James Harden Isn't Playing Around

James Harden knew what he was getting into, back in 2016, when he signed with Trolli, arch-nemesis of candymaker Haribo, the dominant player for decades in the Gummi space. He approached Trolli, and together they were taking a shot at the king—Haribo, the Golden State Warriors of the Gummi world. Harden will make $28 million from the Houston Rockets this season, plus $15 million more from Adidas, but it is clear which of his benefactors has his true heart. Teams and shoe contracts come and go—Harden is already on his second of each—but candy is forever.

"It's a match made in heaven," he says.

What unites Harden and Trolli is a kinship of temperament, also known as a "brand identity," which, Harden tells me, boils down to one word: "weird." So far their partnership has yielded sour Gummis shaped like Harden's line of Adidas sneakers; a set of MVB (Most Valuable Beard) trading cards, including one that depicts Harden surfing through space on the back of his bulldog, Zeus; and one of the most surreal series of ads ever filmed by a pro athlete. In one spot, a bunch of Harden-head nesting dolls pop open, including one that has laser beams shooting from its eyes.

Harden says his creative process with Trolli is: Trolli comes up with some bonkers idea "and they bring it to me, and then they're like, 'Oh, I don't think he would do that—it's just too crazy.' And I'm like, 'Yeah, I'll do it.' " It's not so much that he likes to zig when everyone else zags, or that every day is opposite day for James Harden. It's more like a genetic urge to subvert expectations. He's constantly staring at the Matrix, trying to figure how to be the glitch.

Which is all well and good, but, in candymaking as in basketball, is weirdness really a recipe for knocking off a juggernaut?

Harden ponders the question. He might be pondering the question. Sometimes it can be hard to tell. With his half-mast eyes and that garden-gnome beard, the MVP favorite has the constant appearance of a man who just emerged from a deep hibernation, like Rip Van Winkle with a savage crossover. He has resting rest face.

From the moment he walked into this hotel café, he's looked like the least stressed man for miles, and we're in New Orleans on the night before Saint Patrick's Day. No one in this city is stressed. He's dressed head to toe in a heather gray Adidas sweat suit, looking so slick and so cozy it's as if he's wearing fashion pajamas. And now he's sort of reclining to one side, his right foot up on the plush red lounge chair across from him, like he's chilling on the rocks in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, waiting for God to touch his fingertip.

So it could be that Harden has already forgotten my question. Or he might be "locked in"—that's Harden's slogan for the season; he celebrates nearly every Rockets win on Instagram with a padlock emoji—and he's carefully considering his reply. Who knows. Finally, he answers.

"It's not gonna happen overnight," he begins, his voice low and flat. "The more you work, the more you figure out how to be great. Just keep adjusting, keep adapting." I had been asking about Trolli vs. Haribo, but it's as if he clicked on his Warriors sound file instead. The key is knowing who you are—believing not only that you can find the giant's weakness but also that you are the giant. "Our goal is to be the best. Not the best who's out right now, but the best. You know, longevity."

Harden has never shied away from taking on giants—the Heatles in 2012, Golden State's Death Lineup in 2016, Haribo—but so far at least, he's had less success taking them down. There are signs this year could be different, though. The arrival of Chris Paul has given Harden all the breathers he didn't get in the past five years, and it turns out that Paul's sneaky, silky game is a natural complement to Harden's own sneaking and silking. All dynasties end eventually, and when they do, it has a way of seeming obvious in retrospect. Several Warriors have been nicked by injuries this year, including Steph Curry; maybe we'll look back in July and realize they were ripe for an upset.

If Harden makes it back to the Finals, it will be his only trip since 2012. "Ever since then, I've been tryna get back, get back, get back," he says. "Came close, but just didn't have enough talent. Until now. Different story."

So yes, he finally has help. But the real leap has come from Harden himself. He turned in an MVP-caliber season last year, and this year he's been much better. This is the year James Harden went from consistent All Star to surefire Hall of Famer.

And yet. Despite the Rockets being 🔒'd in every night, the Warriors have kept pace without breaking a sweat. Paul is almost 33 and somewhat mortal, not quite the point god he used to be. Meanwhile Golden State still has the same core roster that just ten months ago ethered LeBron James and Kyrie Irving in five games. This is still maybe the best team in NBA history.

"I mean, shit," Harden says, "they're fucking great." He sounds unimpressed.

