West » Star-caliber guard comfortable in supporting role.
Every profile starts with the beard, and why not? It is striking â€" dense and complex and lush with possibility. It has inspired a movement, a song and a cake. It is a shaggy portal into James Harden’s soul.
Harden, a 22-year-old guard for the Oklahoma City Thunder, is delightfully unconventional: a shooter who loves to pass, a standout who prefers to blend in, a budding star whose skills are overshadowed by his furry shadow.
The beard does not define Harden, but it provides a fitting frame for his portrait.
"He’s not afraid of cutting against the grain, whether it’s a bow tie on draft night or a rather elongated beard," Sam Presti, the Thunder’s general manager, said, adding, "and having some independent thought, which I think is obviously part of the creative process."
That bold creativity will be among the Thunder’s greatest assets when they meet the San Antonio Spurs in the Western Conference finals, which begin Sunday.
The Spurs have the wisdom, the championship rings and the home-court advantage in the series. The Thunder have two of the NBA’s most electrifying young superstars, Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, and Harden, whose stardom is limited only by his surroundings and his selflessness.
Harden has embraced and maximized the sixth man role for the Thunder, averaging a robust 16.8 points while taking just 10 shots a game this season. He is ruthlessly efficient (49.1 percent shooting), a deft playmaker (3.7 assists a game) and a perfectly low-maintenance counterpoint to his flashier teammates.
Yet the box scores and the modest role obscure Harden’s true worth. On a per-36-minute basis, he would average 19.3 points, 4.7 rebounds and 4.2 assists â€" All-Star numbers. If he shot as often as, say, Dwyane Wade, Harden would average 28 points a game.
"You can make the argument that as soon as Wade and Kobe move on in a few years, Harden’s probably the best 2 guard in the league," said the TNT analyst Steve Kerr, a former shooting guard himself.
In his second-unit role, Harden also serves as the de facto point guard and, in Kerr’s view, is "really their best passer, by far."
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He added, "That’s why he’s such a nice complement to Westbrook and Durant."
The Thunder open games with Thabo Sefolosha, a defensive specialist, at shooting guard. But they nearly always close games with Harden on the court. In the conference semifinals, that meant Harden was often the one checking the Los Angeles Lakers’ Kobe Bryant and flustering him into low-percentage shots.
At 6 feet 5 inches and 225 pounds, Harden is solid, strong and deceptively athletic. He is talented enough to build a team around but humble enough to play a role that is typically reserved for older veterans. At 22, Harden was the second-youngest player to win Sixth Man of the Year â€" an award that, by definition, honors players who thrive in a supporting role.
These are the qualities that most endeared Harden to his teammates in high school and college, and the ones that most impressed Thunder officials when they drafted him out of Arizona State with the third pick in 2009.
"James really wanted to be a part of something," Presti said, and the idea of joining a young, promising foundation with Durant and Westbrook "was really more appealing to him than being a focal-point player."
"We loved that mentality," Presti said. "We thought it was a really mature outlook on the game."
Of course, the Thunder also loved Harden’s smooth jump shot, a skill that was born of necessity during his days at Artesia High School, in the Los Angeles suburb of Lakewood.
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