One of the strangest minor threads of this already quite strange N.B.A. season—it started just this past Tuesday but already, thanks to the league’s dispiriting and bleakly revealing preseason misadventures in China, seems to have been going on for a year—is the Brooklyn Nets guard Spencer Dinwiddie’s attempt to turn himself into a living, breathing, hooping unit of esoteric currency. In mid-September, he announced a mildly dystopian scheme to establish a bitcoin-like product called the Professional Athlete Investment Token (or, horribly, “PAInT”), which would allow individuals, starting at the very low price of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to loan Dinwiddie money against his contract, with the promise of repayment, plus interest, in two years. If he keeps getting better, and signs a huge new contract in year three—he’s one of basketball’s more refreshing up-from-obscurity stories in recent years—even greater returns will redound to his investors. In the meantime, Dinwiddie will have received what amounts to a huge advance on his contract, the better to make more investments with—he’s obsessed with the markets, a keeper of slide shows and a reciter of odd financial mantras—in the short term.
Sports fans have learned, rightly, to regard players as workers, caught up in an ongoing struggle with the team owners whose aim is to hold on to as much TV and box-office revenue as possible, athletic labor be damned. But it’s good, sometimes, to be reminded that, relative to the rest of us, a lot of these guys are cataclysmically rich, and, as a result, fairly often, sort of daffy. Dinwiddie’s new teammate Kyrie Irving, for example, talks like a louche Redditor, or a tech mogul fresh off his private charter after too many days at Burning Man.
Dinwiddie’s plan (which is, so far, unrealized; the N.B.A.’s honchos are arguing that the idea runs counter to league rules) promises to make literal an effect that became apparent a few seasons ago, and has only grown more pronounced since then. Increasingly, the most gratifying and coherent way to follow professional basketball is to pay closer attention to individual players than to the fortunes of their teams. Fantasy sports, with its splitting effect on the attention and its erosion of traditional team loyalties, has something to do with this, as does N.B.A. League Pass, which makes it easy to graze through each night’s games, as one might absent-mindedly nosh a platter of hors d’œuvres. The baffling, and somehow still growing, quantity of player movement between teams during the summer offseason is another contributing factor. This July’s free-agency period felt like a watershed in this regard: new deals poured forth so quickly, and in such volume, that I could feel a faint, vicarious twinge of carpal tunnel on behalf of the super-reporters—ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski and the Athletic’s Shams Charania, foremost—tasked with toting news of them to Twitter. It can’t hurt that the N.B.A.’s biggest stars have determined, en masse, that a “brand,” away from the court, is almost as important as a jump shot or a working Euro step: now they are fashion icons, and barbershop conversationalists, and cooking-show hosts, and, apparently, bitcoin bros. We like them as much for their carefully tended personas as for their work on the court.
Especially if, like me, you root resentfully for a benighted home team—or, indeed, if, post-China, your intellect won’t allow you to cheer on the institutional N.B.A. as a bastion of forward thinking, or a metaphor for global democracy, as you might have done in bygone years—your final refuge rests in the individual.
And so, sure, I can imagine watching Dinwiddie’s games with an oddly incentivized double vision. He’s great to watch, deceptively solid and dextrous when finishing in the lane, quick enough to confound defenders, and has an eye for the game that keeps him always in the right spot on the court and his passes always on point. If I had money on the line—about a house down payment’s worth, depending on where I’d like to settle—I’d have a conniption every time Kenny Atkinson, the Nets coach, took him out of the game, and feel my pocket swelling whenever he put a few great plays together. Who knows how many friends I’d cajole into voting for him for the All-Star game? It’d be fandom of a very modern kind.
I, for one, have bought an inordinate, if still only metaphorical, amount of stock this season in Kawhi Leonard. I’m not alone, I know; his operatic performance during last season’s playoffs, when he made one of the most suspenseful last-minute shots in recent memory, then grittily led the Toronto Raptors to the first championship in their history, have made it impossible, in any way, to regard Leonard as a personal “discovery.” But, as a solid, swinging anchor of a forward whose angular zags across the lane make basketball look like a game of high-stakes hopscotch, Leonard still strikes me as a new and hopelessly interesting species of superstar. This might be because he is famously taciturn, an enigma generally averse to the self-promotional gestures that seem to come so naturally to his fellows. Then, sort of conversely, there’s his bracing lack of guile or shame when it comes to his truer, deeper interests: he’s become a basketball contract-killer. After a prolonged and still mysterious injury, he forced an exit from the San Antonio Spurs, who drafted him as a drastically underrated rookie, and with whom he won his first championship; spent just one magnificently successful season with the Raptors, changing lives, then waving farewell; and has now landed with the suddenly fearsome Los Angeles Clippers. If he wins again this year—two in a row for himself, but nothing quite so harmonious for either of the teams involved—he will have invented a category all his own.
Even more intriguingly, though, basketball fans have watched Leonard as he has rapidly grown—has matured, you might say, as assets (a word increasingly used to describe human athletes, items on a general manager’s big spreadsheet) will do—from a young ace defender with incredible range, lateral speed, and poise, to a lead scorer with a hound’s nose for the paint, to, these days, an all-around playmaking maestro, fatally dangerous whenever and wherever he receives the ball. He’s done all of this while playing the game with a physicality unlike any other I can recall. On Tuesday night, in the Clippers’ impressive 112–102 winning opener over the Los Angeles Lakers—the game never really felt as close as that—I enjoyed afresh the jolting arrhythmia of Leonard’s game. He executed untrackable stutter steps into the seventeen-foot corner jumpers he loves so much, and, when hoisting threes from the corner, lofted the ball with the straight-armed heave that would count as awkward form for anybody else. He tossed nifty interior passes to the big man Montrezl Harrell, who you can tell is already a favorite new teammate.
Another new teammate, the star forward Paul George, is injured, after a shoulder surgery; he wore an inexplicable textured tuxedo to the game and sat courtside. He looked like he’d shown up by accident, and was missing a trumpet recital or a New Year’s Eve party. I kept thinking that Leonard, with his permanently upright posture and genteel strolls toward the hoop, could have played just as well in George’s penguin suit. When, in the second quarter, down a few points but not for long, Leonard darted down a path parallel with the sideline, pulled up just before he reached the baseline, and, with a defender all over him, swished the long two-pointer home, you could feel the spirit hiss out of the Lakers’ emotional tires.
Leonard was just as scary in the Clippers’ second game, this time against the Golden State Warriors, in the team’s sparkling new arena, in San Francisco. He made the building christening hell. Same solid drives, same high, metronomic dribble, same deadening retinue of mid-range Js. The only difference was an increase in generosity—now, after diving rimward, he sprayed passes out to his teammates on the perimeter. In the third, you could see him decide that he’d like to score again—he ran straight into poor Marquese Chriss, sent the kid stumbling, fell backward himself, and banked the ball home. Sometimes the algorithm in his head comes to that harshly efficient conclusion: I’m stronger and faster than everybody; why not just run somebody over? He has volleyballs for shoulders and melons for biceps. He looks like he picks fights with brick walls for fun. He can do whatever he wants, in whichever city he pleases. Don’t mind the jersey—Spurs black and silver, nor Raptors purple, nor even his new Clipper blues. Just watch him.
