Giannis Antetokounmpo and the pursuit of something new

The age of analytics, right or wrong, is fostering a sense of finality.

It started in the late 2000’s, when Mike D’Antoni’s Phoenix Suns seven-seconds-or-less teams emphasized shooting and pace. In time, the rest of the NBA followed, while Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors pulled the perimeter out to its logical (and literal) extreme. Pace of play, 3-point attempts and assist rate have skyrocketed over the past decade, to the point that today, those Suns would be one of the five slowest teams in the NBA.

You have to wonder, in a world where the Cavs beat the Warriors in the 2016 NBA Finals by outshooting them, where D’Antoni’s new outfit, the Rockets, shoot ten more 3s than the rest of the NBA, if we will ever again be introduced to something different.

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Determinism, in the internet age, has creeped into every aspect of life. Now, more than ever, our lives ore quantified and the future feels measurable. Just as Amazon is best-served by categorizing every possible combination of human traits into a tidy algorithm, NBA teams are incentivized to gather as much information as possible to accurately consider every possible outcome.

The object of both operations is to limit uncertainty. The object of sports fans, and really, the fulfillment of our lives, is to revel in it; to believe we can circumvent our circumstances, that there is actually a point to rolling the ball out and playing the game.

And that, more than the prospect of winning a championship, is why the question of whether or not Giannis Antetokounmpo can develop a 3-point shot is so important. Antetokounmpo is scorching the NBA, scoring a league-leading 31 points per game on 65.7 true shooting percentage, while dominating the glass, dishing five assists and playing menacing defense. But the question, at its core, is not about firepower, whether the best possible 2-point efficiency and output could  topple a team as optimized as the Warriors. It’s about the future of the league itself, whether the only way to beat a team like the Warriors is to out-Warriors them.

In an age where information breeds faux-certainty, what we’re really longing for is to be proven wrong.

Even a new class of do-it-all big men who threaten to take the league over can’t escape being categorized. Fans have hitched their hopes onto the idea that a player like Joel Embiid, Anthony Davis, Kristaps Porzingis or Karl Towns could one day topple the Warriors, reclaiming the sport as the domain of giants. But the frontier won’t change. It’ll only get taller. They’re complete players in ways other big men haven’t been, but at the core of their appeal lays guard-play: Agile 7-footers who handle the ball, shoot, and pass.

They’ll develop a few separate wrinkles, but in the end, they’re part of the same phylum. To be alive in 2017 is to feel as though you’re on a path toward complete self-actualization yet know, on some deeper level, that somewhere in the world there is someone exactly like you. Even The Unicorn himself is a prototype.

Giannis is, on paper, another large guard. But the ball hits the hardwood, and you know you’ve never seen anything like him before. He can clear half-court with two dribbles and a lay-up. His gigantic stride makes it impossible to sag off of him. His mere name activates new synapses.

That leads us to another question. If Giannis can topple the current order, will it be a singular event, a one-off that briefly pauses the statistical revolution, or can his style pave the way for a new future?

We know, for example, as AAU prospects start chucking deeper shots from younger ages, that there will eventually be another Steph Curry. But the road-map by which Giannis arrived to the NBA was fraught with peril.

His parents, Charles (who died suddenly of a heart attack this year) and Veronika, made the trek from Nigeria to Greece in hope of finding better economic opportunities. As illegal immigrants, who at any moment could have been found out and deported, they worked discretely. Giannis, alongside his brothers, toggled between street vendor and basketball addict. In 2008, He was discovered by Spiros Velliniatis, a professional basketball coach in Greece who, on a whim, remembered being awed by Giannis’s brother Thanasis and ventured to Sepolia to find him. You can read about the absurdity of his body, the rarity of being so tall yet so agile yet so — knock on wood — injury-resistant here.

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I am hard-pressed to believe that any of this is replicable. The emergence of Giannis feels like a singular event, one that has no bearing on any predictive models. Standing at 6-foot-11 with a 7-foot-3 wingspan and a command of the game that, while dominant, is ever-developing, Giannis Antetokounmpo is a miracle.

But I hope I’m wrong.