Paul George of the Indiana Pacers separates himself from so many of his NBA peers, not just by how great he is, but by how easy he makes it all look.
It’s funny how sometimes the most mundane and innocuous plays can open your eyes when watching the NBA.
Flash back to a seemingly random Wednesday in late November, with the Indiana Pacers heading to the nation’s capital to square off with the struggling Washington Wizards. It’s early in the season with a lot for both teams to figure out.
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It’s also early in the game, yet although there’s hardly been two minutes of play, the Wizards have been given a clear picture of what their night is going to consist of.
As George Hill grabs a rebound and leads Indiana out with pace in transition, he drops the ball off to his franchise player, likely expecting him to initiate the offense.
Paul George does not care that he’s four feet behind the three-point line, he does not care that the lengthy and intelligent Otto Porter is defending him, he only has one thing on his mind.
You didn’t forget about him, did you?
Jamming on the brakes to take the shot doesn’t make him flinch. For so many NBA players, this would be the worst shot imaginable. Pull-up three-pointers on the break are what chuckers feast on, and fans tear their hair out over, yet when George decides to catch and stroke it in flow, the outcome never seems in doubt.
Flow is the perfect word to describe Paul George. He glides across the court, switches from stance to stance defensively, passes, rebounds and scores, and no matter which he’s doing, it’s always carried off with a certain fluidity.
On Sunday night, George and his Pacers were once again on the road, this time being hosted by the Los Angeles Lakers. This was the day in which Kobe Bryant, the greatest shooting guard of the past 15 years or so, announced that he would be retiring at the end of the season.
The stars aligned, as in many ways it felt fitting that George should be the man to match up with the Black Mamba on that momentous evening.
The game changes and players change, that much is always inevitable. It’s part of why even aside from injuries Bryant has found his final few years in the league increasingly difficult. It wasn’t necessarily Kobe who became outdated, but in a league that very much deals in natural selection, the style in which he thrived for so long became a thing of the past.
George is the perfect representation of what the modern NBA wing has become. He dropped 40 points on the Wizards, but he did it with only 19 field goal attempts. He then went on to hit Bryant’s Lakers for 39 on only two attempts more than that.
We’re no longer in the age of the gunner swingman who’s just concerned about getting enough shots to get their points. George will look for the right shot. As his 45.5 percent from three indicates, he’ll hit it pretty regularly too.
The 25-year-old brings so much more to the table. Whether it ultimately proves to be a good, bad or terrible idea, the range of George’s positional versatility has been on show throughout the season so far by way of spells playing the power forward spot.
George is long and athletic, yet he’s equally quick. They are the ingredients for the prototypical lockdown NBA defender in 2015. Being able to effectively cover close to 80 percent of your opponents one-on-one is about as big a positive as you can find on the defensive end of the floor.
Throughout all of this, it’s George’s demeanor that always catches the eye. He’s fearless, yet he doesn’t have to press to highlight his talents. Where so many of the league’s stars drive to draw contact, George drives to score. Then even when the contact does come with that, you don’t see him flustered.
Without being known as an intimidating rim protector, Pau Gasol has long done a great job of defending the paint. In Indiana’s recent meeting with Chicago, Gasol could do nothing to deter George.
The Spaniard might as well have been any tall guy down at the local YMCA, because with impressive control, George consistently went through him in order to score.
First of all, we see George moving in transition. He’s moving at pace, he’s slaloming through opposition defenders, but not once does he appear out of control. His handle is rock steady.
Gasol is the only Bulls defender with any chance of disrupting the play so he slides across, yet George takes the hit, maintains focus and drops the shot.
That wouldn’t be the last time it would happen in that quarter. In more of a set, you’d imagine that the prospect of Jimmy Butler, one of the NBA’s top perimeter defenders, in front of George would do something to dissuade him from attacking again, but at the moment he seems to know that he can get what he wants.
George breezes past Butler with the help of Ian Mahinmi‘s screen, and then as he gets towards the restricted area, he simply extends his long arm into the chest to bat Gasol away, as if he was a pesky fly. Not for one second is any part of George’s motion or stride truly broken.
It’s not just Gasol, take the Lakers game as another example. George isolates Bryant one-on-one and takes him with unsurprising ease, but then as he advances inside he prepares to be confronted with the man mountain that is Roy Hibbert.
Hibbert’s additional bulk means that George won’t be able to brush off his former Pacers teammate quite as easily, but he knows that the advantage is still his. George is the one approaching the play with the momentum created by his speed of attack, and that allows him to just retain the edge between the two in terms of balance.
It’s a tough finish, but you now expect the former Fresno State Bulldog to make these.
That sort of dominance and ability to score at will with the ball in your hands creates a sort of nonchalant energy about a player that makes it easier for him to cause havoc all across the floor too.
Already stung by his efficient inside finishing, when the Lakers see George targeted with an entry pass it starts to create panic. Three defenders collapse in to stop him, and as a natural consequence, George knows that he’s been left with an open man as a result.
Finding Jordan Hill through the swarm of bodies is the next challenge, but with one of the most confident assists you’ll see this season, George finds the gap with a beautiful bounce pass off his hip that creates a simple dunk for his teammate.
It’s simple though, just don’t let him get around the basket then, right?
Well, as I alluded to earlier, George is equally lethal from outside so he’ll hurt you just as bad if not worse from the perimeter.
He’s a consistent enough spot up shooter that he could play off the ball and create chaotic diversions, but the scary thing is that even with time and the ball in his hands, he’s now choosing to go to the long ball as he believes he has every chance of making it.
Great anticipation to steal off a sloppy Lakers pass from the rebound is one thing, but to then choose to stop and let it fly from behind the arc, with all the time in the world at your disposal, takes a special kind of swagger.
It’s just all too easy.
That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t know how to turn the screws. It almost felt like a tribute to Kobe, but the Pacers star did break out one old school superstar move for good measure in his big time LA showing.
With the clock winding down on the first quarter, George was taking on Jordan Clarkson to try and get the final score. He lulled him into a false sense security with the dribble, caught him off-guard with the crossover and then pulled up over him for the triple with a second left on the clock.
It could have been Kobe Bryant in his prime.
It’s appropriate that George eventually moved away from the No. 24 jersey that he wore for his first few years in the league, as with the way he’s developing he needs to pave his own path in the history books.
As a perfect marriage of old school know-how, and new age physique, there’s a danger to the rest of the league that it could all just prove too easy for Paul George over the coming decades.
Right now, the biggest challenge is just going to be even making him break a sweat. George has put the league on alert.