Harden responds to NBA act of ultimate disrespect

Houston star James Harden has responded to his "disrespectful" move on Clippers guard Wesley Johnson that set the internet alight.

The Rockets guard turned Johnson's legs to jelly, then gave him a brutal stare-down as he lay helplessly on the court, before rubbing salt into the wounds by hitting a shot - in an incident that's been the talk of the NBA.

It's left the basketball-writing world rushing to their thesauruses in search of synonyms for the word "disrespectful."

But what did the All-Star ankle assassin himself have to say about his profane, aweless, cheeky, disgracious, impudent, out-of-line, saucy and unfilial dribble-destruction after the Houston Rockets’ 105-92 win over the Los Angeles Clippers?

"I was trying to figure out what he was doing," Harden said.

"I was looking at him and he was looking at me. I was figuring out what he was doing, what he was going to say. I was going to shoot it. I was trying to figure out what was going on.”

"Like. did the ref call side out of bounds?”

Nope! It was just that you crumpled a pretty good NBA defender into a tidy bit of recycling to a degree that doesn't typically happen, eliciting a "whoooooa" from the home team's fans and kind of stunning everyone into stasis.

"And then I just shot it," Harden said with a slight shrug, a head shake and a little laugh.

"I don’t know. I've been in my bag all year. It was one of those moves where I had to make him dance a little bit, and I just made the shot."

The incident polarised fans on social media but in terms of the NBA it was just about all anyone was talking about after it happened.

"Of course, it was crazy," teammate Eric Gordon said after the game.

"You don't see things like that all the time. I definitely laughed. Everybody is going to be talking about that for a while."

With Yahoo US