James Harden The Story behind the Beard

James Harden has become a master in isolation by adding new twists to some of basketball’s best moves. Here’s how he turned one of Stephen Curry’s tricks on its side to create one of his signature moves.Being a great scorer in the NBA has always been about creating space. From Mikan’s drop step to Kareem’s sky hook to MJ’s fadeaway to Hakeem’s Dream Shake, if a player has wanted to get a shot off, he has needed room to let it fly. Those moves once created great position to score around the basket and in the midrange, but as the game has expanded outward, the need for moves to create looks from behind the 3-point line and at the rim has increased. As a result, the NBA’s go-to maneuvers now look more like something you’d seen on a playground, or a game featuring James Harden. One player dribbling the air out of the ball as they size up their defender may not be the brand of hoops that James Naismith had in mind, but they have set up Harden’s groundbreaking game. Through an array of jab steps and herky-jerky fakes, Harden has unleashed a mix of hyperefficiency and prolificness unlike anything the NBA has seen before. The reigning MVP is so effective that some of his go-to shots would be considered “bad” in the hands of most players. RELATED The 3-Point Boom Is Far From Over Steph Curry on the Evolution of Steph Curry To catch up to Stephen Curry’s wizardry, Harden and the Houston Rockets have taken off-the-dribble 3-pointers to another level. The Rockets have built their offense around pull-up jumpers, with Harden leading the charge; the reigning MVP has taken 740 pull-up 3-point attempts this season, nearly twice as many as the next player. Of the 27 players who have taken at least 150 pull-up 3-pointers, Harden ranks sixth in percentage at 36.4. He scores 1.09 points per possession on those looks, nearly the same as he scores in the restricted area. Harden’s stepback 3-pointer is the shot in his vast offensive arsenal that gets the most attention—even from fellow superstars—but another move has quietly also been creating open off-the-dribble 3s for him and players all over the league: the side step. What’s a side step? It’s a quick separation move wherein the ball handler lunges to their right or left before lifting for a shot. Like the stepback, the side step freezes defenders by quickly faking a drive. But rather than taking a hard dribble and pushing off their lead foot to go backward, the offensive player presses off their outside foot and jolts laterally. It’s simple and effective, and it maximizes the 3-ball. “It’s amazing to me that you have the best athletes in the world on him and then he, in one or two moves, can create enough space to get a wide-open 3,” Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni said at a practice earlier this season. “People just don’t do that. It’s almost impossible. … Everything is kind of in slow motion to him.” Players like Harden and Curry have stretched the definition of what is possible beyond the arc, and each has done so using his singular abilities to get his shot off. Curry’s deft handle and fluid motion allows him to dribble into shots more easily than anyone; Harden, meanwhile, built on what’s worked for so long in the NBA to create something new. This is the story of how Harden got there, and why the league is following suit. The origin of the side step can be traced back to the “zero step,” in which the pivot step after a player has discontinued their dribble isn’t counted as one of the two steps allotted before a stop, pass, or shot. According to Ronnie Nunn, a former NBA referee of 19 years and the league’s director of officials from 2003 to 2008, the zero step came about in the 1960s, and creativity bloomed from there. “Now comes the one-two in any direction you want to go,” Nunn said in a phone interview. “Kind of like a Gale Sayers being able to go right and left. Like a crossover but without a dribble.” With the zero step, players could take two steps in any direction they wanted. Mostly, it was forward or backward. The latter gave birth to the stepback, which is when a player springs away to avoid a defender’s reach. “Everybody been using side-step, stepback moves,” Kevin Durant told me before a game. “I remember Kobe using them, T-Mac using them. We’re all students. I don’t think anybody in 2019 is creating anything in basketball. They’re just making everything their own. They’re just adding their own flavor and style to it.” But it’s not all ballet. A more brutish relative of the stepback is the bump-off. That’s when a player springs off direct contact with a defender into a shot. The goal is to create more separation by sending the defender’s momentum forward while the offensive player leans back or to the side.