James Harden is on an absolute tear. As of this writing, he’s fourth in the league in scoring (just over 28 per game) and he’s leading the league in assists (just under 12 per game). His Rockets are rolling; they racked up a 15-2 record in December and moved up to third in the perilous West. By post-Steph, Russ, and Dame standards, Harden has expertly transformed himself into a point guard and Houston has brought to life a free-flowing Mike D’Antoni offense last seen in Phoenix circa 2007.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Harden has found new life as a distributor or discovered new ways to attack the basket. He’s an inexplicable, off-kilter marvel, a southpaw who relies heavily on quick turns, oblique angles, and loopy timing to get his points. His passing is equally elastic, finding gaps in the defense with casual precision. Harden also makes use of his strength and expert body control to nab rebounds and immediately spring back into action. He’s averaging more than 8 per game on the year—not too shabby for a 6-foot-5 guard.

What is surprising is how Harden has gone from arguably one of the league’s most loathed players to one of its most entertaining. This may take some reminding. For the past few seasons, James Harden had been fine-tuning an approach to the game that was nothing short of galling. He specialized in creating contact; his unorthodox timing and physical gifts made him uniquely disorienting for defenders and when he dominated the ball, it wasn’t out of selfishness—he simply had a better chance of drawing more fouls that way. His was a perverse brand of basketball that disrupted the rhythm of the game and just generally fouled up play. It worked, but it certainly wasn’t pretty.

If the NBA could have legislated James Harden out of existence, they probably would have. He wasn’t just a colossal drag, he was arguably bad for the sport, in that he offered up a downright inimical formula for success. There’s a parallel to be drawn between Harden and Sam Hinkie, who in Philadelphia tried similarly to reduce the rebuilding process to an exercise in pure logic. Hinkie was a running joke and, since the emergence of Joel Embiid, he’s been reborn as a tongue-in-cheek cult hero. Harden was such a waste of talent that that he could have been a tragic figure—except that he had no one to blame but himself. Harden wasn’t so much a stylist as he was a botched visionary. He figured out a foolproof way to generate offense but it came at the expense of his good name. If LeBron James or Russell Westbrook had unlocked the proverbial cheat code, James Harden often seemed to be exploiting a bureaucratic loophole.

Harden was so resented by NBA junkies and journalists that he was denied all-NBA status last season despite a 29/7/6 statline—single-season numbers that put him in the company of Jordan, LeBron, and Oscar Robertson. At the start of 2016-17, he found himself in an intriguing position: There was zero pressure on him to win a title—the Rockets were underwhelming on paper, even if breaking up with Dwight Howard in the offseason was addition by subtraction—and the combination of D’Antoni’s return and Harden’s positional switch made the Rockets feel like a rabid experiment. Really all that mattered was that they break .500. But as far as his reputation was concerned, the stakes for Harden couldn’t have been higher. He was floundering and needed badly to reinvent himself. Moving to point guard made for a fresh start and D’Antoni’s system provided the ideal backdrop for a creative catalyst like Harden. He responded by not only elevating his game but completely reversing the opinion of him as a great player who achieved his lofty ends through questionable means.