conference finals for the first time since 2001. To do that, as coach Doc Rivers has coined, the Sixers will need Harden to be “a scoring Magic Johnson.”Harden’s playmaking originates from his mind and body; what he used to be, what he has always been and what he has become.
To execute in such a way first requires an unselfish mentality, which is what Harden possessed when he arrived at Pera’s Artesia High School program just outside of Los Angeles at 14 years old. Pera said Harden refused to shoot in initial practices as a freshman, so much so that the coach had to encourage Harden to unlock more of a scorer’s “killer instinct.”
“At 18, he was smarter than me,” said Pera, the former Penn coach who is now at Rice. “He thought, ‘I’m getting all this attention. I’m not going to come in here and shoot all the time and be this ball-dominant guy and rub my teammates the wrong way.’ Instead, he just got them all involved and showed him what a great teammate he was going to be and how much sharing the ball mattered to him.
During early practices, the Thunder would break into groups of two or three players to dissect the reads of each offensive set as the actions developed. Harden would get through those so swiftly that they could expand to the five-man looks much faster than anticipated. He also asked questions — and made suggestions — that drew a response of, “OK, that’s really good. I like that. Let’s throw that into it,” from his coach.
He utilized his relentless scoring — often by driving to the basket and firing step-back three-pointers — as a playmaking weapon. The Rockets put ideal teammates around Harden, including alley-oop threat Clint Capela and long-range shooters such as Tucker, Trevor Ariza and Ryan Anderson. And with every coverage Harden saw, even a standard pick and roll play became more impossible to stop. While averaging 29.6 points per game in parts of nine seasons with the Rockets, he also averaged 7.
“It’s amazing that I get to see it every day, because when we were playing against him it was like, ‘Dang, this is a pain in the ass.’ But when he’s doing that for you, it’s such a blessing.” “He’s going to see the big inside if he’s open,” Nurse said during that series. “He’s going to fire it out to the corner if that guy’s open. If you pre-rotate to the corner, he’ll zing it straight out to the weak-side wing. And he’s hurt us even on the strong-side corner — which that one, to me, is hard to defend. If we’re not going to be there covering that one, that short zip pass is going to be a shot.
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