27/01/2018 The Unexpected Beauty of Basketball Synchronicity | The New Yorker

Rabbit Holes

The Unexpected Beauty of Basketball

Synchronicity
By Vinson Cunningham January 17, 2018

https://twitter.com/World_Wide_Wob/status/921015335897182208

ack in October, in the opening days of the current N.B.A. season, something
B wonderful happened during a game between the Portland Trail Blazers and the
Phoenix Suns. After a bad pass from one Blazer to another, the Suns’ guard Eric
Bledsoe—who has since complained his way out of Phoenix and onto the much more
promising Milwaukee Bucks—ended up with the ball, then torqued his body toward
the other end of the oor, ready to catalyze a fast break. So far, so normal: that
sequence, turnover into all-out sprint, is one of the most basic in basketball. The
remarkable thing, though, was that Bledsoe’s teammates—Devin Booker, Tyson
Chandler, T. J. Warren, and Josh Jackson—mirrored his movements almost exactly ,
down to the subtlest twitch, as if urged by some outside force. Each player planted his
right foot, swerved his torso just enough to make the next step, now with the left foot,
then ew off, chopping his arms through the air—right, left, right, left—like swift,
mechanized scythes. They all ran with their heads slightly forward, their backs ever so
hunched, and their feet kicking gently and freely behind them as they went. It was
eerie. Suddenly, the team was a swarm of doppelgängers, hoping, it seemed, not only to
score the bucket (as, incidentally, they did, on a smooth dunk by Jackson) but also to
win, via coördination, some other, more celestial recompense.

Synchronicity is no stranger to sports. Back in 2016, a clip of two synchronized

synchronized
swimmers , strutting toward the pool like cool, imperturbable twins, went brie y viral.
Sometimes in football you’ll witness perfect symmetry on the offensive line: the center
trucks forward while the guards block outward—one’s path looks like a leaping,
curving dolphin; the others’ looks like its re ection in the water. But in basketball,
aesthetic pleasure usually comes by way of difference. Somebody sets a pick and helps
his teammate slash toward the rim. The other guys stand still, ready to catch a pass, or
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dart to new places around the three-point line, while the pick-setter jogs somewhere
across the paint from the guy with the ball. The resulting decision—pass, shoot, or
dribble under the basket and back outward, like Steve Nash used to do and James
Harden does today, in order to start the sequence again—comes out of the ball-
handler’s understanding of diversity: where this one likes to catch it, whether that one
can jump high enough to snag an alley-oop, the fact that the other one’s probably
sulking because he didn’t touch the ball on the last play. If displays of strict physical
unison like the one among the Suns were always part of the game—and they had to
have been!—we must have just missed them, lacking the means to distribute them and
gawk. These days, armed with DVR, endlessly rewind-able N.B.A. League Pass, and
social-media feeds, we can capture these moments and consume them as self-enclosed
entertainments, wholly independent of the score at the end of the game.

The clip of the Suns attracted a hypnotized audience of hoops fans, who then—led by
the writer and podcaster Rob Perez—kept collecting specimens of the genre , which
turned out to be unnervingly plentiful. Just the other day, both members of the New
Orleans Pelicans’ superstar duo, Boogie Cousins and Anthony Davis, decided to quit
their walking and jog down the court for an offensive possession at precisely the same
moment. They both dip their heads , like divers breaking the surface, then straighten up
and stick their chests out as they gather momentum. In other examples, players fall in
synch, whine or celebrate as if choreographed, or eye the scoreboard identically. Some
viewers chalked it up as yet another article of proof that we are living in a vast,
deterministic video game—or, even more conspiratorially, that action in the N.B.A. is
just as minutely planned as professional wresting, or the Ice Capades.

The likely truth is more mundane, but also, in its way, more beautiful. Bodies and
minds as amazing as these are made similar by training. The smallest stimulus—an
obviously shy pass, an off-kilter jump shot, an unexpected whistle— res thousands of
responses, all honed by hours of practice and study. You get hit lots of times and you
learn how to fall. Every so often, instinct kicks in and only one option seems possible:
plant a foot, turn around, and run. Style is great, but sometimes it’s nice to watch it fall
away.

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Vinson Cunningham joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2016. Read more »

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