Individual End-Game
Anyway, talk of posterizing, breaking ankles … that’s all about humiliation, and that’s absolutely a part of basketball. A big part of it.
And when it comes to using basketball to humilate your opponent, there is a certain scale. Shooting a jumper over someone is maybe a one. Beating someone to the hoop for a layup might be a two. Dribbling through your legs as you do so could make that worth three, dribbling through their legs as you do might get you up to six. Sevens are garden variety dunks and blocks, while there is a special carve out somewhere around eight or nine for using your crossover to make the defender actually fall over.
But up at the top of the humiliation hierarchy, right there with doing many of the above things with the game on the line, is an explosively humiliating move whose handy shorthand might not belong on this family-friendly website.
There’s a reason I don’t play much pickup basketball in the States. One is that a lot of typical pickup players don’t know how to play anymore. For all the skills they’ve got, their teamwork is so shoddy it’s absolutely painful to play with a lot of them, because I have the body of a point guard and I’m often consigned to spot shooting because players ballhog and lowpost when they have no game to lowpost. Occasional passing and cutting, but otherwise pretty slipshod.
But also underlying is this whole humiliation aspect. It diminishes the joy of typical pickup basketball into a two guard streetball game, where the best shooters with the best moves always dominate over everyone else. Point guards are relegated to spectators and the taller ones just look like their hands are stuck in mud. It becomes a “Who has the bigger pair of cajones” contest, a contest of wills outdoing one another in a one-on-one battle for supremacy. And often the winner moves on to the next stage, triumphant in his arena; the loser is often scarred unless they have the capacities to move beyond. Look at what happened to poor James Felton and look at how T-Mac rose from that.
And that’s what makes basketball so compelling. In almost every other team sport everyone else has to come together or fall apart; in basketball an individual can transcend the game, or bring himself to rise above it. Or once in a lifetime, he can do both.