No superstar better embodies all the pleasures of the modern NBA—its wit, its social-media hyper-fluency, the way its players delight at and participate in the night-to-night subplots across the league—than James Harden. If LeBron James is the Jay-Z of the NBA (untouchable, an empire builder) then Harden is the Migos. The guy just seems like he's always having a good time and riding his own wave. He doesn't bark at reporters who ask dumb questions; he just hits them with an immaculate side-eye, then slides off-camera and into the GIF hall of fame. He's not so much a trash-talker as a trash poet. For the entire first quarter of a game last season in Philadelphia, Sixers fan and miniature-teacup troll Kevin Hart lit into Harden from courtside, with that shrieking rabbit voice of his; Harden scored 51 points that night, and as the clock ran out, he leered at Hart, before shouting, "Tell your team what you did to them!"

This is also the age of the unicorn in the NBA. Seven-foot, condor-armed sui generis freaks hatched in genome labs all over the world keep landing in America on draft night, with names that terrify Trump voters, like Giannis Antetokounmpo and Kristaps Porzingis. But Harden is nothing like those guys. He's more like a human record scratch. He's six feet five, thick as a tree trunk, and fucking maddening to chase around. Send a unicorn to cover James Harden and he'll just dribble around its legs and float teardrop jumpers over its pointy horn.

Harden isn't that tall, he doesn't jump very high, and he isn't crazy fast. But there is one very particular, newly quantifiable skill at which he is the best in the NBA: deceleration. P3, an athletic-performance firm based in Santa Barbara, California, actually studied this, and that was its conclusion. At a moment when everyone in the league is trying to go faster, Harden is the best at slowing down. "No—stopping," he clarifies. "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?"

Harden's neatest trick is the way he plunges into the chaos of an NBA defense, then pauses for a split second—nine massive humans whipping around him at warp speed, like Frodo when he slips on the One Ring—and surveys his options, using Newton's first law and the ongoing rotation of the earth to get an entire defense leaning the wrong way, just long enough for him to do whatever he wants: Get off his shot, thread a pass through a tiny crack, or reverse direction entirely.

"It's just God-given, you know? I can't sit here and tell you, 'I worked on that.' " Harden keeps glancing over my shoulder into the hotel's main hall, where tourists in green shirts and green-bead necklaces meander in search of hurricanes. "You have to be in that moment and have this brain to know how to figure it out."

"His IQ is just off the charts," says Rockets head coach Mike D'Antoni. A couple of seasons ago, Harden got so proficient at drawing fouls as he rose to launch three-pointers—what Harden describes as "trying to create an advantage," and what opposing fans and rival players describe as "bullshit calls"—that the league changed the rules to permit such incidental (or in Harden's case, super intentional) contact. D'Antoni just sees this as evidence of his genius.

"Anytime they try to change the rules, or put new rules in, for one person," he says, "it means you're pretty well ahead of the game."

Harden was always basketball-obsessed, but as a kid growing up in Compton, he was also paunchy and asthmatic and, as we know, candy-obsessed. He loved Trolli before he even knew what it meant to love. His high school coach used to bribe him with fast food if he got to the free-throw line at least six times in a game. When I ask Harden to picture his childhood—his home, his neighborhood—his mother is the only happy image that comes into his mind. Compton was "rough, dirty," he says. "Just wasn't the safest place, you know? Gangs and distractions. A lot of people that weren't trying to be successful." There's a "Junior" on Harden's birth certificate that he has never used; James Sr. was reportedly either in jail or out of the picture.

By his senior year, Harden was being recruited by every major program in the Pac-10, including national powers like UCLA and Arizona. Instead he chose Arizona State, a middling program in unlovely Tempe. It turned out to be a shrewd choice: Rather than share the spotlight at UCLA with Russell Westbrook and Kevin Love, he led the Sun Devils to the NCAA tournament as a sophomore and was voted the Pac-10 player of the year in 2009.

That summer, Harden went third in the draft to Oklahoma City, joining Westbrook and Kevin Durant to complete the most beloved nucleus of young NBA talent since Shaq and Penny. But like Shaq and Penny in Orlando, the Thunder came up short in their one trip to the Finals and got too expensive before they could get back there. In 2012, Oklahoma City shocked the league by trading Harden to Houston, at once ending the Thunder trio and immortalizing it. By this summer, all three should have MVP awards; two of them wouldn't if the Thunder had stayed together. And yet Harden says he still thinks about that team every day. "It was the perfect puzzle," he tells me, reliving the end for the thousandth time. "How do you give that up? How do you let that go?"

In his first game for the Rockets, Harden scored 37 points, and he woke up the next morning a star. He was 23, rich, and famous. Over the next two seasons, he became a familiar sight at various nightclubs (slash strip clubs) in various major cities, he started dating a Kardashian (Khloé), and he showed up for training camp in 2015 paunchier than usual. He got off to an awful start, and the front office's ill-fated experiment with Dwight Howard, the league's largest adult son, finally came to its predictable end. Head coach Kevin McHale was fired just 11 games into the year. Things got so bad that Rockets fans started blaming the collapse on Kardashian.

