A Really Good Bounce Pass Is Chaotic Transport
Recently watching Werner Herzog’s 2005 film Wild Blue Yonder, which I’m not really going to get into here, I learned about the concept of Chaotic Transport, or the use of chaotic “tunnels” determined by the gravity of stars, planets, moons, etc., to travel through the universe using little or no energy whatsoever. Herzog interviews JPL scientist Martin Lo, who studies these tunnels. I can’t make heads or tails of Lo’s explanation, but it’s quite beautiful. Lo has us consider that the orbits of the heavenly bodies are profoundly integrated and chaotic pathways. Instead of concentric, unbroken circles, Lo shows us, purely as an example, a solar system in which the orbits follow the path of the Labyrinth at Chartres. It’s really lovely.
Anyway, blah, blah, blah, thinking about gravity, of course, got me thinking about basketball. Lo’s reminder — and I’m wildly and irresponsibly simplifying things here — that the movement of objects in space is subject to a complex system of gravitational forces serves as a reminder (to me, a lunatic) that basketball is no less complex.
One version of this kind of gravity is what’s going on with Nikola Jokić and the Denver Nuggets right now. After last night’s loss to the Mavericks, the Nuggets are 9-5—4th in the West, and the degree to which they are dependent on Jokić is as easy to see with your eyes as it is in the data. The data is kind of hilarious, actually. The Nuggets are 14 points per 100 possessions better than their opponent with Jokić on the floor and 11 points worse with Jokić off. Per Dunks & Threes’s Estimated Plus-Minus (EPM), Jokić is currently the most impactful player in the league on offense and the second most impactful player in the league on defense (first, wonderfully, is Gary Payton II). So, that’s the data.
But when I’m thinking about gravity, I’m thinking about Jokić’s ability to operate from the high post or from the top of the 3-point arc. From these points he utterly warps the space around him. Last night at one point Jokić hit Bones Hyland with a bounce pass for a layup. The pass was so good that I’m not even sure Bones knew he was open before Jokić. Playing with Jokić makes your body start moving, though, I think. Watching it over and over again, I can almost feel the chaotic tunnel happening in real time. It almost feels like the pass itself bends the shape of the human form of Bones as he moves towards the basket. He seems to stretch out.
I can see the ways in which this space is starting to turn into a Nikola Jokić Appreciation Blog, so I wanted to also talk about the Bulls as well. I was high on the Bulls this season—I thought they’d be really good. What they are doing without Patrick Williams and more recently with Nikola Vucevic is totally astonishing even to me.
When I wrote about the Bulls during the offseason, I was excited about the possibility that Lonzo Ball would serve as a sort of Jokić-like connector for the odd collection of pieces the Bulls had put together. That has happened, but what has happened even more is that each piece of the puzzle seems to have properties that help the other pieces connect. Zach LaVine and DeMar DeRozan, for example, are both deadly one-on-one scorers who operate in totally disparate zones. They could be fighting for touches; instead, they are amplifying one another. It all just works. One fun stat is that the five key players on the Bulls—LaVine, DeRozan, Ball, Vucevic, and Alex Caruso—are all averaging right around four assists per game. Not an elite number for any one of them as an individual, but as a collective, it shows that the playmaking responsibility is spread out evenly.
This is, of course, another version of a kind of low energy transport, so to speak. The swirling of the heavenly bodies can be beautiful or it can be a series of horrible collisions. Just watch the Celtics try to play offense for a little while if you’re wondering what the latter looks like. The Nuggets and the Bulls seem to have solved the energy problem, but the season is long. There is no accounting for time.