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FreeDarko Presents: The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac: Styles, Stats, and Stars in Today's Game

Bethlehem Shoals

This morning, Bethlehem Shoals (@freedarko) had a piece go up on GQ arguing, finally, that LeBron James is still the best player in the NBA. Shoals writes,

James is...insidiously adaptive, flexing whatever skills best exploit an opponent’s weakness. The phrase “Basketball IQ” is too often conflated with decision-making but James’s ability to tailor his game to an opponent is mind-boggling. It’s all the more impressive for being so matter of fact.

It’s true, of course. We often use “Basketball IQ” to describe something more like a combination of intuition, vision, and gravity. Whatever it is, it is LeBron James. He remains the most physically gifted player in the league, but what’s so sublime about him is that he’s also the smartest and the most capable of leveraging his physicality in ways that manipulate the physical and emotional boundaries of the game itself.

Shoals says of Curry and James, “Curry is a fully-realized amalgamation of a lot that’s come before. LeBron James remains unprecedented.” I don’t fully believe in this cosmology. I can see the amalgamation that yields LeBron (just off the top of my head, it’s something like Magic’s vision and selflessness + Karl Malone’s size, strength, and durability + Scottie’s defensive omnipresence) just as clearly as I can see Steph’s (for the moment let’s go with Iverson’s outsized gravitational pull + Ray Allen’s combination of accuracy and quickness-of-release + Isiah’s handle and toughness + Steve Nash’s vision and improvisational flare). The point I want to make is that an amalgamation is not a basketball player. Ultimately, everyone who plays basketball exists within the same set of constraints, and the constraints themselves are what allow for genius. And when that genius happens, it bends the game itself in ways that are unprecedented. The proof of their lack of precedence is in the way your heart feels when you watch them pop into existence. 

When a player has a great game, a part of me hopes that level of greatness is a new kind of baseline. This happens all the time in small ways; I root for the Celtics, and the way Jae Crowder has been playing the past couple of weeks has me wondering every time I watch him: can he keep this up? But I’ve watched basketball for the vast majority of my life, and I know how this works. Careers and even individual seasons and games have ups and downs. You don’t have the best performance of your career and then start from that point the next time out. The true you is the mode, the way you look the most often, the most likely outcome for a given night. 

And then once every so often, a player keeps increasing the baseline expectation until the ceiling seems to have been taken off the building entirely. There’s just sky up there. We reached that point with LeBron years ago, and even though he is now 30 years old and certainly on the downside of his physical abilities, I would argue that I still don’t know what his ceiling is. What I watched him do in The Finals last season was wholly unexpected. It made me emotional. He was able to carry even more than I thought he could, and I basically already thought he could carry anything. 

It might be true that LeBron is still the best player in the league, but to make that argument I think you need to fall back on the undeniable truth that LeBron has done it for longer, and though LeBron’s arc, in terms of his ability alter the terms of the game itself, is still possibly in ascendance, the vector Curry is on is more extreme. Whereas LeBron warps the game with his physicality and vision, Curry seems to be warping it with skill and fire. Shoals writes, “No one else in the league—and few in the history of the game—can make an opposing team miserable in as many different ways as LeBron James.” I don’t know. You watch the Warriors this season, and, well, I don’t know what to say about it. No one is altering the terms of the game the way Curry is right now. LeBron included, no one is making opposing teams seem more helpless. 

Finally, Shoals comes around to the idea of the long game. He says that James “isn’t about moments anymore.” The implication is, perhaps, that in comparison there is something short lived about Curry’s impact on games. Curry is “effervescent,” “a light bulb exploding.” Certainly, that’s how it feels to watch him. Sometimes it seems like his feet are not necessarily attached to the floor itself. There’s a lightness to him that is almost ethereal. But I want to argue that what I’ve learned from Steph Curry this season is that it might be possible for a light bulb to go on breaking indefinitely. We are not at the end of this arc as of yet. It is possible it just keeps going on this way. We are watching a new precedent materialize. But oh my God, imagine the player you are watching years from now who reminds you of all this.