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 half-court 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.

“I just tried to get it there however I could,” Harden said when asked about the pass after the Sixers’ first-round playoff victory last spring. “He was running so fast, and when you have the opportunity to capitalize on the transition … we’ve got to take advantage of them.”

Since that slick dish more than a year ago, Harden has only built on that aspect of his immense offensive skill set with the Sixers. He led the NBA in assists this season (10.7 per game), the second time in his career he has accomplished that feat. He became the first player in Sixers franchise history to record multiple 20-assist games in a season, setting a new career-high with 21 in a December win over the Los Angeles Clippers. He passed Tiny Archibald and Bob Cousy, among others, on the NBA’s all-time assist list this season. He joined Russell Westbrook as the only players in NBA history to lead the league in scoring and in assists multiple times.

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Some view this as a dramatic transformation for the former NBA Most Valuable Player, following years as a ball-dominant scorer during his prime with the Houston Rockets. Those who have long been part of his basketball journey, however, remind that elite playmaking has always been central to Harden’s game, even as he blossomed into a college All-American, an NBA Sixth Man of the Year, and a perennial All-Star and future Hall of Famer.

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Yet Harden has evolved to apply this ability to the Sixers’ roster. He is now playing alongside a dominant big man in MVP front-runner Joel Embiid, along with a rising star in Maxey and a collection of outside shooters who are familiar (P.J. Tucker) and new (Tobias Harris and Georges Niang). Facilitating allows Harden, who has recently been hampered by injury and finishing issues, to have a significant imprint despite no longer being relied on to score in eye-popping bunches.

“People were saying, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re not averaging 30 [points],’” Harden said. “It’s not about that. I’m impacting games in so many different ways that I’m satisfied. [There’s] not a lot of people that can really do that, so it makes me happy.”

Harden demonstrated he can still bring the scoring punch when his team needs it, tying a career playoff high with 45 points in Monday’s stunning Game 1 victory at the Boston Celtics without Embiid. But in order to advance to the conference finals for the first time since 2001, the Sixers will need Harden to be, as coach Doc Rivers has coined, “a scoring Magic Johnson.”

“I knew he was a great passer,” Rivers said, “but he’s a better passer than I even thought.”

Harden’s playmaking originates from his mind and body; what he used to be, what he has always been, and what he has become.

He boasts the 6-foot-5 frame — and a lefty handle — to get downhill with a defender on his hip, then to see over the rest of the bodies on the floor if he needs to kick the ball out to the perimeter or dump off (or up) to a big man. Years of repetition means he has “literally seen every coverage ... thousands and thousands of times” that an opponent can devise, creating an enviable feel to recognize how a play is unfolding a tick faster than his counterparts. That makes it seem like Harden has a “sixth sense,” as high school coach and longtime confidant Scott Pera described, to find an open teammate before anybody else can react — even while playing at a dribble-heavy pace that outsiders might aesthetically describe as plodding.

“Each situation that I was in ... it’s created James Harden and who I am as a basketball player,” Harden said. “From being off the basketball to getting double-teamed to having to score the basketball at a high clip to having to be a playmaker, that all translates to who I am.

“Just seeing the floor different, it’s kind of hard to explain to somebody who hasn’t been in those positions.”

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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 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.”

But Harden was a quick study, picking up and applying concepts in 10 seconds that “some kids, it takes 10 minutes, 10 days, 10 weeks or 10 months,” Pera said. Swatting Harden with padding taught him how to finish through contact, and also brought opportunity to discuss passes to open teammates after luring an extra defender.

“[We talked about], ‘Where is that guy? Here are your options,’” Pera recalled in a phone conversation with The Inquirer last week. “And he was just, like, boom, boom, boom, boom. He could go through his progressions.”

Dedrique Taylor, then an assistant at Arizona State, described Harden’s high school and AAU games as “watching poetry in motion … to literally deliver the ball where his teammates needed to [be] effective and be functional.” When he arrived at the university as a ballyhooed McDonald’s All-American, Harden returned to his defer-first ways during early workouts. That caused Sun Devils head coach Herb Sendek and Pera (who had been hired as an assistant) to ask each other, “What’s wrong? What’s he doing? What’s going on?”

