Barnstorming: The death of Jordanism and the new NBA wing
By Ian Levy
On Sunday, Kobe Bryant announced, with a poem at The Players’ Tribune, that this would be his last season in the NBA. By all indications it will be an ugly slog to get through but, when April comes, he will turn the final page on a legacy rich with narratives of team success and voluminous individual statistical achievements. Kobe will also end a larger aesthetic era of NBA basketball, taking with him the last remaining link to The Jordan Template.
For a decade, the language of scouting and player development was warped by the hunt for “The Next Jordan.” Kobe was as close a facsimile as humanity could manage and, as he says goodbye, that search has been largely abandoned. No one is looking for “The Next Jordan” because the very idea is a relic from another time and place.
LeBron James did as much as anyone to push the NBA out from under the shadow of Jordan. Tim Duncan and his San Antonio Spurs were antithetical to Jordan’s balletic act but, in their lumbering size and blandness, probably made us ache for him all the more. Kobe did his best to perpetuate Jordan’s legacy but this league has long belonged to LeBron. He is the one who smashed the construct for elite wing play that Jordan so carefully cultivated. In doing so, he neglected to offer a substitute. LeBron’s unique blend of bigger, stronger, faster is what drives his transcendence. If one was to look for the next LeBron, where would you even start?
As Kobe fades to black and LeBron keeps extending his own narrative arc, the next great generation of NBA wings is free from having to be anything but the best version of themselves.
After LeBron, some ordering of Paul George, Jimmy Butler, Kawhi Leonard and Kevin Durant would cover the best the NBA currently has to offer in a positionally fluid wing model. George could be the heir apparent to Tracy McGrady’s languid and sleepy offensive brilliance. Except he also plays defense like Gary Payton. Like Jordan and Kobe before him, his primary offensive weapon is the jumpshot. But George plays from the three-point line in, not the other way around, and he is more catch-and-shoot than catch-survey-double-jab-step-shoulder-shimmy-turnaround-fall-away. He doesn’t so much direct the movements of the defense, as slide through them from angles they aren’t expecting.
Jimmy Butler has a grizzly bear’s physicality — all shoulders and explosive strength. He worked his way up from defensive specialist and off-ball cutter to a legitimate offensive centerpiece with an all-around game that probably deserves some quiet MVP talk this season. He has something of the Jordan/Kobe will, but it manifests with bull-in-china-shop bluntness instead of a scalpel.
Kawhi Leonard would likely be the MVP front runner if not for Stephen Curry’s experiments with the metaphysical boundaries of shot-making. Leonard already has a Defensive Player of the Year award on his mantle and has now become one of the league’s best offensive players as well, somehow managing to do it without even putting a hitch in the San Antonio Spurs’ system. If he had a signature move, it would probably be curling off a screen at the elbow for a simple layup. It’s so routine that you don’t notice it until Leonard has piled on 32 points of anonymity.
There was a time when Durant was LeBron’s rival-to-be but injuries and Russell Westbrook are forcing some adaptation and evolution — something he should be good quite at since he essentially took Kevin Garnett’s body and decided to do Ray Allen things with it. There still may not be a better offensive player in the league than Durant, or at least one so exquisitely equipped to score from anywhere and in any way.
These four all have epic duels with LeBron as part of their origin story and they now stand around him as the new pluralistic vision of what an NBA wing can be. While Durant still has a little “my offense is my defense” going on, the other three are all elite at both ends of the floor. And yet they could never been confused for each other, by role or aesthetics. Their on-court stardom comes from unique strains. These infinite variations on infinite themes are not limited to the very top either. If you want to drop down a tier, there is Klay Thompson (a little bounce in Reggie Miller’s step) and James Harden (a glitch in The Matrix) and Andrew Wiggins (a metaphor to be named later). Arrayed around the three-point line, cutting along the baseline, coming off a screen at the elbows or backing down on the low block, NBA wings are doing their own thing.
This last gasp of Kobe’s has been painful to watch and it will be both freeing and bittersweet — for the Lakers, for the fans, and for Kobe himself — when it is finally over. Whether he will admit it or not, he has spent an entire career trying to establish his own legacy while being aesthetically, psychologically, and canonically constrained within someone else’s. It will be a relief when he’s finally done fighting this battle to make the most of Jordanism, not just because it’s a Sisyphean task, but because we know no one else is waiting to take up sword and shield and give it a go.
Long live Kobe.
Long live Jordan.
Now let’s celebrate what comes next.