In his annual remarks on the state of the National Basketball Association, at last weekend’s All-Star Game, in Chicago, Adam Silver, the league’s commissioner—a slender, bespectacled man known for his combination of savvy and candor—acknowledged that it had not been an easy year, so far, for the N.B.A. The games on the court had been overshadowed by the deaths of Kobe Bryant and David Stern, Silver’s predecessor. A single tweet from the Houston Rockets’ general manager, Daryl Morey, in October, had led to a rift between the league and China, which has not been fully resolved. (Silver said that the dispute had cost the league “certainly, probably less than four hundred million dollars, maybe even less than that.”) And television ratings are down, both for national broadcasts and on local stations. Some of that is circumstance, probably—several of the league’s biggest stars have been sidelined with injuries—but some of it is structural, Silver acknowledged. “In terms of distribution of highlights and general chatter around our games, we’ve never been more popular,” he explained. But many fans, especially young ones, are consuming the game in new ways, largely through social media instead of traditional television broadcasts. As if to prove his point, a few hours later, during the Rising Stars game, Zion Williamson, a nineteen-year-old rookie for the New Orleans Pelicans, threw down a dunk of such astonishing force that it bent the rim, and the clip instantly went viral.
Every sport has its just-so stories, but only basketball has Williamson: a linebacker crossed with Baryshnikov, as dreamed up by the Internet. Williamson had a million Instagram followers even before he arrived at Duke, in the fall of 2018, for an obligatory year of college basketball. There, with every explosive dunk, every soaring block on the defensive end, every slick spin and quick jab step, the legend grew. By the time that his left shoe exploded, during a prime-time game against the University of North Carolina, last winter—the seams splitting from the violent force of his athletic movements—he was a cultural phenomenon. (The night his shoe broke, Barack Obama was in attendance. A clip of his reaction went viral, too.)
It was a foregone conclusion that Williamson would be picked first in the N.B.A. draft, by the Pelicans. The N.B.A. and its media partners then scheduled eleven of the Pelicans’ first twenty games on national television—even though the team had lost forty-nine games the previous season, and then lost their resident superstar, Anthony Davis, who had demanded a trade, to the Los Angeles Lakers. During the preseason, Williamson scored on N.B.A. players nearly as easily he had handled scrawny high schoolers. But then he tore his meniscus, and needed surgery; he missed the first forty-four games of the season. When he finally played, on January 23rd, he scored seventeen points in three minutes, hitting four straight three-pointers. He sat on the bench in the fourth quarter, because the franchise wanted him to play limited minutes in his return, and the Pelicans lost—but who cared? Zion had arrived.
In one respect, that first game was totally misleading: in nine games since then, he has only attempted seven more three-point shots and has missed all of them. But he has continued to collapse the drama of entire contests into sudden, vivid bursts: when Williamson is on the court, the game becomes a series of explosive moments held together by tense stretches of potential.
While playing fewer than twenty-eight minutes per game, Williamson is averaging 22.1 points, on 57.6 per cent shooting, and 7.5 rebounds. He is the youngest player in N.B.A. history to score twenty points or more in six consecutive games. In his last two games before the All-Star break, he scored thirty-one and thirty-two points, respectively. He has grabbed the rebound on nearly thirty per cent of his own missed shots, and is averaging 3.8 points per game on put-backs, good for third in the league. And he looks like no one else: six feet six and two hundred and eighty-five pounds, with a guard’s grace and quickness but a big man’s strength and girth, plus a seemingly casual relationship to gravity. In one of his many recent highlights, Williamson slips behind the Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo, the reigning M.V.P., and simply rips the ball from Antetokounmpo’s hands. In the background of the replay, you can see Antetokounmpo’s teammate Brook Lopez lift his hands to his head with an expression of astonishment, his eyes bugging out of his head.
What does it all add up to, besides material for YouTube? The Pelicans, after a disastrous start, have been playing well: when the starting five of Lonzo Ball, Jrue Holiday, Brandon Ingram, Derrick Favors, and Williamson are on the floor together, they have an excellent offense. Their defense is less accomplished. They remain several games behind the Memphis Grizzlies for the eighth playoff spot in the Western Conference, and they have won only three of their last ten games. It may be too late to make a playoff push. And there are aspects of Williamson’s game that are in obvious need of improvement—too many turnovers, poor free-throw shooting—but he has displayed an intelligence and a subtlety in moves that don’t always pop in a GIF: striking court awareness, deft passing, soft hands. At the All-Star Game, he told the Washington Post’s Ben Golliver that his mother had urged him to study tape of the game’s greats. “When I got to Jordan, she told me to watch full games, not highlights,” he said. “As a kid, the stuff he was doing was incredible to watch. Getting a steal, saving it, and then doing a backwards layup or floating through the lane, through like three people, dunking it. As a kid, that really caught my attention. From then, I just watched every full game Michael Jordan clip I could find.” Full games, not just highlights: Adam Silver would probably like a little more of that, too.
