When James Harden began the 2012-13 season with a 10-megaton explosion — 37 points and 12 assists on opening night, followed by a career-high 45 two nights later — you kind of had to applaud Daryl Morey for his foresight.

Sure, plenty of hoop lovers had come to admire the never-in-a-hurry playmaking gifts of the hirsute Oklahoma City Thunder guard since he entered the league in 2009. But when OKC brass bristled at giving Harden a maximum-salaried contract — reportedly owing to concerns about what such a deal would mean for their salary structure, with Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and Serge Ibaka already in the fold and the 2011 collective bargaining agreement making luxury tax payments more punitive than ever — it was the Houston Rockets’ general manager who was at Sam Presti’s doorstep with a deal.

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Where the world saw a sixth man — the best one in the league, to be fair, but still — Morey saw a main man, the force of nature who’d finish second in MVP voting in 2015 and who may well be the front-runner for that honor in 2017. And now, with the Rockets running roughshod over the competition behind Harden’s heroics a the controls of Coach of the Year favorite Mike D’Antoni’s high-octane offense, we think, “Surely, this is exactly how Morey saw it all playing out four Octobers ago.”

Weeeeell … maybe not exactly, as Morey colorfully recounts in a new feature on Harden and the red-hot Rockets by Howard Beck of Bleacher Report:

“People always ask, ‘You traded for him; did you know he was this good?'” Morey says. “I’m like, ‘F–k no!’ I mean, we thought he was extremely good and better than other teams probably did.”

But not top-five good or, say, top-three, which Morey would make the case for today. […]

What the Rockets saw, and what the spreadsheets illuminated, was that Harden was already elite in his ability to attack the basket and create high-efficiency shots, whether for himself or an open teammate.

“He was always flashing off the charts on that,” Morey says. “The question was more: Can he do that when he’s playing all front-line defenders?” […] “Even we thought it would come back to Earth,” Morey says. “It hasn’t.”

No. No, it hasn’t.

James Harden has scored or assisted on 50% of the Rockets points THIS ENTIRE SEASON. pic.twitter.com/DQFReYmiNm — NBA on ESPN (@ESPNNBA) January 19, 2017





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Harden entered Wednesday third in the NBA in scoring, averaging 28.7 points per game, just a tick under last year’s career-high 29 points per contest. He’s doing so while taking a quantum leap forward as a table-setter, leading the league with 11.7 assists per game — topping last year’s mark by more than four dimes a game — and creating a league-best 28.5 points a night off his helpers, nearly five more than the second-place facilitator in that category, John Wall of the Washington Wizards.

He ranks fifth in the NBA in points scored off drives to the basket, collapsing defenses every time he knifes into the paint. He’s also fifth among high-volume players in points produced per possession used as a pick-and-roll ball-handler, leaving opponents chasing their tails as he works around high screens from the likes of Clint Capela, Nene and Montrezl Harrell, forcing them to either swarm him and give up an open shot to one of Houston’s cadre of knockdown shooters, or stay at home on the perimeter and let Harden go one-on-one with a retreating rim protector.

Pick the former, and you’re at the mercy of the NBA’s most willing (and sixth most accurate) 3-point bombers. Choose the latter, and you’re either allowing a deep paint touch to a between-the-tackles running back who converts nearly two-thirds of his attempts within five feet of the basket or, more likely, given his remarkable proclivity for courting contact, fouling him. Harden shoots a league-leading 10.5 freebies a night, hitting them at an 85 percent clip.

While the approach might not always be beautiful, it is exacting and effective, brutalizing and brilliant. This is Harden’s game, the one that has led the Rockets to a 33-12 record and the No. 3 seed in the Western Conference … and, to hear Harden’s former Thunder teammate Durant tell it, it always was his game. From a lengthy chat with Anthony Slater of the Bay Area News Group:

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