When Taj Gibson poked the ball loose against James Harden

The fate of basketball’s biggest names drive the sport’s overarching narratives, but the fate of superstars are also dictated by the smallest of actions, carried out by the smallest of names. This is a story about one of those times.

The Houston Rockets currently lead the Oklahoma City Thunder by one game in the first round of the NBA Playoffs. Game 4 will be played this afternoon, and Houston will either restore its two game lead in the series or be forced to start from scratch. Such is the rhythm of a playoff series. The drama ebbs and flows on big shots, or the drama dries up.

At the end of Game 3, James Harden pulled up at the top of the key with 3.0 seconds left on the clock. With 2.4 second left, he stood with his wrist cocked. His Rockets trailed by two points. With just over a second left on the clock, the ball ricocheted off the rim. The Thunder would win, and much to Harden’s dismay drama was still alive.

In what is par for the course, basketball Twitter rejoiced at the news that this first round series might indeed transform into an actual series, and a basketball series, much like a television series, requires twists and turns, plates of ironic tension moving under the surface, heroes and villains.

The matchup between Houston and Oklahoma City has it all, because the matchup also includes James Harden and Russell Westbrook.

In game 1, Westbrook finished three assists shy of a triple-double, but his team finished 31 points shy of Houston’s 118. In game 2, Westbrook finished with a historic triple-double including a 51-point eruption. Watching him continue such efforts of raw energy and anguish into the playoffs is like having a front row seat to Mount St. Helens. The experience is full of force and fright. And, despite having become the way of things, each eruption is mesmerizing, as if the world never knew such power.

Obviously, Oklahoma City fans worship at the feet of Mount Westbrook. Due to his sense of loyalty, he is their good. However, there is always that lurking question as to what role his passion played in the departure of Kevin Durant. Did Durant feel the tremors of Westbrook’s quaking hunger? Did he catch a whiff of sulfur when he walked by his former teammate’s locker? When he left for Golden State, did he pursue something other than wins? Did he leave in pursuit of safety?

If one does not experience cognitive dissonance when watching Westbrook, then one’s rational thought has simply melted in the heat of his kinetic chaos. And that’s fine. It’s totally understandable. In fact, it may be the only natural way to watch such athleticism. But, to do so, is to totally forget how he stole Apollo’s cattle and might as well be running every fast break backwards. In other words, never forget this was never supposed to be Westbrook’s team, not really anyhow. The tale of how his inheritance came to be can be written with him as a bystander or it can be written with him as a master manipulator, having outlasted and outmaneuvering all other possibilities for his own private kingdom.

And yet, in a matchup against James Harden, Shea Serrano can tweet that the bearded one is in fact “the devil” and have 314 people like the idea. This makes sense, too, because he wasn’t initially supposed to have his own domain either. The two also play in two distinct, yet similar styles.

While not as forceful as Westbrook, Harden’s game is full of tricks to bend reality. Is there a better player at stopping the clock through a flailing of arms, masquerades and trickery? Also, while Durant is the target of Westbrook’s venom, Harden’s 2012 departure from Oklahoma City for Houston is what really set in motion the decline of House of Thunder from potential dynasty toward first round fodder. The road to this series is written in chapters, not acts.

In my NBA fanfiction project Everything That Dunks Must Converge, I concluded the breakup between Westbrook and Durant with the following scene:

"Russell limped along with blood soaking into the rags of his pant leg. He trudged towards the spot where he’d seen the Patronus-like flash of light, but it was all dark, as if an entire solar system had erupted and then collapsed in a constellation of moments. The going was slow; he was dragging James Harden’s body.“I’m sorry, man. We’re in the middle of nowhere,” he said to no one in particular. “What else was I going to do? Yeah, I get it. Maybe that was a little rash.”He wrestled the body into an old canoe floating in the high grass and still water, in the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes. He guided the patchwork canoe–its bottom soft with rot–out into the water. When the water ebbed at his chest, right against his heart, he pushed it out from his body and away from the land. He watched it drift. In the darkness, he could not tell whether it floated or sank, maybe it lingered somewhere in the ether between the two choices. His leg bled into the water, out into the world and into nothing."

Fiction tends to be overwrought with drama. In the end, a basketball series is about basketball, but if Westbrook’s supporting cast appears too heavy to lift, that’s also because he’s carrying the absence of his former teammates. His supporting cast was largely put in place with the idea that he and another star would be lifting the weight together. Sam Presti, even though he played a role in writing the script, never envisioned such a splintered arc.

When Harden brought the ball to the top of the key at the end of game 3, Shea Serrano followed his devil tweet with a basketball question: “is there anything more terrifying in the nba right now than james harden with the ball at the top of the key”?

A quick flurry of responses interjected with names like LeBron, Giannis, Boogie and even Russ. Kawhi, too, probably deserves mentioning. But the sight of Harden at the top of the key must still be a sight of soreness for Thunder fans, for it was from the top of the key where he orchestrated the franchise’s lone trip to the NBA Finals. There may be nothing more frightening than Harden with the ball at the top of the key, but I imagine that sight is more frightening for some than it is for others. For some, mostly Oklahoma City fans, the sight is frightening because Harden is not in a Thunder uniform, nor is he accompanied by Durant and Westbrook on the wings.