“At 18, he was smarter than me,” said Pera, the former Penn assistant 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.

“It was a brilliant plan, so that when he did take over games, nobody would ever complain.”

Taylor, now the head coach at Cal State Fullerton, compared Harden’s court vision to a quarterback who can recognize a defensive scheme — and manipulate it — before the snap. Harden used those mismatches to find his all-conference big man, Jeff Ayres (formerly known as Pendergraph), and an array of outside shooters while also leading the Pac-10 in scoring (20.1 points per game). He averaged 4.2 assists per game even while playing alongside a traditional point guard in 2008-09, and ranked eighth in a conference that also included future NBA point guards Jrue Holiday and Darren Collison.

“He can get the ball into spaces that not many people can,” said former teammate Antwi Atuahene “… Around-the-back passes. Skip passes. He had the whole package.”

Added Taylor: “It’s not something that you can coach. It’s something that you can talk about. It’s something that you can rehearse in terms of, ‘Hey, this is what they’re going to look like. This is what they’re going to do.’ [But] you literally just wind him up and let him go.”

Harden’s desire to “think the game,” former Oklahoma City Thunder coach Scott Brooks told The Inquirer, was also immediately evident after he was selected third overall in the 2009 NBA draft.

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.

“It’s crazy that he was 19 years old,” said Brooks, who is now an assistant with the Portland Trail Blazers. “But he thought like a 27-year-old. … James wanted more. He always wanted more.”

That made Harden a “driving force,” the coach said, of a dynamic young team also anchored by Kevin Durant and Westbrook that would eventually reach the 2012 NBA Finals. Harden created a dangerous off-the-bench combination with big man Nick Collison, then gave the Thunder an additional distributor in their fourth-quarter lineups. Brooks also called Harden a “connector” with his teammates off the floor.

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During offseasons, Harden gained additional experience against NBA defenders by playing in Drew League pro-am matchups and pickup games at UCLA. He also started working with Irv Roland, who trained NBA players privately while moving his way up on league staffs. While many players started their sessions with dribbling drills, Roland said, Harden would focus on sharpening passes, such as slings from each hand to the opposite corner or one-handed lobs.

“That’s something that I’ve done with him more than I’ve been able to do with some of my other players,” said Roland, who became a player development coach during Harden’s time in Houston and is now an assistant coach with the Utah Jazz, “just because they don’t have the size and the ability to see over defenses and make those passes.”

That all prepared Harden for his sharp ascension in Houston, where coach Mike D’Antoni put the ball in his hands at the top of the key and let him cook.

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 scoring 29.6 points per game in parts of nine seasons with the Rockets, he also averaged 7.7 assists — leading the NBA with a career-high 11.2 per game during the 2016-17 season.

“Knowing whether the lob’s open, the guy coming to the rim’s open, the weak corner’s open,” Tucker said of playing alongside Harden. “Just making those checkdowns like a quarterback. That’s how I explain it: He’s like a quarterback.”

Niang, who lost to the Rockets in back-to-back playoffs when he was with the Utah Jazz, witnessed the way Harden exploited defenses firsthand. When Harden dribbles between his legs, for instance, Niang pointed out that Harden is watching for when his defender’s foot drops — or for when the opposing big man shifts sides in the lane or drifts away from the basket.

“He’s going to drive the ball and make you make a decision,” Niang said. “Those are the little things that people who aren’t really into basketball don’t notice. They’re like, ‘Oh, he’s just wasting dribbles,’ but he’s just timing you up to use your strengths against you.

“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 [butt].’ But when he’s doing that for you, it’s such a blessing.”

Harden’s 80 games with the Brooklyn Nets provided a glimpse at how he could facilitate alongside fellow one-on-one superstars in Durant and Kyrie Irving. He averaged 10.9 assists with the Nets in 2020-21 — generating some late MVP rumbles despite his messy exit from the Rockets — and 10.2 at the start of last season, even with Irving out the bulk of that time because he refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

But Harden’s blockbuster trade to Philly last February gave the Sixers the lead guard they needed, after Ben Simmons held out and Maxey, then a first-year starter, was thrust into that offense-initiator spot.

