Harrison Barnes Is Good And Lucky, Not Necessarily In That Order

This article is part of VICE Sports' 2016 NBA Playoffs coverage.

Every great team gets the aggravating figure of fun it deserves. Harrison Barnes is the Golden State Warriors' analogue for the near-dynastic Heat's browbeaten Mario Chalmers, or the late Lakers' decrepit Derek Fisher. Harry B doesn't quite stand athwart history, but he doesn't do much to help it along. Barnes is simply there, like a tick stuck fast to the winning racehorse's belly. His signature move is standing at the three-point line in the corner with a screensaver of an expression on his face that betrays neither anxiety nor interest. His signature emotion is hungoverly refreshing Twitter in a hammock. There is something unathletic about him, in that he doesn't move with the violence or animus of an athlete. When he sprints, it looks like a jog. He leaps only grudgingly. He is one of the better basketball players alive, to be fair, but it is awfully hard to notice it.

This makes Harrison Barnes sound worse than he is, but his boring competence stands out on this effervescent, devastating Warriors squad, where even bit players like Shaun Livingston and Mo Speights have a certain danger and panache to them. Barnes isn't untalented: he's an able defender and a pretty good spot-up shooter, and he can rebound when he wants to. But there is always the feeling he should be much better at this than he ever actually is. Some of this can be explained away by citing unfairly lofty expectations foisted upon him in his teens.

In 2009, Barnes was billed as the next Kobe Bryant, which is the silly, breathless sort of thing meat market experts say to justify all the time they spend lurking in the bleachers of high school gyms, but he was genuinely as promising as any lanky, 17-year-old, semi-formed mass of talent can be. Every college program wanted him, and he took this as an excuse to turn his commitment announcement into a spectacle that was half-board meeting, half-smarmy Oscars acceptance speech. He gave the impression that he might have carried a briefcase to class, and it was not what anyone would call a good look.

Nor was his time at Chapel Hill, where he struggled beneath the weight of his own ambition. It is difficult to do anything well; it is basically impossible to do something well while preoccupied by the massiveness of the undertaking itself. He wasn't bad at Carolina by any stretch, but he displayed that now-familiar tendency to drift out of games, even when he was obviously the best player on the court. He couldn't create his own shot and didn't play much defense. He was clearly a gifted player, but not one who seemed like he could be the best player on a decent NBA team.

The tail end of his freshman year was impressive—Barnes put up 40 points in an ACC tournament game against Clemson—but he didn't exhibit much growth in his sophomore season, shooting 8-for-30 over his final two games as a Tar Heel, a fittingly deflating coda. He came to Carolina as the best prospect in the country. He left as a source of puzzlement and bemused annoyance.

He was still a lottery pick, though, because he's that talented. He redeemed himself a bit at the 2012 combine, where he was dazzlingly good at a bunch of basketball-adjacent things, and his raw ability and Young Republican poise superseded his 75 games of weirdly middling production as a collegian. This was typical pre-draft hooey, but it was indicative of a larger truth in Barnes' case. He was, as he has been since age 17, given every benefit of the doubt. His friend Kyrie Irving wanted the Cavs to take him with the fourth pick. Barnes ended up going seventh to the Warriors, one spot behind Dame Lillard and two ahead of Andre Drummond.

We had already seen Harrison Barnes before he played an NBA game, because Marvin Williams preceded Barnes by seven years. In the season before Barnes entered the league, Williams scored 10.2 points per game on 43.2 percent shooting with 1.2 assists and 5.2 rebounds. Barnes's career averages, to this point are 10.1 points per game on 44.6 percent shooting, with 1.5 assists and 4.6 rebounds. Williams is a better athlete and Barnes has superior shooting touch, but they're basically the same player. The meaningful difference is that Barnes is a world champion role player and Williams only just began his transition out of draft bust infamy two years ago.

At the moment, Barnes is working on a second title, or, more precisely, he is knocking down a few open threes while Steph Curry and Draymond Green handle most of the work. He plays more minutes than you'd think by looking at his counting stats, and has been out there for about 30 minutes of every night of this latest Warriors playoff rampage, doing a quietly fine job guarding the other team's second-best wing and rarely stepping into the corporeal realm on offense, usually either to launch a jumper or take one dribble and pass the ball to Klay Thompson. He's not shooting particularly well—a hair under 40 percent—and his playoff-high is 13 points. There is not a lot to say about this. Harrison Barnes has not really been a remarkable player.

And yet, he's almost certainly going to get paid a lot of money this summer, because he's hitting the free agent market in the midst of a salary cap spike and because the league thirsts for 6-foot-7 guys who can shoot and defend. Barnes fits that bill, and he's young. At least one general manager will let himself imagine what Barnes might do in an expanded role. The answer, of course, is that he's likely to do the same stuff he's always done, except with more doomed drives to the basket. He'll do it well, but the privilege of watching that play out up close will cost—well, Barnes turned down a four-year, $64 million extension last offseason. So, even more than that.

For someone two weeks shy of his 24th birthday, Harrison Barnes has already amassed an extensive record of failing upward. He's an avowed reader of TechCrunch.com and management type desk-bricks like The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership and fancied himself a businessman even when he was giving that strange, stilted quarterly report of a signing day commitment. It's easy to imagine him in some austere glass cube of an office, pitching investors on a company that doesn't actually do anything, and succeeding. Yes, good, transdigital optimization is definitely what's next in the acquisition space, is what one venture capitalist would say, as Barnes presented him with graphs quantifying the potential revenue generated by products that hadn't strictly speaking been built yet.

His NBA career hasn't been quite this cartoonish a con. Barnes has gotten pretty much everything he could want, except the stardom he courted in high school. Only he knows if rings and obscene riches will compensate for that. He knows another thing, too, and is in rarefied air in that respect. He knows for sure, from personal experience, whether it is better to be lucky than good.