Basketball, of all the sports, seems to me to have the most flow. It can be — and in my opinion, should be — back and forth, not always moving fast, sometimes real choppy and physical, while allowing, just once in a while, for a build up of energy so intense that it has no choice but to explode.
The players I love to watch are the ones who know how to stay present, the ones who refuse to surrender to the flow but also know when to go with it, the players who can keep their head above water, spot the channels, and know when to break.
Some people love to watch this happen on offense. They love to see the drive, the pass, the shot. I love to see it on defense: the deflected pass, the block, the steal, the taken charge, the fast and sneaky rebound, and the turn up the floor into transition.
I like players like Marcus Smart and Aron Baynes, and all the other guys who’ve ever earned themselves a Tommy Point.
That’s part of the reason I like these guys: because Tommy Heinsohn, a former Celtic player and a longtime local Celtic announcer, taught me to. I’ve been listening to Tommy for almost my entire life, and while he might be the biggest homer in basketball-announcing history, he also knows the game, and he heroizes the unsung effort above all else. Every night, he calls the audience’s attention to those moments in professional basketball when a player reveals his heart by rising above and beyond any reasonable expectation to instead reach for the greatness of the moment with no thought as to the accolades involved.
It’s Marcus Smart playing defense on Lebron James and forcing one of the greatest players in the history of the game to give all his effort every time he touches the ball. It’s Aron Baynes catching a deflected rebound in the middle of the paint and being so focused on the act of catching the ball that, now that he has it, he has no idea what to do with it.
But I wonder if it’s Jaylen Brown refusing to leave the Cleveland floor at the end of the game without first slamming the game ball through that god-damned hoop in an act of childish anger but also an act of defiance, an act of rejection, a willful and spiteful act that said “Fuck you!” to everyone and everything but mostly…the moment: the losing end of a hard-fought game.
Is that worth a Tommy Point?
Or is it worth our condemnation?
The ethics of sportsmanship suggest the latter. The Cleveland Cavaliers were perfectly willing to run out the clock, and most of the Celtics were ready to as well; but Tatum and Brown didn’t notice, and when Brown finally did notice, when he looked around and saw that all of his teammates and all of his opponents were just standing around, he got pissed, because he was still ready to fight.
Brown is young — twenty-one years old — and he just ran up and down the court with men in their late twenties and thirties. Those aging men might be willing to accept the clock, but a young guy like Brown, after 48 minutes of playoff basketball, he’s still ready to go, and now, having looked up, he’s the last to realize the game is over. That realization brings with it the painful knowledge that his team has finally lost.
His decision to slam the ball through the hoop after everyone else has given up is a warrior’s way of screaming, “FUUUUUUUUUUUCK!”
The problem is that Brown was standing on a basketball court with nine other guys, professional men who have long recognized that a professional man doesn’t act like that.
So is Brown’s dunk worth a Tommy Point? Does a Tommy Point also recognize self-discipline, or does it solely recognize the blend of talent and instinct, the ability to make one’s effort create one’s moment-to-moment reality?
I lean toward the latter. There is a place in basketball for sportsmanship, and it ought to be recognized as adamantly as Tommy recognizes effort, but a Tommy Point is not a sportsmanship award.
Jaylen Brown, in slamming the ball through an undefended hoop with near-on-zero seconds left, did not act like a sportsman. He violated the norms of the end game, which calls for the players to gracefully pass the last 40 seconds or so if the lead is insurmountable, each team dribbling out the 24 second clock and denying themselves the opportunity to make a shot.
Everyone else on the floor had acknowledged that norm, but Brown refused. He put the ball to the floor and went full speed towards the Cleveland basket, bypassing any defender who happened to react by default, stepping around them, rising up, and slamming the ball through the net with all of his athletic power and might, while everyone else, nine professional men, stood around watching: Look at the young boy go.
Is that worth a Tommy Point?
I don’t know. It demonstrated attitude, effort, and heart, but it was also too little and too late.
I like Jaylen Brown, and I appreciated how hard he played during that game. He got outplayed at instances, and he got ahead of himself at others, but he gave the game his all the entire time he was on the floor.
His final dunk was the culmination of that. He wasn’t done fighting, but he also hadn’t fought enough, and now the clock was telling him he had to leave the floor a loser; his slamming the ball through the hoop signaled his refusal to.
And that, my friends, ought to be worth a Tommy Point.