James Harden invites the wrath of NBA Twitter with ‘system player’ comment

Enter a middle school classroom. Kyrie Irving is rolling a globe back and forth on the desk; at one point, the globe falls off the edge and he looks down, completely mesmerized. At another table, LeBron James is engrossed in a health textbook reading what the Half-Blood Prince wrote about a cure for aging. And then there's James Harden, sitting on a chair dangling a paper-mache solar system model over his head. He quietly mutters to himself, "I am a system. I am a system. I am a..."

In case you haven't heard, Harden is a system. He said those very words in a Thursday press conference with his new team, the Los Angeles Clippers.

Here's the full quote just so people know the sentence was not entirely taken out of context.

The viral quote came during Harden's comments on his traumatic time in Philadelphia, where he said he felt like he was being kept "on a leash."

Harden said, "When I meant a leash, I don't mean just shooting the basketball every time. I meant, like, I think the game and I'm a creator on the court. If I've got a voice to where I can say, 'Hey, Coach, I see this. What do you think about this?' Then it's like, 'Alright, okay.' Someone that trusts me, that believes in me, that understands me. I'm not a system player. I am a system."

There's another iconic tombstone inscription for him: "Daryl Morey is a liar" and "I am a system."

After forcing his way out of Houston and Brooklyn, Harden burned yet another bridge in Philly, who got sick of negotiating with a tantrum-prone toddler and shipped him off to L.A. in the dead of the night, when Kawhi Leonard was presumably sleeping.

In the aftermath of Harden's first Clippers press conference, NBA Twitter did not hold back on the now-unleashed star for spreading his arms, summoning the power of the basketball gods, and declaring one of the most meme-ifiable quotes in history.

Say it with us: James Harden is a ______

You couldn't have scripted a better start to the Harden-Clippers era.