There comes a special point in everyone’s basketball watching career when you begin to feel the game and anticipate its cadences.
The game, once something to sit completely in awe of, becomes deeply rational, with a marvellous sort of predictability. You see ‘that’ happen, and you know ‘this’ will follow.
Goran Dragic has no time for rationality. He obliterates the mould and scythes through knowable conventions.
He drives the lane, like a point guard will, and then he ascends towards to the hoop or crashes into an opponent, like everyone else does. Except he doesn’t. He just stops.
He stops on a dime and then almost starts to look confused, like a man getting off at a bus stop with utter conviction and then not having a clue where he is the moment he steps off.
But the beauty of Dragic is that everyone else gets even more confused. And when Dragic dances after his abrupt halt, using his balletic footwork in the paint, he mostly dodges air, because everyone else is frozen, waiting to see what this strange man is going to do next.
The jump-stop drives might be Dragic’s trademark, but his wonderful weirdness extends well beyond a singular move. He finds unimaginable angles at the rim to finish lefty, cannonballs brazenly into larger humans, and attempts around the back dribbles on his drives with four people around him. Most of the time it works, and when it doesn’t, it feels like it should have.
Dragic is unusually accomplished for a player who has never made an All-Star team. He’s been selected to an All-NBA team, won a Most Improved Player award, and been the best player on two different teams, one that won 48 games. He already has an iconic playoff performance on his resume, his 23-point fourth quarter extravaganza against the Spurs in 2010 exorcising some serious Phoenix demons, a game in which he made Tim Duncan look silly.
But we never really talk about Dragic. He’s a quiet personality who never attracts controversy. He can seem passive at times, deferring to Dwyane Wade all of last season despite clearly being the superior player. For much of his career, it’s felt like he should be more. But after two years of treading in underwhelming respectability, this season has been an emphatic ‘more’.
Dragic is back to All-NBA form, averaging 20 points per game on outstanding efficiency, and chipping in with six assists and solid defence. He’s shooting 40 per cent from deep, on mostly tough attempts. And his team is thriving, 27-16 in 2017, tied for the league’s fourth-best net rating.
Miami is the season’s most inexplicable story, a dead team brought back to life by a platoon of nobodies. Their third best player is Dion Waiters and their fourth best player is James Johnson, and in the loss column they’re tied for a playoff spot right now.
The Heat excel because they’re relentless. They compensate for their deficiencies in individual talent by playing selflessly, playing disciplined, and playing furiously. They move with conviction and force, whirring around on offence and sealing every gap on defence.
Dragic fuels this identity. He’s in a constant state of motion, probing the defence and attacking boldly. He is fearless, a brilliant marriage of courage and finesse, someone who looks just as natural smashing into angry limbs as he does easing in a teardrop floater.
FiveThirtyEight projects Miami as having a 37 per cent chance to make the playoffs. If they miss – which would likely be because of a brutal closing schedule of away games at Charlotte, Toronto and Washington before a pair of home dates against the Cavs and Wizards – it’ll be a shame, because right now the Heat are more like the fifth best team in the East.
Whether or not their season extends another fortnight, this Miami team will be fondly remembered – a squad that started 11-30 and then hammered on the door of the playoffs. They’re a team that warms the basketball heart – a light version of the 2013 Nuggets or 2015 Hawks, squads that defied their individual limitations and became a basketball force as a collective.
Dragic drives that collective, the fierce glue that keeps everything together. However the season ends, Dragic’s star is safe, and not to be forgotten.
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