NEW YORK CITY - “I don’t think there’s a player that’s had to create as much as I’ve had to in these last three years,” James Harden says to Devin Gordon for GQ’s May issue. “I don’t know if there’s a guy in NBA history.”
Houston Rockets star James Harden is ready for his MVP award. The point guard believes he’s been unjustly passed over twice - once to Steph Curry, and once to Russell Westbrook - and now it’s his time.
He knows he has the skills. He says he’s the best in the league at stopping.
“That’s why it’s so hard to guard me - because I’m able to get you off-balance, use my body, then stop on a dime and still get my shot. That’s tough, you know?”
It’s that talent that led to one of the best moments of the 2017-18 NBA season, and possibly the buzziest of Harden’s career: when he crossed over and stepped back, reducing an unsuspecting Wesley Johnson to a heap on the floor. In dramatic fashion, Harden then paused, licked his lips, and easily made his shot.
The reaction went far and wide. LeBron James called it a move you dream of having.
Harden reflects on his basketball career thus far; he still laments the loss of the fiery trio he was part of in Oklahoma City with Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, that was broken up upon his trade to Houston.
“It was the perfect puzzle,” he says. “How do you give that up? How do you let that go?”
Harden acknowledges a few ill-fated seasons when he first joined the Rockets.
“Nothing went well. Like, nothing.”
But all of that led to this moment, entering the playoffs as the number one seed in the best.
“Our goal is to be the West,” he says of his team. “Not the best who’s out right now, but the best.” And for anyone who thinks this isn’t his year, that something can still go wrong, he says: “too late.”
The May issue of GQ is on stands April 17.