Basketball is a sport that surrenders easily to narrative. Singular talents can appear to dominate entire generations, and the list of NBA champions is largely a zigging and zagging between a few franchises. No other sport obsesses so much over thrones and dynasties. And, while the narrative can be expanded to include new cities and new names, the narrative is often incredibly limiting. Entire teams and franchise players can be swallowed up in the time that lapses between one generation of fans and another. Because of this interplay between legacy and extinction, a playoff series really can feel like it’s for all the marbles, if the marbles were more like infinity stones.

Thus, for better or worse, the results of this showdown between Westbrook and Harden will be etched on a monument declaring one individual’s dominance over the other. The acolytes of either guard will hold to this series as if it were a universal law, and they will break the internet many times with their rigid interpretations of greatness. Adding extra tension to these moments is that no one knows how many games the series will last or whether this meeting will be the last between the two players. Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett only met twice in the postseason. Clyde Drexler only had one shot at Michael Jordan. Geography, seedings, injuries and front offices can render such moments an unanticipated rarity, and that rarity transcribes such moments with the power of a plot’s climax.

In the future, this series will often be discussed as if Harden and Westbrook not only carried their teams offensively, but as if they guarded one another. But such talk will be unintentionally misleading. When Harden missed the potential game winner, Westbrook was floating in no man’s land between Harden and Harden’s back court mate, Patrick Beverley, and the same was true on another key play in the game.

Any possession where Houston doesn’t score is a successful one for the defense, obviously. Also rather obvious when watching a Houston basketball game is how everything on offense involves the creativity of James Harden. That is not a statement of hyperbole. He gets to the line. He assists others. He creeps through the nooks and crannies of the defense like a granddaddy longlegs between the fissures of a crawlspace. All of this is known, and it is also what makes the Harden versus Westbrook debate so intriguing. The responsibilities they hold for their teams are of equal weight and value. Neither team would be dramatically better or worse if the two switched places for a game, a series, or even a season.

The only difference between the two is Westbrook’s ability to inspire myth. Westbrook burns himself alive and rises from the ashes; Harden tangles himself in political secrets and palace intrigue. They are locked in an epic duel, as they have been all season, maybe even for their entire careers. However, the duel is not between good and evil. The duel is a matter of strategy; the magic versus the material. Responding to one another game by game or shot by shot, they are waging war not over whether the world should be changed but whether it should be altered by incantation or prescription. Such a war requires stat sheet comparisons and offensive feats, but it does not compel the two to guard one another.

And, in the closing moments of game 3, nothing was different. Westbrook was on his way to 32 points, 13 rebounds and 11 assists while Harden finished with 44 points, six rebounds, and six assists. The two handled the ball back and forth down the stretch. The nature of basketball is to instill whiplash in its fans as two equally matched teams trade blows down the stretch. Such sequences are why fans and players desire for the game, and yet a little-discussed play at the start of this closing flurry was of equal importance to anything that happened in the last two minutes.

With just under three minutes to play in the game, Harden had the ball at the top of the key. Guarding him was his shadow-for-a-series Andrè Roberson. When Houston’s Ryan Anderson set the pick, Taj Gibson switched off Anderson and onto Harden. The shot clock read 3.5 seconds left, meaning Harden probably wasn’t going to drive the ball. Still, who knows if Gibson was aware of the shot clock? His back was to it, and his eyes were locked on Harden. Harden could have launched a 3, but, as he so often does, he seemed to be probing the defense in an effort to eventually draw contact, visit the free throw line and exercise his dominance over time. When he went to cross up Gibson, Gibson reached out his left arm and poked the ball loose. The play would not register as a steal; Harden recovered the ball, even dribbled once more in the effort. What the play did register as, however, was a shot clock violation. Harden rose to shoot. The buzzer sounded. Harden never even released the ball, but hugged it in defeat. For once, the one aspect of the game he controls so well reigned him into inaction.

To go along with his poke of the ball, Gibson also contributed 20 points on the night. Other Thunder role players joined him in double digits also, and this much maligned supporting cast finally outplayed their counterparts in white and red. Such events often occur when a series moves from one arena to another. Role players play better at home is the in-studio mantra. These moments are also written out of the narrative, somehow too small and complex at the same time. To obsess over them is probably not worth the time—there’s a reason George R.R. Martin can’t finish his fantasy series. And yet, just as a game can turn on a star’s triple-double, it can just as easily turn on a role player’s fingertips.

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Westbrook and Harden can wage their war for the hearts and minds of the basketball universe, tying and untying the soul and the body. Meanwhile, Gibson, Roberson, Anderson and Beverley will continue to play their parts.

Night and day breaks on a planet’s rotation. But a planet is made habitable by degrees. A whale feeds on plankton. So on and so forth, these are small things. The shot Harden missed. The shot Gibson didn’t so much prevent as delay. The spot on the floor was the same.

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