Most of the copious baskets that James Harden, of the Houston Rockets, has made this month have been unassisted. Photograph by Frank Franklin II / AP

James Harden sent a shiver through the N.B.A. a few weeks ago. He lead his team, the Houston Rockets, back from a twenty-point deficit to beat the Golden State Warriors, the defending champions, on their home court. He did this by hitting a three-point shot with seconds left to send the game into overtime. And then, in overtime, with two of the league’s best defenders, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, floating in the air on either side of him, with their outstretched hands leaving a seam no bigger than the width of the ball, Harden hit a three-pointer to win it. He scored forty-four points in the game, with ten rebounds and fifteen assists. It was the sixth straight win since Harden’s co-star, Chris Paul, went down with a hamstring injury, a span in which Harden had been averaging forty-two points per game. It turns out to have been a prelude to his playing in the subsequent weeks, which has continued to be dazzling, up to and including his sixty-one points in a victory over the Knicks, at Madison Square Garden, on Wednesday night.

There have been many strange milestones and records during this stretch, which may one day come to seem something like Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak. (Though it’s hard to imagine a nation turning its troubled eyes to Harden.) One stat I enjoy pondering is that only one player has ever averaged more than Harden’s current January average of 45.3: Wilt Chamberlain, who did it five times.

But these game-winning shots and gaudy statistics, scintillating as they are, only hint at the pleasures of watching Harden play. His very movements are strange and unusual, even obscene. His game can seem—in some visceral way, having to do with his body language, his beard, the way he deploys his arms and legs with such litigious ingenuity that players have taken to guarding him with their hands held up in the air, as though someone just shouted “This is a stickup!”—profane.

A friend and former high-school teammate of mine, John Merz, who belongs to what is surely a small club of former basketball junkies who are now reverends, said, of Harden, “His step-back is driving me crazy. This lunging backward for the three-point line is becoming carnivalesque. It has completely changed the balance between the inside and outside dialectic of basketball. Those two things were always in delicate relation, but now it’s gone. The game of basketball was meant to be played moving toward the basket.”

Ronnie Nunn, a former director of N.B.A. officials, has emerged as a kind of defender of Harden’s step-back, which many people see as a travel. It is a travel, sometimes, Nunn told me, when he does “a double step-back.” But, most of the time, Harden’s carefully calibrated move is legal. “Calling travel is about a dance,” Nunn said. “Once you understand the rhythm of it, you can determine whether it’s legal or not. It’s really not about counting steps anymore once you see it. Just know the rhythm.” Harden’s rhythm, as Nunn has described it, is 0-1-2: “A waltz.” I always thought that the rhythm of the step-back was a kind of salsa. I showed videos of Harden’s step-back to Laura Stein, of the Dancing Grounds dance school in New Orleans. She thought that it resembled hip-hop footwork, with its wide step and change of direction, “like a top-rock in breakdancing.”

Harden didn’t invent the step-back, and, at this point, it seems that nearly every N.B.A. player has a version of it, including centers likes Joel Embiid. If you watch Kristaps Porziņģis’s draft workout video from 2015, you will see, amid the rapid succession of jump shots and dunks, the seven-foot-three-inch Latvian taking two giant, elongated step-backs. Yet Harden has made it his own, crystallized its impact on the game. Everywhere you go, you will see players practicing the step-back move. And it’s always so unique; everyone has their own version. Playing pickup basketball last summer at Pier 2 in Brooklyn, I had to laugh at the flamboyant theatricality of this one kid’s step-back. It was so over the top. The self-congratulating way he cocked his head at the end was part of the Harden influence, too. And, to the kid’s credit, it worked. He kept leaping dramatically back. The ball kept going in. I see some version of this on every playground and at every gym. I practice it, ridiculously, myself.

Harden’s step-back has entered new territory this season. “He took 0.9 step-back threes per game in 2016–17 and 2.4 last season,” according to Sports Illustrated. This season, he is taking more than six every game. Harden has changed the way the game is played in ways that remind me of Michael Jordan and Allen Iverson. Jordan’s game fetishized his air time. The poster-worthy dunk from the foul line became the fantasy object of players the world over. Iverson made a fetish of the crossover. He managed to take the aesthetic of hip-hop and translate it into basketball. Breaking your opponents’ ankles became basketball’s ecstatic accomplishment under Iverson’s reign.

A kind of changing of the guard occurred between Jordan and Iverson, in the spring of 1997—at the start of Iverson’s career and near the end of Jordan’s. It happened in one play. Iverson is guarded by Jordan at the top of the key. In the video, you can hear Phil Jackson’s voice, nearly drunk with confidence after his first run of championships, calling out to Jordan to pick up Iverson. There is something about his tone of voice that suggests the power at his disposal, in Jordan.

Iverson crosses once, to his left, then brings it back. Then he does it again, this time with more force. Jordan lunges, misses. (I feel like I am telling a story from Greek mythology.) The great Jordan was now off balance, out of position, and this feisty and very quick newcomer was alone with the ball at the top of the key. But, as Iverson would later remark, such was Jordan’s skill that he recovered in time to leap toward the ball and nearly block Iverson’s shot. But he didn’t. The ball leaves Iverson’s hands and swishes through the net. There is a nearly Sistine Chapel–like frisson to the moment, two fingertips just grazing each other.

Harden has taken Iverson’s template and embellished it. Most of the copious baskets Harden has been making this month are unassisted. One man on an island, creating his own shot, as Iverson did against Jordan. And, like Iverson, there is a lot of dribbling. The feeling is of a player dancing with himself. Harden likes to lower his body, with one leg forward and one behind, and dribble the ball rapidly back and forth, instilling terror. Then he lunges and either continues to the basket, to score or get fouled (or both), or steps back. Once he has created his space, he pauses. The beard seems to jut forth a bit, taunting. It happens in a split second, but it is an unmistakable effect of the over-all move. That one little hesitation has a practical element—it is Harden gathering balance before rising to shoot—but, psychologically, it is devastating. One can’t help but wonder if this is why he so often draws fouls on these long-range bombs—the defender throwing himself at Harden with kamikaze conviction, anything to prevent another highlight-reel step-back from swishing through the net. (An extreme version of Harden’s taunt, to the point where you can’t miss it, was one of the most celebrated plays of last season.)