James Edward Harden Jr., nicknamed The Beard, is one of the highest-scoring guards in the NBA. He has won multiple regular season awards, winning the NBA Sixth Man of the Year award in 2012, the same season where he played a major role in getting the Oklahoma City Thunder to the NBA finals. After a trade to the Houston Rockets, he began his run of 8 NBA All-Star team selections (2013-20), 5x NBA First Team selections (2014, 2015, 2017-19), Scoring Champion the past two seasons (2018, 2019, and NBA MVP (2018).

In that 2017-18 season, Harden was averaging 30.4 PPG (NBA Leader), 8.8 AST, and 5.4 TRB. That season was only his third highest PPG average, with his highest being in 2018-19 at 36.1 and second being 34.4 in the 2019-20 season. Throughout his career he has had an extremely high effective field goal percentage (eFG%), a stat that measures field goal percentage and takes into account that 3-pointers are worth more than a 2-pointer and adjusts because of that.

Blue: Oklahoma City; Red: Huston

In his career, Harden has averaged an eFG% of 52.5%. His best year was in his final season with the Thunder, the year he made the NBA finals, where he had an eFG% of 58.2%, which ranked second in the NBA that year. This high percentage, so early in his career, played a role in Harden receiving the max contract he wanted in 2012, a contract worth around $80,000,000.

One thing that could have made this number a little higher was Harden playing with two now-potential Hall of Famers, Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant. The combination of those three players was extremely dangerous on the offensive end, as they created lots of space and open shots for each other, playing a role in Harden having such a high number. Harden also only attempted his third lowest Field Goal Attempts per game that season, with only his first two seasons being lower, which could have boosted his eFG% as well.

In the 2017-18 season, The Beard won the MVP with an average eFG% of 54.1% tied for second highest in his career. The other season where he averaged 54.1% was 2019, in which he won his second consecutive scoring title.

In the past three seasons, no one has attempted as many 3PA as Harden, The closest someone has been to him was in the 2017-18 season was Damian Lillard, who was still more than 90 shot attempts behind harden. In the 2018-19 season Harden was more than 200 above Curry, who was second, and Buddy Heild was more than 150 behind Harden this season and that number would have grown even higher if it was postponed.

This season, Harden has been performing well and still ranked in the top ten of many MVP races and player power rankings, but he isn’t nearly performing how he did in the 2017-18 season. In this chart, you can see at the arc, he is averaging a little bit above or below the league average, and is relativ/ely consistent no matter where he is shooting from three.

His mid-range jumpers is something that has been extremely impressive, as Harden is primarily almost 10% above league average from around 12-feet. The area The Beard is purple in is in an area where usually one of two scenarios occur, the floater or a player is posted up and takes a hook-shot or highly contested shot typically. Harden, in those situations, struggles a lot shooting below 10% the league average.

Compare those numbers to the chart below, Harden’s MVP season.

First, one will notice is the large amounts of yellow, meaning more than 10% above league average. That season, if you compare the purple/tealish to yellow/greenish colors in each of the two graphs, there is a much more of the above compared to the below in that MVP season. Harden was consistent from all over the arc in 2019-20, but in the MVP season Harden was much more accurate in other parts of the arc except for his right corner while he was on the court.

Harden was much more inconsistent with his shooting in his MVP season, showing that he has worked more on his overall shooting and accuracy throughout the court. He was more accurate in specific areas and after likely looking at statistics and through using numbers in his game decided that he valued shooting from all areas on the court at an average percentage would be more beneficial for his playstyle of large quantities of shots and ball control throughout the game.