Tony Allen | Tuesdays With Horry

You’ve seen this before. Well, maybe not – you can’t be sure. But you’ve seen enough to know it’s good, and that it’s righteous by your eyes. Players like this come along – allegedly – all the time, and if you blink, you miss them. The why used to be nebulous, but it isn’t anymore: if you can run like that, and jump like that, well, you’re going to burn out rather than fade away.

Then again, though, watching a dude with rim-smashing force and game-changing power in the 2019 draft from South Carolina shouldn’t have been much of a novelty. Look yourself in the mirror: now you know that two of those existed at the same time, doing different but exactly the same things. You had nothing to do with this, and your teams aren’t pleased, but you remain mesmerized.

Frederick Breedon/Getty Images

Last Thursday, the NBA’s trade deadline came in like, if not necessarily a lion, then a tiger cub exploring wilderness without its mother for the first time, but it went out like Dwight Howard – generally functional, marginally compelling, much more infuriating and with its movers likely coming away with the impression that they are all champions, no matter what.

While arguably the biggest move of the day involved Orlando sending Tobias Harris to the Pistons for Brandon Jennings and Ersan Ilyasova and was more or less functionally about basketball, a number of less-heralded moves seemed to speak to the cultures of the teams involved: Cleveland traded for Channing Frye to hedge against Kevin Love questions, Oklahoma City nabbed Randy Foye as a more stable proxy for Dion Waiters in the backcourt and the disappointing Wizards ended up with the annoyed Markieff Morris. None of these says “cultural fit” so much as it does “cultural change,” but sometimes in the NBA, as in life, a move is good for the soul.

—Tuesdays With Horry

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