Is it weird to say basketball is our most romantic sport? In the artistic sense, not like it’s all lovey-dovey. I think most votes would go to baseball and its obsessive pastoral nostalgia, and fair enough. But I’ll take basketball any day. I’ll take the pick-and-roll. The give-and-go. The 10-year-old heaving up shots toward a crooked rim at the end of her dusty driveway as the moon rises and day turns to dusk turns to night. I’ll take the opening credits of Hoosiers.
I’ll take Kelsey Plum. And if you want to throw him in, I’ll take Michael Porter Jr., too.
What a time to be a hoophead in the Emerald City. For two hours Saturday afternoon, Plum composed her masterpiece, pouring in 57 points in the Washington women’s team’s season finale against Utah to break the NCAA Division 1 career scoring mark and set a single-game record in the Pac-12. In the evening, Porter Jr. led Nathan Hale, the nation’s top-ranked high-school team, to an 80-70 win over Rainier Beach in the first round of the state tournament, scoring 39 points and gathering 20 rebounds.
Neither player is like anything I’ve ever really seen. And for me, at least, the Plum-Porter doubleheader was a reminder of why I spend such an extraordinary percentage of my waking hours watching other people play games.
It’s not wrong to say that we watch sports for the drama. Most of our lives are blessedly lacking in life-or-death situations, and a last-second touchdown or marathon point in tennis offers the sort of high-stakes escapism that releases the dopamine or adrenaline or whatever the chemical in our brains is that keeps us coming back for more.
It’s not wrong, but it’s also not completely correct. We also watch for the individual—to see what other people can do, to see what they’re capable of, to see what maybe we could be capable of if only … (yeah, not so much). We watch to be inspired, to see humanity at its best when so often the slices of life beaming across the airwaves are examples of us at our worst.
We watch to see someone do something that’s never been done before, because there are few things in life cooler than that.
When it comes to individual drama, then, what separates basketball from every other game? Football is too chaotic and militant, baseball too staid, soccer too dependent on cooperation (with some exceptions). There are purely individual sports like tennis and golf and gymnastics, but they’re too isolated. Each athlete does his or her own thing in his or her own space. A basketball player shares the same geography with the five defenders trying to stop her. It’s a team game, but one player can transcend the team in the way a running back or a shortstop never can. Being in the gym when a basketball player is taking over a game is the closest I’ll ever come to attending a religious revival.
Which brings us back to Plum, the big-tent preacher of Montlake, the little lefty with the giddy-up dribble that no college-aged woman in America seems capable of slowing down, let alone stopping. It’s crazy to say about someone averaging more than 30 points per game, but for most of the season, Plum’s been only too happy to defer. It made you wonder what she could do if the full weight of her focus was on putting the ball in the bucket. On Saturday, we found out.
It was a tour de force: 3-pointers off the dribble or off the catch, herky-jerky Harden-esque drives through traffic to draw contact, crafty pull-ups, blow-bys of gawky bigs in the pick-and-roll that finished with looping layups off glass—shots that are never blocked, by the way, because Plum has a savant-like sense of how to use her own body as a shield, how to improvise. She’s got rhythm. When people compare basketball to jazz, Kelsey Plum’s offensive game is what they mean.
It’s all the more impressive when you see her in street clothes. Plum is an amazing athlete who could have played multiple sports in college if she wanted, but a specimen she is not. She’s 5-foot-8 or 5-foot-9, average build, not all that long, doesn’t have a sprinter’s speed.
And yet this is one of the most dominant women’s basketball players of the past decade, along with physical freaks like Brittney Griner and Breanna Stewart. Plum has spent thousands of hours in the gym, working on every aspect of her game, and the result is the daily embarrassment of anyone trying to guard her.
In that sense, she’s the epitome of basketball’s romanticism, the triumph of the individual over nature. The little girl hoisting backyard jumpers in the gloaming probably isn’t going to be Griner, but she could be Kelsey Plum. In theory, at least. I don’t know if we’ll see someone like her again for quite some time.
Do a complete 180-degree turn, and we arrive at Michael Porter Jr., who is one of the most physically gifted human beings I have ever seen. Are their parts for 6-foot-10 people in ballet? If so, sign him up. It’s silly to compare a teenager to Kevin Durant, but there’s really nobody else that comes to mind—not really Tracy McGrady, not really George Gervin, but certainly along those lines of an impossibly long wing with spidery quickness and a jump shot so pure it’ll break your heart.
Saturday night was the third time I’ve watched Porter Jr. play this season, and it seemed like he had an off game. Then I looked at the stats and saw 39 and 20. It comes so, so easy for Porter Jr., much like current Washington wunderkind Markelle Fultz, to the point that I anticipate plenty of (probably misguided) questions about Porter Jr.’s work ethic next from year from announcers parachuting in to work a UW game. But it’s not Porter Jr.’s fault he happens to be the Platonic ideal of a basketball player.
His dominance feels inevitable: Of course the tallest, fastest player on the court is really good. Plum’s dominance feels like some sort of parlor trick: How exactly is that little point guard doing all that? And yet they both can deliver the moments that make basketball unlike any other sport in the world: When a single player shrugs and says, “I got this,” and they do got it, they singlehandedly destroy the opponent, and they take the gym in the palm of their hand and send everyone sitting in the bleachers into ecstasy.