The Aesthetic: What Anthony Davis sacrificed for greatness

Anthony Davis has made sacrifices to make things work with the Los Angeles Lakers, forgoing his profound potential for basketball weirdness in pursuit of greatness.

I find it now takes some work to remember just how fundamentally weird Anthony Davis was. He led Kentucky to a National Championship, won Player of the Year and the signature play of his lone college season was a game-saving block. He was iconic — the most dominant player for the most dominant program in the country but more of his NBA potential seemed to be wrapped up on the defensive end.

He averaged six blocks and steals, combined, per game. His length and quickness literally swallowed up actions. Everyone who played against Kentucky that year looked like a bunch of second-graders trying to fire up two-handed jumpers against an overly aggressive gym teacher. And then there was the look — the brow, the closely cropped hair, the limbs that went on for days. He was a human caricature. He looked like no one we’d seen before, he played like no one we’d seen before.

And then he arrived in the NBA and revealed layers on layers. He wasn’t just a defensive savant. By his second season, Davis was a 20-point-per-game scorer. Elite touch in the post. Beating his man with quickness and skill in face-up situations. Making reads, catching lobs and hitting step-back jumpers in the pick-and-roll. Running in transition, logging blocks and poster dunks back-to-back. You could see bits of Tim Duncan, of Kevin Garnett, of Kenyon Martin and Kevin Durant.

But he was more emotive than Duncan, more mobile than Garnett, more versatile than Martin, more powerful than Durant. He wasn’t just a special player, Davis was a genre-busting, archetype-shredding big man. And he was the face of a franchise that had been nomadic, he broke out just as they rebranded themselves as the Pelicans. An unfamiliar player, doing unfamiliar things, for an unfamiliar team.

I pass no judgments on Anthony Davis’ desire to join the Lakers. I am happy that he’s happy with his new home, happy that he gets to play with LeBron James and happy he had a chance to realize his dream of being an NBA champion.

Watch a Lakers’ game, take a look at his stats — any argument that NBA fans have been robbed of some measure of his greatness by him teaming up with two legacy brands is flawed. He is still exceptional.

And I don’t find myself particularly interested in or curious about the premise that the league’s ecosystem is less healthy for his desire to play for the league’s premier franchise, next to its premier player. And honestly, between Brandon Ingram, whatever they get for Lonzo Ball and the picks and pick swaps they’re still owed, the Pelicans could still end up with something close to a hundred cents on the dollar, especially if Zion Williamson turns out to be the class of player who can lead a contender.

Anthony Davis is not worse with the Lakers, but he’s different

But I do sometimes stare at Anthony Davis and wish we’d had a chance to see him persist in his inherent weirdness.

Joining the Lakers has certainly elevated his personal brand, but it’s watered it down as well. As bright as his light shines, it’s shaded by LeBron’s and colored in by the royal gold and purple he wears. He scores fewer points in transition, does less work around the basket, takes more standstill jumpers. His defensive impact is as great as it’s ever been, but it’s defined more by solid and consistent deterrence than rapidly mobile chaos.

Davis’ offensive brilliance is shaped, dramatically, by its connection to LeBron — more than 30 percent of the basket he’s made as a Laker have been assisted by LeBron. His aesthetic and legacy will be entwined with LeBron’s as well, even if his career outlasts him. (I feel compelled to use the word if there only because The King is closing on two decades and seems unwilling to relinquish his throne any time soon).

Over the past few years, there has been endless hand-wringing about the homogenization of the NBA, the idea that a passion for 3-pointers will lead to everyone playing the same game. It’s absurd for countless reasons, but the most obvious antidote is transcendent players, particularly those whose greatness is wrapped up in intrinsic weirdness. Every team can’t play the same way when one of those teams has Stephen Curry, one has Giannis Antetokounmpo and one has Nikola Jokic. Build your team around a singular muse and you’ll always be something different.

Anthony Davis was that sort of a player, a one-of-a-kind interplay of function and form. The kind of player who regularly chased 5×5 games, who could have given birth to wholly new basketball systems. To be fair, the Pelicans did a lousy job of capitalizing on it, of accentuating it, of building something extraordinary around its extraordinary center. What would he have looked like in an organization like the Rockets, with the willingness to meet his potential with boundless creativity and risk-taking? Not everyone liked watching James Harden work in the system they built around him, but the basketball world is richer for having seen it.

It’s all still there somewhere, I imagine, in Davis’ reach and footwork and anticipation, the potential to build or be something unprecedented. And maybe all of those edges would have been sanded away anyway. Maybe even if he had stayed in New Orleans his frame would have filled out, along with his hair and his beard, and he would have ended up embracing convention as a path to success. Age has a way of pushing everything towards a stylistic mean.

To be clear, Anthony Davis is not worse. But he’s less singular, he’s less unique. He is one of many, doing things that have been done before, on a team that has built a rich legacy out of repeating the victories of their past. But I suppose that was all the point.

The Aesthetic is an irregular column series, treating basketball as a purely artistic medium. Check out the entire project at A Unified Theory of Basketball.