A Simple Plan

Freed from distractions(No more reality show girl friends or passive aggressive teammates), James Harden is making history in houston, where new coach Mike D'Antoni is turning his point guard loose and producing loads o‌f wins

- Lee Jenkins

JAMES HARDEN stepped gingerly off the bus at the Kimpton Epic Hotel in downtown Miami, punchy after a two-hour flight from Houston following a 20 point loss to Golden State, and was greeted by a phalanx of photographers along Biscayne Bay. They were not interested in Dwight Howard or Patrick Beverley, Clint Capela or Trevor Ariza. Every camera was fixed on the Beard, and as he strode toward the sleek lobby, he lost himself in their lenses. Why, he wondered naively, were they here? How did they find him? And what were his teammates thinking as they watched the whole high pitched scene unfold? He felt their eyes trained on him also. Harden was used to fans lining up outside hotels for autographs and selfies, standard road procedure. But not even LeBron James attracts paparazzi while shuffling between mid-market outposts on the regular-season docket. There still exists a yawning gap between sports celebrity and Hollywood celebrity, though not as wide as it used to be.

“What’s happening?” Harden asked himself.

“Who am I?”

On that warm afternoon, in the fall of 2015, it was a difficult question to answer. Over three dizzying years he had metamorphosed from sixth man in Oklahoma City to leading man in Houston, culminating with a white-hot spring/summer when he carried the Rockets to the ’15 Western Conference finals, finished second in the MVP voting, inked a $200 million shoe contract and squired a ubiquitous reality star who makes a habit of transporting professional basketball players across the fame divide. “It was a lot,” Harden says, “and it was fast.”