Death to Efficiency, or Against James Harden

James Harden is currently enjoying the best season of his career, which means at least one person is getting something out of it. He leads the NBA in scoring, is at the helm of a contender, and-in this year of banged-up Durant and fogged-over LeBron-has a spot on the short list of MVP candidates. Old- and new-school statistics cast him in favorable light; he is assisting and rebounding at career-high rates and is neck-and-neck with Anthony Davis for the league lead in win shares. Despite missing Dwight Howard for substantial chunks of time, Harden's Houston Rockets sit comfortably in the middle of the playoff pack in the impossibly tough Western Conference.

The recent success of player and team alike is unwelcome news in some sectors of basketball fandom. It comes as no surprise that a healthy portion of Harden's points have come at the free-throw line, where he has taken the most attempts--316, over 36 games--of any player in the league. Harden has become as synonymous with and synchronized to the referee's whistle as any player in the game.

That talent for drawing noticeable, or at least apparent, contact has long stuck in the craw of both fans of the Rockets' opponents and anyone who looks to basketball for an escape from, not accentuation of, life's workaday inauthenticities, calculations, and tedium.

The ranks of Harden's detractors are thinning, though, as he continues to succeed at doing what he does. We have to thank for this the hoophead's perpetual optimism as well as the Sports Opinion Complex's habit of letting success turn even the most deserving heel into a misunderstood hero. It takes a hard soul to keep ragging on one of the game's best players, and so Harden's cynicism is painted as craftiness, and his Rockets--with antique-abacus-collector Daryl Morey at the helm--are the thinking fan's team, all drives and spot-ups and trips to the charity stripe. For fans that have been taught that efficiency is not just a virtue, but the virtue, the Rockets--who don't really have that many other virtues going for them--are what it's all about. Learn to love them; they are the future.

Well, bullshit. Harden is a bore, a company man, a peddler of the league's dullest ideology. Only a sucker or a Houstonian could love him. The Rockets stand for no advance but that of ennui past art, and James Harden is their chief agent. Yes, of course we are looking for something different from our basketball experience than Harden is from his. We are there to have fun, and Harden is there to win. Increasingly, for better or worse or both, Harden gets what he wants, and the rest of us just don't. It's hard to see what we're supposed to like about this.

As mentioned above, Harden has taken the most free-throws in the NBA this season. He led the league in the category two years ago also, ending up with 792 attempts; last year, only Kevin Durant and Blake Griffin took more. A key difference between Harden and his neighbors on the list, though, is how integral foul-drawing is to everything Harden does, and the player he's become.

While every great scorer understands the value of getting to the line, it behooves someone like Durant, for example, to act as if he would rather not get fouled, as if his defender simply and unavoidably interrupted play without Durant having anything to do with it; this maintains his credibility with officials, to say nothing of his fraternal standing. Harden is doing something different. He wants defenders worrying about his whistle-eliciting gyrations, wants them objecting and complaining, because, come the fourth quarter, Harden will dribble around a screen and see nothing but open lane in front of him, the nominal rim-protector having backed ass-first into the stanchion, his palms already lifted in appeal.

Notorious as he is, Harden does not always flop, exactly, and when he does, he does so subtly enough that he has received only one fine since the NBA's anti-flopping system went into place before the 2012-13 season. His tactics are more nefarious.

The flop tends to be an act of desperate improvisation, an attempt to wring points from a barren possession. Floppers pilfer points here and there, a couple at a time. Harden's approach is systematic. He tailors his drives not to end at the rim but to intersect with some poor rotating sap mid-stride, and at the point of collision lets go of something that only the most cloudy-headed academic could call a shot attempt. He halts without warning, and recovering guards slam into his back. His Eurostep throws a helping big into existential crisis: stay planted, and Harden will get to the rim; lift a foot even an inch, and he'll barrel into your chest, dust himself off, and recite a string of prepared arguments about the finer points of defensive position.

These are all fouls, according to the rules of NBA basketball, but that hardly makes them just. Harden's is a game designed to profit from institutional imperfection, to play the reality of habit and custom against the precision of law. A flopper is a crook; Harden is a politician.

He did not always play this way. During his early years in Oklahoma City, Harden was a delight to watch. There were the 60-foot, no-look chest passes from one wing to the opposite corner, where Durant materialized after hanging his defender up on a flare screen, and there was the tricky two-man game he ran with Nick Collison. There was the sense, when Harden joined Durant and Russell Westbrook in fourth quarters, that the Thunder were getting simultaneously more explosive and more stable. He had some penchant for drawing fouls even then--the arms-out posture during drives tempting defenders into ill-advised swipes at the ball--but it was a secondary characteristic, and a charming one at that. Harden brought a dash of guile and mystery to a team mostly based around its headliners' high-wattage brilliance.

Then, for reasons avoidable and not--Clay Bennett's cheapness, the natural NBA hierarchy, the universe's insistence on not just leaving this one fucking cool thing alone for once--Harden went to Houston, where he has planted himself at the top of the key, run pick-and-rolls, dished off to Morey's stable of three-point shooters, and fallen down in the lane perpetually. Harden now plays a type of basketball in which the basket is less objective than theoretical limit, its abstract worth making possible a whole anti-ballet of knocked shoulders, tripped feet, and flailed arms. He is an avatar of corporate progress: good for the Rockets and bad for the world.

Let's spare ourselves the self-deluding arguments that Harden and the Rockets stand for better, smarter basketball. Don't place them opposite Byron Scott's luridly toxic long-two Lakers and ask, Which would you rather watch? as if the future of basketball has room only for either litigious scheming or incandescent stupidity. Rid yourself of the belief that effective and admirable mean the same thing.

Do not be a sucker. Do not love James Harden, because he does not love you back. He makes your games longer and your highlights scarcer, he turns a sport into a chore, and he'd knock your grandma out of a crosswalk if he thought it would get him to the line. Know your enemy.