Welcome to Unstatable, a newsletter by Louis Keene about the 2019-20 LA Clippers. Warning: this issue contains wild conjecture. Also: they won’t all be this short. (They will be shorter.)
Anyway, here’s waterwheel
“Foreign places yield more to one who is himself worth meeting.” (Beowulf)
Jamal Crawford played nineteen seasons without aging,
won three sixth-man awards,
holds the all-time record for four-point plays,
is the only player to score fifty in a game for four different teams, and the oldest player to drop fifty (which was fifty-one, at age thirty-nine, in the last game of last season),
never played a lick of defense in his life,
still wants back in the NBA,
and is the only person Kawhi Leonard follows on Twitter.
This is Jamal Crawford: someone whose basketball card you tack onto the wall of your cubicle. His originality and insistence on bone collecting made any gym floor he touched a glorious blacktop. He was never efficient, and teams that jettisoned him never had trouble redistributing his shots, but what he brought to a game and to The Game remains unassailable. Generous with fans, the media, and a Pacific Northwest basketball community that worships the ground he walks on, Jamal always gave back as many buckets as got.
All of which is to say that he’s one of a kind, and certainly one of my all-time favorites, but not exactly intuitive as an inspiration for Kawhi Leonard. By the summer of 2014, when he created his Twitter account, Kawhi was a better and more accomplished player than Jamal had ever been. He’d had LeBron James running scared in the NBA Finals two years straight. He’d lifted his first Larry O’B and Finals MVP trophies and was unquestionably the league’s best defender. He was not yet the most dominant basketball player on the planet — his offensive repertoire has expanded vastly since then — but you could see him becoming that guy, and soon. Most of all, Kawhi’s ethos — spare, mechanical, muscular — is Jamal’s diametric opposite.
Earlier this year, on the Kids Take Over podcast, Jamal said he thought Kawhi followed him because he had recognized Kawhi’s potential early on, and told young Leonard what he saw. But that’s just a guess. Jamal Crawford does not know what’s in Kawhi Leonard’s head any better than we do.
Kawhi stays off social media, remains utterly stoic on the court, and, when he does give interviews, comes off as impenetrable. His reclusiveness has grown more noticeable as his accomplishments piled up, and while most fans are past characterizing Leonard as a robot or AI, the basketball watching public remains fascinated with his inner life. Any glimpse into a more colorful personality, be it Kawhi laughing, Kawhi laughing at his laugh, or Kawhi intoning what it do baby, hey hey hey into a microphone, is immediately memed, devoured, destroyed, and finally turned into a New Balance shirt. It would be exhausting if he were seeing any of it. But when a meme does enter his orbit, he takes it in stride. Then he goes for 38, chai in the fourth.
The pathology of singular talent figures more prominently in basketball lore, I think, than in the annals of other sports. It could be a Jordan habit — any challenger to his supremacy must measure up to MJ’s Legendary Killer Instinct, must produce a high school varsity coach in his past — or it might be the curse of good (?) sportswriters. When Kawhi’s mysterious leg injury kept him out for nearly a full NBA season, fans, media, his teammates and even his coaching staff tried to game-theory out a Machiavellian motive for staying sidelined. If there’s a lesson to be learned from that travesty, it’s that trying to “crack” Leonard probably means undervaluing the richest source of information about him: Kawhi himself.
He’s been telling you all along: he loves the game of basketball. He’s not playing for fans, or for records. He likes to win. He cares about his family. He’s a fun guy. Taking these statements at face value from the king of the court — writing off what lies underneath — may render them newly profound.
It might also remind you of our other hero, he of eight jerseys and nineteen coaches in nineteen seasons, the shake-and-bake king, The Lanky Clipper, Jamal Crawford. Here’s Kawhi, suiting up for one season and bringing a chip to a team he never wanted to play for; and here’s Jamal, so desperate to play one more year he is campaigning for employment on Twitter. “I’m still playing basketball, no matter what jersey I have on,” he said after Game 6 of the 2019 NBA Finals, champagne goggles still on his forehead.
Maybe Kawhi followed Jamal on Twitter because Jamal, more than any other player, treated basketball as a means unto itself. When Jamal Crawford said he just loved hooping, people believed him.
Let’s not call them fantasy team “owners” anymore
Last year I managed to dramatically improve my life by quitting fantasy basketball cold turkey. I had been working on my car with my dad and sliced my right pointer finger open across the knuckle. It was bleeding, bad enough that I had to stop fixing the car, but not so bad that I had to go inside. Naturally I started tinkering with my fantasy lineup with my off hand, picking up Bismack Biyombo while my dad took over shoving the radio back into the center console. Realizing just as my left thumb pressed confirm that I had mistakenly selected Luka Dončić as the player to drop, I decided to never play fantasy basketball again. This whole thing — cutting my finger, cutting Luka Dončić, and cutting fantasy basketball out of my life — all happened in under a minute.
I only ever joined public fantasy leagues, because conversations about fantasy sports in real life are only interesting to me when I’m talking, about my team, at people who aren’t in the league. So, while I can’t say for sure, I imagine the other proprietors of Yahoo! Public #20108 were happy I quit, with a handsome Slovenian parting gift no less. That is because I was the guy in their (your) league who sends terrible trade requests. Yes, it’s been me all along. I understand that this is, in a sense, posting. However! You may be surprised to learn that my obscene trade requests are often granted. Here’s one that was cruelly vetoed by haters, shortly before I quit:
There’s a little box where you can put a little love note with your trade offer. The key to my success has been maximizing that box. There are a few ways to take advantage of the space. For example, I’ll embellish the statistics of the player I’m trading. Just like make up numbers I guess. Nothing is real this is fantasy sports.
It kills me that In Today’s Society we so often suggest trades, so rarely leave love notes
When your passion comes through the screen, it is easier caught than dismissed
Help people see themselves as characters in a story you can’t write without them.
Be A Part Of Greatness
make your laptop, Nalgene, or car windshield an instant winner
get you 18 and 7 every night (and precious counting stats)
avail you of Yahoo!’s neat IL functionality
only cost four dollars
Venmo me and comment your address. Many cool and influential people have these.
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Same Old Clippers Podcast ∙ Take It Or Break It ∙ RealGM Analysis ∙ Sports Stories ∙ The Second Arrangement ∙ Roundball Rock NBA Podcast ∙ Bad Photojournalism ∙ Crane In Search Of Man ∙ The Shocker ∙ The Power Of Human ∙ My Motherfucking LinkedIn Page ∙ Basketball Feelings ∙ Fastbreak Breakfast ∙ Mouse House Books ∙ We Average Unbeautiful Watchers ∙ The Summer Of Lever ∙ Hreal Sports ∙ Clips Nation ∙ NBA4Free
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