"Nothing went well. Like, nothing. I just knew it was gonna be a disaster," Harden says now about that lost season. "We never got a rhythm, we never got a chemistry. That was the first time I felt like I couldn't control it. And you can tell. I couldn't figure out what was going on. Was it me? I mean, when anything goes bad or is not looking good, I go, 'Okay, what the hell am I doing wrong?' And then I figure out how to get myself straight."

Step one: Put your trust in Mike D'Antoni, a certifiable offensive genius, even when he says you should switch positions, from shooting guard to point guard. Step two: Grow up, chill out, spend more time with Mom.

Harden takes evident pride that his career has enabled his mother, Monja Willis, to have an NBA life of her own. Willis is one of a bumper crop of delightful NBA moms, led by Draymond Green's mom, Mary Babers-Green, and Kevin Durant's "real MVP," Wanda. They are funny, salty, ferociously protective of their sons, and living their best lives on Instagram. "My mom—she hangs out with, like, moms of other players that I don't even talk to," Harden says, amused.

How does that happen?

"There are mom meetings, things like that."

You're joking, right?

"No, I'm serious. Mom meetings. That makes me happy, 'cause they get to talk about their sons behind our backs. She deserves that."

Harden is almost 30. He has figured out what he was doing wrong, and he has gotten himself straight. He talks about adult stuff now, like the perils of such a prodigious beard for his bachelor life. "I get food in this shit all the time," he says. "Like, all the time. If it's people that I don't know, I won't eat around 'em. When I'm, like, going on blind dates, I'll wait till I get around people I actually am comfortable around, because then they'll tell me I have stuff in my beard. It kinda comes with it. If you wanna look as good as I do."

I actually don't process this confession about his beard until much later, because I'm so thrown by the thought of James Harden going on a blind date.

Wait, you just said "going on blind dates." You don't really go on blind dates, do you? It'd only be blind for you—everybody knows what you look like.

"You know what I mean."

Not really. What kind of dates do you go on?

"I don't know—first, second, third time hangin' out with somebody. Not random. Just a dinner or something."

Even if Harden weren't one of the most recognizable athletes alive, his outfits would give him away. His style has evolved a ton over his eight years in the NBA, but there's been evidence of audacity from the start. In his draft-night photo with then commissioner David Stern, Harden's beard is still in its infancy, nothing close to the Babylonian garden it is today. But his suit sure is something. It's a three-piece in beige, with what appears to be piping on the notch lapels and pocket flaps, plus a striped lavender shirt, a cream pocket square, and a patterned bow tie. He looks like a very friendly steamboat captain.

His choices have always trended toward maximalist, even mad-maximalist on occasion, but now that he's in Houston, and a superstar, the brakes are totally off. As he describes some of the wilder looks from his GQ shoot, he surveys what I've got on—blue dress shirt, bluer tie—and tells me, "You probably wouldn't wear some of the stuff."

You don't think so? What are you saying?

"You seem like the conservative type, a little bit," he says. "Like the glitter shorts, or the scarf—"

Sorry, the glitter shorts? Nobody told me about the glitter shorts.

"Pink glitter shorts." Another grin. "You're judging me already. I can see it in your face." He loves this, loves these reactions, loves being weird. "That's one of those outfits where, you know, it'll go on Instagram and guys will be like, 'What the heck is he wearing?' Most guys wouldn't do that. Most guys don't want that attention."

No one made more grown men look more silly this season than James Harden. In one game, in January, he scored 60 points against a hapless Orlando defense. But his coup de grâce—the signature moment of this NBA season and probably of Harden's career—happened in the first quarter of a game in February against the Los Angeles Clippers, which the Rockets were already winning 28–7.

It begins with Harden dribbling out beyond the three-point arc and being guarded by poor, unsuspecting Wesley Johnson. Harden hits Johnson with one of his cruelest tricks—crossover, then step-back three—and Johnson just crumbles to the floor, like a building being dynamited. For a blink, Harden looks confused, until he spots Johnson's corpse, still in a heap five feet away, and pauses to consider its form for a while. An actual full second passes, Harden just standing there, watching. Then he licks his lips—he licked his lips—and calmly splashes the open three-pointer.

The impact across the league, on Twitter, on Instagram, on TV, in the very air we breathe, was nuclear. LeBron James was asked about it the next day—a play that did not involve him or his team. "It's one of those moves that you sometimes dream about having," said a man who's had every other move you can dream about having. ESPN did a highlight package of the reactions to the play. Harden says he watched it ten times after the game, which means he watched it 40. He actually ran into Johnson a couple of weeks later after a rematch, and he says they discussed their historic bond. According to Harden, "I asked him 'How's everything going?' And he told me he was still thinking about it for the next week and a half."

