Look at that. watch it over and over. Watch it until your eyes truly start to appreciate the poetic nature of it.
Stephen Curry, a man who became famous for being mentioned in a Drake song, just had the best basketball player on earth staggering like a rookie offensive lineman.
There are so many fun aspects to this. First, the spin. Arguably sports' most gorgeous move when pulled off. But the half-spin -- the adulterous twin brother of the spin -- is just dirty and disrespectful. It's deceitful. The half-spin forces you to see eye-to-eye with the person who's trying to embarrass you. It forces you to confront the pain. It's damn near sadistic.
The best part is how Curry stares LeBron James down before the shot. The jumper finally put the Golden State Warriors up after such a long time of playing catch-up to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Three-and-a-half quarters of trying to make up for a disastrous start and they finally reached the mountain. James had done everything humanly possible to put his team in the best position to win. He set a new NBA Finals career-high with 44 points and took more shots than he ever had in his career to accomplish it.
That stare down was Curry letting him know that all of his efforts would be in vain. It was the "you think basketball is your ally, but you merely adopted the jump shot" monologue before the Warriors broke the spirit of the Cavs. Curry did the half-spin and just when you believed that he would show mercy, he gave James the Ned Stark treatment. Stephen Curry is just an Under Armour sponsored Joffrey Baratheon.
The pump fake practically froze time. Even Timofey Mozgov, an innocent bystander in the play, looked as if he had been placed in carbonite. It was the most serene moment during the game. You often hear stories of how peaceful and enlightened people become before they walk into the light; that when someone is crossing the boundary between the living and spiritual, that the outer-body experience is a deafeningly quiet moment. These things always seem unbelievable till you see it happen to the hero of thousands of children in Cleveland and around the world.
And of course he made the shot. It was a free throw. Curry was shooting and making shots from the tunnel before the game, this must have felt like an insult to him. He's the fastest gun in the west and the jumper was like facing him off against a young upstart who rode into town thinking that he could make a name for himself.
Too easy.
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