When people fly
The art of getting off the ground
This Writing Activity newsletter has an About page with a photograph which demonstrates the outdoor adventure involved in reporting Ballistic. There I note that the finished book is 90,000 words, while in the editing process I cut 100,000. Below are some of the spares:
Marcus Elliott, M.D. runs the Peak Performance Project, perhaps the most sophisticated movement lab in the world. “Who,” I asked him, “is the most beautiful jumper you have ever seen?” Marcus’s team at P3 has assessed nearly a thousand NBA players, and several thousand other elite athletes.
“My first thought” Marcus responded, “is Andrew Wiggins.” One of Andrew’s parents played in the NBA, the other held a Canadian record in the 400 meters. Perhaps the most famous moment in P3’s history is a short video of Wiggins, pre-draft, jumping insanely high against a wall-sized P3 logo.
But many others have jumped higher at P3. “The thing about him,” says Marcus, “why he was such a beautiful jumper, is that he could do everything. He could jump off one leg, two legs, left leg, right leg. He could jump really high off no steps, or a single closing step, dropping vertically off a box right next to the vertec.” The vertec is the vertical-jump measuring device you’ve probably seen in highlights--a tall pole with a row of fingers near the top, which leapers swipe at. In grainy video of Wiggins’ standing jump test, about ten people are lined up in the background, just watching.
“He didn't care, he had the right tool for every job. Mechanically it was just really clean. No inefficiencies in his jumping. That’s the hallmark of the best: no extraneous movement. Like in engineering, all the force into this pulley or this lever causes an action. No rotational movement, no lateral movement, just boom boom boom. Just go.”
Although it’s a revered part of the scouting process, vertical as measured at the draft combine—this has been studied various ways—has literally nothing to do with success in the NBA. (One way to succeed at that test, the data shows, is to be short. Another is to cheat: the test measures the highest point you can touch while jumping, and then subtracts your standing reach. Every inch you don’t touch in the standing reach adds to your vertical; the common technique is simply not to extend your shoulder all the way when they measure the standing reach.)
But P3 researches jumping all the same, because takeoff and landing are biomechanical earthquakes. If you want to reduce injuries in NBA players, you want to tidy up that engineering. And as athletes get them dialed in, no extraneous movement, no lateral movement, just boom boom boom they do tend to fly. A big vertical jump might not mean much about NBA performance, but an improvement might mean something nice about biomechanics.
The most beautiful jumper question pinged around P3, where people often use the words “Anthony Edwards” as a synonym for elite movement. On the day I asked a couple of years ago, I learned some NFL players have eye-popping data, especially Matt Breida and Bud Dupree. The Seahawk DK Metcalf tore up social media with clips—some real, some faked—of a leaping catch at NBA All-Star Weekend. Overseas basketball player Jacob Wiley got a vote, as did a couple of NASCAR tire changers from P3’s orbit: Adam Riley and Kevon Jackson. Basketball players who made the list include Zach LaVine, Jeremy Evans, Rodney Williams, young Dennis Smith Jr., and pre-injury Alec Burks. (One of P3’s then-biomechanists, Trent, evidently likes jumps that end with a shot, and nominated Salim Stoudamire, Jimmer Fredette, and J.R. Smith.) P3 trainer Jack notes that “Ant Simons hit the same height as Scottie Barnes. He’s six inches shorter, and made it look super easy.” Scoot Henderson, points out Eric Leidersdorf, P3’s head of biomechanics, “moves how you’re supposed to move.”
Once in a while the ability to fly really matters in an NBA game. With about 100 seconds left in a tied 2016 NBA Finals game, Stephen Curry fired a fastbreak bounce pass to his Warriors teammate Andre Iguodala. The two Warriors had a single Cavalier to beat: the 6-6 J.R. Smith. Iguodala had Smith’s exact height, the ball, and a plan. He leapt off his left foot, bringing the ball to his right–a textbook middle-school layup in the making. The inartful predictability triggered Smith, who leapt into a cloud of confidence. Not today, Andre.
But it was a trap, a killdeer luring a hawk away from the babies by faking injury. Iguodala looked vulnerable for the millisecond it took Smith to orbit. Then he narrowed his shoulders, hung in the air, added a second palm to the ball, and snuck it as far out in front of his chest as his long arms would allow. Smith had filed his flight path to the right; Iguodala’s trick had created a window through which he could sneak a highlight. When Smith finally cleared airspace, Iguodala resumed his textbook layup form. Iguodala extended his right arm and gently released the ball with just a foot to drift to the glass backboard and then tidily placed it into both the net and stories Iguodala would one day tell his grandkids.
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LeBron descended into the play from heaven or the mesozoic or a Chinook helicopter and blocked the living hell out of Iguodala’s shot. Only in slow-motion did it become clear that when Curry fired that pass to the streaking Iguodala, LeBron trailed Curry; the fourth-closest player to the hoop. But the king had the focus of a fox and the movement of a Zeus. As Smith and Iguodala concocted their dogfight, LeBron took one of the best steps in sports, planted a left foot, and put his right hand into the apex of Iguodala’s plans. LeBron’s Cavaliers won the game by a whisper and the championship in seven.
Perhaps there has never been an athlete like LeBron--somehow at once among the NBA’s heaviest, strongest, fastest … and highest jumping. Perhaps there’s nothing to learn about how LeBron did that, other than eat your Wheaties and pray.
Or maybe there’s a whiff of something in LeBron’s badassery that can be ours. Just maybe there’s something to learn from the way the ball of his foot strikes the floor, his hips sink toward the hardwood, or his ankle aligns under his center of mass that we can extract and model. Maybe in the symphony of the best movements in history there are examinable and exportable traits. There is certainly a place, on a sleepy block of Santa Barbara’s Funk Zone, where they’re more than a decade into dissecting the living crap out of the NBA’s best jumpers.
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