James Harden shines in Sixers’ 1-point victory over Celtics

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Yaron Weitzman

FOX Sports NBA Writer

For years, James Harden’s coaches have been urging him to let more jumpers fly off the catch. That’s never really been Harden’s style. You know how he likes to play. Hold the ball for a bit, dance with it at the top of the key, put it back-and-forth between the legs.

Yet as he found himself surrounded by more talent in his later years — when Chris Paul joined him in Houston, when he joined Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving in Brooklyn — it was made clear to him how much it would benefit the team overall if he evolved just a bit into more of an off-ball weapon. He’s always been a knockdown 3-point shooter. Why not take advantage of the easy looks — and make defenses pay for shading toward other players?

This year, he launched just 1.8 per game, according to Second Spectrum. Last season? 1.2. The year before in Brooklyn? A miniscule 0.9.

Which is why it was fitting — and perfectly symbolic considering how unlikely Harden’s performance was — that the game-winning shot, the jumper that not only gave the Sixers a 116-115 series-tying Game 4 win Sunday evening, but also saved the Sixers’ season and, quite possibly, the entire “Joel Embiid, Doc Rivers, Daryl Morey, James Harden”-led blueprint, came via a catch and shoot.

The shot capped off a magnificent Harden performance. Forty-two points on 16-23 (!) shooting. Six-for-nine (!) from deep. Nine assists. Eight rebounds. He even added in four steals and one block.

It’s an incredible stat line, and even more incredibly, it doesn’t do his performance justice. It’s not just that he racked up 13 points, four rebounds, three steals and two assists in the fourth quarter and overtime, while Joel Embiid, looking gassed, struggled down the stretch. As Embiid told reporters after the game, “I was terrible tonight.”

It was that Harden was everywhere, it’s that he was able to come up with big plays whenever the Sixers needed, especially after they watched their one-time 16-point lead evaporate. One time it’d be a step-back three. Another a running floater off a downhill drive. He even dipped into his mid-range game a bit, draining jumpers from 15 feet away.

One week after carrying the Sixers to a Game 1 with what most agreed was the best playoff performance of his life, Harden, somehow, topped that in Game 4. And he did so after looking cooked in Games 2 and 3. Who knows what happens the rest of the way. It’s now a best-of-three series, and the Celtics look like the better team. And yet, at this point, it appears that betting against James Harden would be a mistake. Did you ever think you’d hear that this postseason?

Yaron Weitzman is an NBA writer for FOX Sports. He is the author of “Tanking to the Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process in the History of Professional Sports.” Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

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