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In today's NBA, off-ball offense is all the rage, in part because it's so rare to find a dominant on-ball point guard willing, and able, to not just cede some of their precious autonomy, but thrive as a catch-and-shoot marksman. 

It's what makes Stephen Curry a different level player than Damian Lillard. It's what everyone is clamoring for Trae Young to commit to. It's why we're all wondering, deep down, if even Luka Doncic, as great as he is, can win a championship as a ball hog. 

James Harden, at heart, is a ball hog. I'm not necessarily saying that as a putdown. The newest Los Angeles Clipper is great enough, or he's been great enough in the past at least, to justify an offense built entirely around his creative talent. He was given the keys to this kind of offense for eight years in Houston, and it resulted in not just a statistical boom, but a whole bunch of wins. 

There was a cost, however. And I'm not talking about the ultimate championship shortcomings of such a predictable system. I'm talking about the muscle memory -- or lack thereof, for a guy like Harden who for so long created almost all his shots off the dribble -- of shooting straight off the catch. 

In some sense, Harden has effectively forgotten how to just catch a ball and shoot it. His instinct is to put the ball on the floor at least once, as that is how he's comfortable generating what have become his most natural biomechanical rhythms. 

This is becoming more of a problem now that Harden is entering a phase of his career in which he isn't the guy controlling the ball all the time. On this Clippers team, in particular, he has to be a floor spacer, and as such be ready to shoot immediately off the catch, at least some of the time as Kawhi Leonard, Paul George and Russell Westbrook all require their share of creative control. 

Over his first two games with the Clippers, we've already seen Harden turn multiple open catch-and-shoot opportunities into highly contested and thus more difficult shots by cramming a quick, unnecessary dribble into his chain of movements just to feel more like himself. 

Like this:

And this:

It's like there's a sudden glitch in Harden's shot wiring. We're not talking Markelle Fultz here, but on a far less dramatic level the same sort of thing could be happening. He goes to shoot off the catch, and it just doesn't feel right as he starts his motion. So he stops. Takes a dribble to restart the motion. 

The good news is Harden knows it's an issue. After the Clippers' loss to the Nets on Wednesday, Harden was asked about his hesitance to pull the trigger straight off the catch, and he gave a thought-out, honest answer that sheds light on the challenge of breaking a shooter's most entrenched habits. 

His full quote:

"From my first three years [with Oklahoma City] catching and shooting, to going a whole eight, nine years [in Houston] of being on the ball and having to facilitate the majority of the plays, and then the last few years [with Brooklyn and Philadelphia] a little bit of both. I work on [shooting off the catch] every single day. It's just I don't really get [those shots] in the game, so it's weird to me. So tonight I made one, I shot two, I should've shot maybe four. As the games go I'll get more comfortable and I'll start shooting more."

The most important thing Harden said here is that catching and shooting feels "weird" to him. That's it. He is just more comfortable putting the ball on the floor at least once before getting into his shooting motion. 

For the longest time, off-the-dribble shooting was considered more difficult that shooting off the catch, but for these modern guys who control the ball so much, the opposite is actually true. Their dribble is how they gain rhythm. It's everything from footwork up to where their hands are placed on the ball, which comes as second nature as part of the gather off the dribble but actually has to be consciously thought about when it's a pass hitting your hands from an angle at at a speed you can't control. 

This also isn't a new struggle for Harden. They harped on him in Brooklyn to take more catch and shoots (he attempted about one per game in 2020-21 and '21-22) because he was playing alongside two other premier creators in Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant, but he just never got comfortable doing it. 

Last year in Philadelphia, when, again, Joel Embiid was the one drawing a lot of the double teams, Harden did take 127 catch-and-shoot 3-pointers, which accounted for nearly 20% of his shot diet, per Synergy, and he made those 3-point shots at a 43% clip, which is obviously elite. 

So it's not as if Harden can't do this. He can. Like he said, he just needs to get more in-game reps to feel more comfortable. The catch of that, so to speak, is that he actually has to take more of the catch-and-shoot shots that come his way if he's going to start developing that muscle memory. 

That's where Harden is wrong in saying he doesn't get a lot of those shots in games, even though he works on them every day in practice settings. He didn't get a lot of those shots in Houston, but in Brooklyn and in Philadelphia and now with the Clippers, he does get those shots. He just doesn't consistently take them. It needs to change, and Harden sounds confident that it will.