LOS ANGELES — When James Harden walked into the Artesia High School gym the summer of 2003, then-coach Scott Pera said the freshman-to-be was “nothing special.”
“I don’t know that he stood out above anybody else,” Pera recently told The Inquirer. “Rather, I thought a couple other kids might have had more potential than him. … At the time, he just wasn’t somebody that you thought, ‘Oh, this is a star’ or, ‘This kid has everything it takes.’ You just didn’t think it. Nobody did.”
Pera realizes how preposterous that initial evaluation must seem today. But before becoming “The Beard,” before winning the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award and multiple scoring titles, before the polarization of his playing style and lifestyle, Harden was a late-blooming high school player about 25 miles southeast of Crypto.com Arena. He eventually morphed into a five-star recruit and All-American at Arizona State before embarking on a Hall of Fame NBA career that has taken him from Oklahoma City, to Houston, to Brooklyn and, now to Philly.
