MILWAUKEE — Early in the fourth quarter, the Los Angeles Lakers, those gold-and-purple princes with their lordly leader LeBron James, awakened from a slumber and were pressing the Milwaukee Bucks, cutting a once mountainous lead to single digits.
Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Bucks’ wunderkind, leapt to snare a rebound, spun and began to dribble down court. The Lakers’ Anthony Davis backpedaled on defense. This young Greek player, the reigning league M.V.P., is spectacularly talented — a lean 6-foot-11 with a pterodactyl’s wingspan and a gymnast’s balance — but his jump shot sometimes still flickers like a lamp shorting out, and it was wise to expect a drive to the hoop.
Except not this time. “I knew I was going to shoot as soon as I grabbed that rebound,” Antetokounmpo said. “Davis was backing up, leaving me room. It is a momentum play.”
He pulled up 26 feet from the basket and stuck his chin out, jaunty, and loosed a 3-point attempt that arced and flipped through the net. As he loped back downcourt, Antetokounmpo turned to the stands and winked.
Thursday night had the feel of one of those pass-the-baton moments, the 35-year-old LeBron James ready to be supplanted by this splendidly talented 25-year-old. It is, however, a mistake to read too much into any one midseason contest.
This particular game was to be Godzilla vs. Mothra, West vs. East, the Los Angeles Lakers vs. the Milwaukee Bucks, each with identical 24-4 records. Inshallah, it might foreshadow the league’s championship round in June.
Except Godzilla this night was tired and achy and cranky, his atomic breath banked. The Lakers had spent eight of their previous nine games on the road, the last four in a reverse Sherman’s march north, from Miami to Atlanta to Indiana to Milwaukee, where they lost, 111-104. Afterward the Lakers spoke mostly of the prospect of sleeping in their own beds again.
That is not to discount what happened on the court. This Bucks team is led by a maturing player with a superstar’s hunger to add new tricks and wrinkles to his game. When the team’s cylinders are firing, it’s an impressive machine. The offense is studded with shooters and big men, and they play a relentless defense, hedge rows within hedge rows.
Wes Matthews, the 33-year-old forward and guard, was charged with guarding James this night. He succeeded, as much as anyone could, in bewitching the league’s reigning grand old man. One minute he bumped with James, the next he backed off and switched. “It’s a tremendous honor,” he said of guarding James.
Did you and James, I asked, chatter during the game? Matthews nodded his head. “Most definitely, LeBron and me have a history,” he said. “He’s 17 years in the league and I’ve got 11 years. It’s a lot of banter, man.”
These teams have a not-dissimilar architecture. Each has a couple of stars — the Lakers Davis and James, the Bucks Antetokounmpo and the sweet-shooting Khris Middleton. They have surrounded these cores with a mix of young players and wise old heads, including the Bucks’ 38-year-old Kyle Korver, who presumably honed his still deadly long-range shot with Jack Marin and Archie Clark. (Note to not-so-old readers: Plug those names into basketball-reference.com.)
The Lakers lean heavily on their two stars. Davis, 26, has taken on the heaviest scoring burden at 27.4 points per game. James had not faded, averaging a hair short of 26. But most remarkable this year is his embrace of the art of the pass. Like a latter-day Magic Johnson, he is averaging a career-high 10.6 assists, and he can find cracks and crevices in even the tightest defenses.
Davis will be a free agent at season’s end, and if he has a whit of self-awareness he should sign up again with the Lakers. James is a near-perfect running partner for him, as game after game he delivers the ball precisely when and where Davis needs it.
(Remember, by the way, the small ball triumphalists? Those who watched the Golden State Warriors and told us the poor big man had become a dinosaur? Well, big is back. The Lakers’ starting lineup goes 7 feet, 6-10 and 6-8 across the front line, with the 6-11 Dwight Howard available off the bench. The Bucks are loaded with powerfully built big men, too, not the least the Lopez brothers, Brook and Robin.)
For all this, the most compelling narrative when these teams collide is the battle between the young star Giannis and the old man LeBron. The N.B.A. is a nakedly Darwinian world, and players strive to dominate their teams and the sport as surely as one mountain climber races another to plant a triumphant flag atop a massif.
Antetokounmpo is openly admiring of James, noting the improbability of the Lakers star playing as he is at 35. He is “different, he is an alien,” he said of James. The young man has, in fact, followed a developmental arc not so different from old man Laker. While James’s offensive game as a teenager was more polished than that of Antetokounmpo, he had to labor hard over many hours and years to develop a reliable jump shot.
The Greek came into the league with no hint of one. Then he, too, set to work to change that. “I was making these shots six years ago in practice but now I can make them in the game,” he said. “To see that result at the end of the day, man, it’s great.”
He and James share an acute sense of where they came from, too. To listen to James some days is to realize he remains in his mind’s eye the child of a single mother in a impoverished quarter of Akron, right up from the rail tracks. To listen to Antetokounmpo is to hear echoes of the stateless son of Nigerian immigrants living in Greece, working with his brothers to hawk watches and handbags in the streets of Athens.
Antetokounmpo’s older brother, Thanasis, now plays with him on the Bucks. Their younger brother, Kostas, is a rookie with the Lakers. As Giannis put it, “Three brothers under one roof tonight, we are blessed.”
“At the end of the day, I was not supposed to be here,” he added. “You keep thinking, ‘O.K., what else’? I want to be better for my team and that’s what keeps me in joy.”
He dropped 34 on LeBron and his Lakers, the latest highlight in a journey that already has come a long way. Maybe they will meet again in the playoffs.
A rivalry that resonant offers its own joy.
Source: Basketball - nytimes.com