Though the Sixers ran only three or four sets in games when Harden first arrived, he immediately peppered coaches and teammates with questions and experimented with what Maxey called “extremely creative” passes during practices and shootarounds. The three-point shooting numbers for Maxey (48%) and Harris (40%) skyrocketed following last season’s All-Star break, because A) Harden recognized them as open when others earlier in the season did not, and B) they could let the ball fly faster off a pinpoint Harden pass. Though not yet completely seamless according to the eye test, the pick-and-roll combo with Embiid instantly became the NBA’s most statistically effective.

By the time the Sixers faced the Raptors in the playoffs’ first round, then-Toronto coach Nick Nurse described a metaphorical chessboard on which Harden “certainly sees all the pieces out there.”

“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 weakside 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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A full training camp and season with the Sixers further cultivated that chemistry and awareness between Harden and his teammates. Rivers — a former point guard who also coached masterfully intelligent distributors Chris Paul and Rajon Rondo — marvels at Harden’s vision and “dazzle” that he never had during his playing career, identifying moments in games when he “can’t wait to watch the film to see how he saw that before everybody else.” But the coach also takes pride in Harden’s 3.4 turnovers per game this season, his lowest mark in that category since his final season in Oklahoma City in 2011-12.

“You can run a lot of stuff that other teams just couldn’t run,” Rivers said, “because no one could deliver the pass.”

Maxey can rattle off where Harden now gets the ball to specific teammates, such as when a defender gifts Maxey a sliver of free space by taking one step to help at the top of the key. Harris is often a recipient of Harden’s full-court, kick-ahead launches after a rebound at the opposite end, a connection that is subtly communicated. Reserve big man Paul Reed has been a prime example of earning Harden’s trust this season, using screening angles to put Harden in his desired driving direction, rolling hard, and being ready to receive the ball.

“With James, you’ve just got to be prepared whenever,” Reed said. “You might not think you’re open. But he might think you’re open, and he might throw the ball to you and you’ve just got to catch it.

“I feel like, for me, it’s just about being prepared at all times when I’m in the pick-and-roll with James Harden.”

Sharpening the partnership with Embiid — who continues to expand his own multifaceted offensive game by playing more at the elbow and nail this season — has been particularly critical. Harden has needed to identify where Embiid likes to receive pockets passes, and when he will pop for a jumper or roll for an inside finish following a screen. Rivers added that Harden’s advice has also helped Embiid counter defensive traps, which has elevated his own assist numbers and shooting efficiency.

The result: Embiid and Harden became the first teammates to lead the NBA in scoring and assists, respectively, since the San Antonio Spurs’ George Gervin and Johnny Moore in 1981-82. The Sixers’ offense as a whole, meanwhile, ranked third in efficiency during the regular season, with 117 points per 100 possessions.

That is why “sacrifice” has been Harden’s personal motto during a season in which he chases his first NBA title. He totaled five of his 11 assists as his team pulled away in the fourth quarter of the Sixers’ Game 4 win against the Brooklyn Nets without Embiid, which finished off their first-round sweep. As Tucker set a corner screen on a Harden drive early in the period, he turned and fired a midair dish to De’Anthony Melton for a three-pointer. Later, Harden dropped two nifty bounce passes to Reed for layups. And with about a minute to play, Harden zipped the ball from the left wing to Melton for a jumper from the free-throw line.

Following that win, Harden spoke like a man content with no longer being “the old James Harden.” He got to tap back into that score-first mode in Monday’s improbable victory in Boston. But this more aggressive turn with the Sixers still means “generating really good shots for our team ... [by] reading the game of basketball, playing on my basketball instincts.”

Because that playmaking version has always been at the heart of Harden’s game.

“There’s always going to be something to say,” Harden said. “So I think about my role and what I can control and impact on this team the best that I can every single night. ‘Sacrifice’ is my word that I’m going to continue to use for this year, and see where it gets me.”

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