The Los Angeles Lakers’ Anthony Davis has sculpted features and wings for arms.
He is, by any measure, and by every account, one of the most gifted players in the N.B.A. He can bully big men in the paint, splash long jump shots, and deliver deft passes. He is uncommonly quick, strong, and intelligent. There is no good way to stop him. During these playoffs, the Houston Rockets tried to swarm him with smaller defenders, and the larger Denver Nuggets tried to keep him out of the paint. Davis calmly and efficiently rained down points on both teams. And, on the other end of the floor, he is one of the top two or three defenders in the league.
Davis is sometimes described as a “unicorn,” a nickname for big men with great guard skills. Davis might be the rarest of them. In the playoffs, he’s already got the better of Nikola Jokić, another variation of the breed. He is a more complete player than the 76ers’ Joel Embiid, and he posts similar statlines to Giannis Antetokounmpo, while possessing a better jump shot. He does all this coolly, almost casually. Davis is universally admired; he is not, as superstars go, especially adored. He doesn’t thrill with the almost unharnessed power of Antetokounmpo; he doesn’t have Jokić’s sense of humor with the ball, or Embiid’s impish charm. He is more reserved. When he hit a game-winner to beat the Nuggets, in Game Two of the Conference Finals, he yelled, “Kobe!,” in homage to the late Lakers legend. But, for all his obvious competitiveness, Davis doesn’t show the almost cruel killer instinct that characterized Bryant on the court. Watching him during these N.B.A. Finals, I find myself thinking of a different mythical beast. Davis is more sphinx than unicorn: body of a lion, wings of an eagle, head of a mysterious human being. He’s the spitting image of the Sphinx of Giza—just knock off his nose.
Davis has quietly loomed over the landscape of the league ever since rumors of his discontent with the New Orleans Pelicans—which drafted him as the first pick in 2012—arose two years ago. And yet, he can seem oddly overlooked. The machinations that led him to the Lakers last summer—a move that ESPN analyst Zach Lowe described as “the single most important trade of an NBA veteran since the Lakers acquired Kareem Abdul-Jabbar from Milwaukee in 1975”—was the biggest story line of its season, but it was one in which Davis himself often appeared to play a passive part. At the end of the Pelicans’ dismal season, when everyone knew that Davis was as good as gone, he showed up in a Looney Tunes T-shirt emblazoned with the words “That’s All, Folks!” Pressed to explain this uncharacteristic bit of trolling, he said that someone else had chosen his clothes for him. It was an obvious metaphor. No one doubted his desire to go to Los Angeles, which he made plain. But, for all the talk of player empowerment, the one flexing the power in Davis’s move seemed to be LeBron James, who had joined the Lakers a season before. And that impression hasn’t gone away. After the Lakers won the Conference Finals, James, sitting on the court, exultant, his shoes off, and confetti swirling around his head, reflected on Davis’s resplendent performance in the series. “This is the reason I wanted to be his teammate, and why I brought him here,” he said, during a post-game press conference.
In the first two games of the Finals, between the Lakers and the Miami Heat, Davis established himself as the best player on a floor that included James at something like his peak. Which is to say that Davis looked comfortably like one of the greatest players in the game’s history. In Game Two, a ten-point Laker win, he scored thirty-two points—hitting 75 percent of his shots—and grabbed fourteen rebounds. Then, in Game Three, he played horrendously; he was dunked on by the Heat’s Jimmy Butler early, and got pestered into serious foul trouble. By the end of the first quarter, he had four turnovers and had yet to take a shot. He was better in Game Four—he hit a crucial three-point shot with less than forty seconds left to put the game, if not the series, out of reach.
