NBA coaches explain why superstars are taking over offenses like never before

On New Year’s Eve, James Harden had one of the greatest single game performances in the history of the league. Calling it a “triple-double” alone doesn’t do it justice. Harden finished with 53 points, 16 rebounds, and 17 assists, just the second 50-point triple-double the NBA has ever seen.

Of course, the first ever 50-point triple-double came about two months earlier thanks to Russell Westbrook. And four weeks after Harden put on his show on the national holiday, he pulled it off again — dropping 51 points, 13 rebounds, and 13 assists on Jan. 27.

The NBA celebrated its 70th birthday last June. Exactly 70 seasons had plodded along without the league ever witnessing a 50-point triple-double.

Then Westbrook did it in his second game of the year. And Harden did it two months later, while grabbing 16 rebounds and 17 assists, something only three other players have ever done. Harden did it again, and it would almost be surprising if Westbrook didn’t record another one before the season is up.

This is the new NBA. Forget the offensive records you know. Set aside archaic notions about how teams must balance their scoring in order to be successful, or can only keep their superstars involved by isolating them off to the side. More and more, the best players in the league are relied upon for massive offensive performances night in and night out.

This is why.

Harden’s opportunistic style is very different from Westbrook’s coiled spring of kinetic energy, but their 50-point triple-doubles both have something in common that makes sense: the ball was constantly in their hands.

In his 51-point game, Westbrook touched the basketball 128 times, with the next-closest teammate only touching it 51 times. In Harden’s 53-point game, he had 141 touches without any teammate having more than 57 touches. That data, provided by NBA.com’s player tracking, backs up those trends for the season, too. Harden leads the league with an average of 100.3 touches, while Westbrook comes in second at 98.5.

“It has as much to do with the system, really, as it has to do with the strategy,” 76ers head coach Brett Brown said.

Brown’s right. While both players have skill sets that uniquely set them up to succeed, their massive offensive performances this season couldn’t happen without offseasons that paved the way for this. In Houston, general manager Daryl Morey installed two catch-and-shoot players in their system in Ryan Anderson and Eric Gordon into new head coach Mike D’Antoni’s system.

Oklahoma City’s changes weren’t quite as intentional because of Kevin Durant’s departure. It was their best choice to “let Westbrook be Westbrook,” as the Twitter mantra goes, and both sides gladly accepted it.

Usage rate, or usage percentage, calculates the number of possessions that a specific player ends via a shot, turnover, or drawn foul while is on the floor. Kobe Bryant set the all-time record in the 2005-06 season, ending 38.74 percent of the Lakers’ possessions on his way to a 35-point season for a barren roster.

Westbrook’s usage rate this season is 41.8 percent. Two years ago, he finished with the second-highest usage rate of all time. Now he’s on pace to shatter Bryant’s record.

Another player is poised to join the top five, and it’s not Harden. The Sacramento Kings are as sad as ever this season, but it’s not because they don’t know who their best player is. DeMarcus Cousins’ 37.3 percent usage rate would be the fifth-highest mark of all time if the season ended today.

Brown coaches a player who could be top-five all-time, too, if he played enough minutes to qualify. Here’s his amusing theory on Joel Embiid’s 36.3 percent mark.

“It’s just like someone at a buffet who hasn’t eaten in awhile,” said Brown, referencing Embiid’s two missed seasons due to injuries. “It’s just like someone who comes in and dives into it. His usage rate, I think, was born out of the excitement of playing.”

Since publicly available sites started tracking the stat in 1976, there have been 167 players who ended a season with more than 30 percent of their team’s possessions — about four per season. This season, 12 players (not including Embiid) are on pace to pass the 30 percent mark.

In fact, you can see the trend beginning last season, when 10 players reached usage rates of at least 30 percent. Prior to that, there had never been eight players who qualified during a single year.

Even then, usage rate doesn’t fully capture the way these players dominate their team’s offenses. Harden and Westbrook are leading their teams with double-digit assists, as well, and several others in that top 12 have high assist marks. These aren’t static scorers. Despite scoring gobs of points, they also generate massive amounts of offense for their teams, both directly and for their teammates.

Eight players broke the 50-point plateau last season, an NBA record, with Stephen Curry doing it three times and Damian Lillard twice. It’s not quite the All-Star Break, and the NBA has already hit that same number of players this season. We’re in the midst of a revival for 50-point games, and one more instance will break the league record.

That will almost certainly happen. Players who haven’t recorded a 50-point game yet this year include Curry, Durant, Lillard, Kyrie Irving, LeBron James, and Kawhi Leonard, among others.

However, this isn’t a throwback to old Kobe Bryant era of isolation scoring. All this talk of players scoring more individually shouldn’t necessarily be conflated with them shooting more.

“I would probably say there’s less of that,” Hawks head coach Mike Budenholzer told me.

Budenholzer brought up Klay Thompson, who scored 60 points against the Pacers in December. Somehow, Thompson only held the ball for 90 seconds all game, taking 11 total dribbles. In Golden State’s offense, his points came off screens and in transition.

Thompson hit eight three-pointers in that game, and six of the nine 50-point games we’ve seen so far this season have involved at least five made threes. This is one of the biggest reasons for the uptick in standout individual performances. Players and teams are once again shattering NBA records by taking and making more shots from distance than ever before.

“I don’t know if it’s that shocking that there’s been a lot of 50-point games,” Mavericks head coach Rick Carlisle said. “Guys are shooting the ball a lot better than they have in other periods. The three-point shot just throws another wild card into the equation.”

Even Westbrook and Harden aren’t devolving into 90s-era isolation ball, though. Houston’s system, for example, still relies on plenty of ball movement. Sure, Harden still shoots plenty in isolation — 5.3 shots per game, accounting for 24 percent of his offense, per Synergy Sports Technology. But when he leads the league in assists, too, it’s hard to complain.

Westbrook is only averaging 34 minutes, despite still averaging a triple-double. Harden is at 36 minutes per game. Spending more time carrying the offense hasn’t seemed to affect the stars of the league in any apparent way.

“I look at (it) in a macro perspective: how the team is doing, how the team is functioning,” Trail Blazers coach Terry Stotts said. “Most coaches and most teams cater to the best offensive players on the floor.”

It’s hard to see an outcome where this trend doesn’t continue in the coming years. Any stat, whether it’s usage rates, 50-point games, or any other offensive metric you find, should keep rising.

It doesn’t mean that every team will start treating one of their players like Westbrook or Harden — personnel will always dictate style. But even a coach like Carlisle, whose offense is usually based around balance, wouldn’t mind adapting his ways.

“It’s a problem that I’d like to have,” Carlisle joked.