In New Orleans, I asked if Harden knew he had licked his lips during the play.

"Yeah," he says. "Dinner time." Harden chuckles but his expression hardly changes. "No, I wasn't tryna do that. It was just, I felt like my lips were kinda dry, so at the moment, I licked 'em." He says the only reason he finally shot the ball is that another Clipper, Milos Teodosic, left his man to cover Harden. "If he wouldn't have contested the shot, the ball would probably be sitting in my hand right now."

Every superstar has a signature moment, but it's telling that Harden's occurred in the first quarter of a regular-season game. In the playoffs, by contrast, all of his signature moments have been the wrong kind. Facing elimination against the Clippers in 2015, he was benched and relegated to spectator status as his teammates mounted a miracle comeback without him. Then last spring, after carrying the Rockets all season and facing elimination again, this time versus San Antonio, Harden finally ran out of gas, shooting just 2-for-11 and turning the ball over six times as the Rockets were humiliated by 39 points.

"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," Harden says testily. "I don't know if there's a guy in NBA history." It's the kind of thing a player shouldn't have to say out loud himself, and the fact that Harden can, and does, and won't take any heat for it—even though it's kind of a slap at his teammates, many of whom are still on the team—is a testament to its plain truth. (And in Harden's defense, D'Antoni told me the same thing.)

Still, fairly or not, the last thing we all saw last season—and a few times before that—was Harden breaking down. "I didn't play well," he says. "It is what it is." And for once, "it is what it is" is more than a cliché. It's a verdict. Tough shit. Life is unfair. Harden finishes the thought.

"Be better," he says.

The following night at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans, a squat concrete lump crouched in the shadow of the luminous Superdome, the Rockets have a late-season matchup with Anthony Davis and the Pelicans. This is putatively the last chance for Davis, Harden's only semi-serious challenger for MVP, to make a race of it: head-to-head, the Beard vs. the Brow.

It may come as little surprise that Harden believes he should already have an MVP award. Two, in fact. What is surprising is how many people around the league agree with him. In 2015, when Steph Curry won it, the NBA Players Association gave out its own award for the first time. Only players got to vote, and they chose Harden. I ask him if he can explain such a discrepancy—100 cranky, nay-saying sports journalists all vote for the same guy…and then the players pick someone else entirely? Harden's first answer is to snicker and take the open layup: "You guys are all crazy," he says. Then he gets into it. "It is a huge gap. And that's what confuses me, because it's, like, the guys that I'm actually out there on the court competing against—and probably don't even like me—are just like, 'Okay, he deserves it.' "

Last season Harden lost to Westbrook because "history happened," he says. "What can you do about that?" He's right—Westbrook averaging a triple-double was legit NBA history. And yet with each passing day, it feels less consequential, more this crazy stat thing. In the first round of the playoffs, the Rockets trucked the Thunder in five games. It felt like a rebuke, and it resulted in a slight Russell Westbrook market correction (very slight—Russ still rules) that has spilled into this season. Even Westbrook averaging a triple-double again—he clinched it in OKC's very last regular season game, grabbing 20 rebounds, exactly four more than he needed—has had the peculiar effect of diminishing the feat rather than amplifying it, like we're seeing a magic trick for a second time and we're starting to figure out how it works.

All of which means that there are people around the NBA, probably lots of people, who believe Harden should be en route to his third MVP award in four years. Unless history happens again. Unless Anthony Davis does something impossible. And if that's about to happen, it would have to start here tonight.

But just before tip-off, Pelicans coach Alvin Gentry pours cold water all over the idea, telling reporters that the MVP race is "not even close" and Harden should win it, which is refreshingly candid but still a peculiar thing for Davis's coach to say. And then, as if sensing a threat to be vanquished, Harden goes out and scores 32 points, coming up just two assists shy of a triple-double. Davis has a nice enough game and gives the Pelicans a chance, but Harden hits the game-altering free throws and brings Houston closer to a key prize: home court in a playoff series with the Warriors. They'll get to relax and refuel for the postseason, while Golden State will be rehabbing fractured thumbs and strained knee ligaments. This time, James Harden will not run out of gas. This time, the Rockets have a real shot.

The night before, at the hotel, I'd put my MVP-comeback theory to Harden—that someone might snatch it from him yet again. Davis, say. Portland's Damian Lillard. LeBron, alone and unbound. Harden peered skeptically at me, like he was amused or impatient or both. He let me spin out my theory a little longer, then finally he cut me off.

"Too late."

Devin Gordon, a former executive editor at GQ, is a freelance writer and editor in New York.

Styling by Simon Rasmussen.