Did John Wall make the leap?

John Wall stood on the scorer’s table before a crowd clad in blue and red. He yelled. They yelled. With him impersonating peak Russell Crowe, they would continue their basketball insurrection. Onto Boston. Maybe onto Cleveland. Victory breeds more victory. John Wall and his teammates defended their home court. They triumphed in the same building where only days earlier the Washington Capitals fell once again to the Pittsburgh Penguins in the postseason. The city felt relief. They felt excitement. The moment felt big and grand and ripe with certain possibility. The moment quickly gave way to questions and nonsense that were really neither here nor there.

John Wall played an awesome second half, but did Wall make the leap?

This kind of question rises off tongues after they witness 26 points and 8 assists at a funeral where the corpse rises from the grave. If that wasn’t the leap, then what was it? A refusal to die? An insistence on life? Was it simply entertainment?

Chances are, whatever it was, words won’t do it justice.

In the third quarter, after an abysmal start to the game, Wall started to look a lot more like Wall, especially after unleashing a spin move that left Boston’s Kelly Olynyk frozen in a shop window. Can a player make the leap if in making the leap he simply plays like himself?

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After all, John Wall’s highlight tape features plenty of spin moves. In searching for a metaphor, perhaps Wall’s witnesses can consider the nature of his spinning.  When blowing by the Boston mannequin, he spun counter-clockwise, as if he were a comic book hero tasked with reversing the earth’s orbit. Maybe that’s why he keeps coming face to face with the same question.

After a Game 6 win in this year’s first round against the Atlanta Hawks, the answer to the leap question was in the affirmative, but a sub-par performance in Game 5 against Boston allowed the question to germinate again. Maybe the question is simply a way of conjuring ways to measure success in the age of LeBron James, when the passage to the Finals is as wide as an eyelash.

As a franchise, the Washington Wizards are a great deal like the New York Knicks and Philadelphia 76ers. Unlike the Boston Celtics, these teams have golden pasts that they have neither sustained nor been able to fully resurrect.

Radio hosts in Washington still receive calls from old heads that remember when the Wizards were the Bullets and staving off elimination in a second round series would be a good thing but not the thing.

Of course, Wall’s athleticism has never been in question. He was the number one prospect coming out of high school and the number one pick coming out of college. He has always been recognized as athletic, and easily so. The spin move, however, is not what prompted that signature question. What prompted the question was the 3-pointer he buried at the end of the game. Spin moves are for the young. Clutch shots are for the newly arrived.

In three of the last four seasons, the Wizards have advanced to the second round, but after winning Game 6, the team is one game closer to advancing than they were in those previous trips, when the Chicago Bulls and Atlanta Hawks dropped them from contention in six games. Did the team make the leap? Who knows? Are they still in flight? Sure.

What’s amazing when reading basketball biographies is how many times players are tested from the time they pick up a basketball until the moment they walk away from the sport. They develop skills, they hone them, they learn to be the best, they throw themselves against older and larger players, they attend college, they join the league, and the stakes, seemingly, grow larger and larger. At what point, though, does a player advance from crawling to walking to running to flying?

Again, these are metaphors trying to gauge results. Russell Westbrook and James Harden just finished historical seasons, but they are already eliminated from the playoffs. Have they made the leap? Is the leap still before them? Are statistics no better than metaphors when assessing unfinished careers? Obviously, I really don’t have any answers to these questions. I only have prosaic ramblings, which include two guesses about how these players might answer such a question. One, they’re wondering who are we to ask. Two, they’re not satisfied even if they have made the proverbial leap.

To be a great athlete requires being a creature of appetite. One can never be full, and one can never be satisfied. Westbrook’s triple-doubles were the product of a tremendous hunger. I don’t think that hunger can ever be satisfied, and that is why I think he will eventually play in a way unlike the way he did this year. Triple-doubles will not fill him. His own stubbornness for being recognized as the best there is will eventually break his own feeding habits into something new. On the other hand, I’m not so sure about Harden. His Game 6 against San Antonio, as long as he was healthy, makes me wonder if he is already satisfied, which would be sad because then the Harden of the future would be only the Harden of now.

Westbrook is 28. Harden is 27. Wall is 26. Most of the basketball world probably doesn’t place Wall in the same category as these other two, at least not yet, but when seeing Wall flex from the scorer’s table, I can’t help thinking here is a guy always hungry for the next moment.

Did John Wall make the leap?

Fans and media members ask this question about players they legitimately want to see as successful. The question is a compliment in how it recognizes potential, but buried in the question is also a desire for finished products and destinations.  In essence, the question commands: grow up already. It cannot be delivered without some passive sense of condescension that uniquely belongs to the old and not the young.

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Still, bystanders don’t ask the question unless they are rooting for a player to land safely on the opposite shore of an imaginary abyss. And the question cannot help to recognize some change in the status quo is already underfoot. And yet, a more appropriate question may not be did John Wall make the leap, but can John Wall keep on leaping.

If the answer is yes, then that really would be something to wet our appetites.