Order, Ecstasy, and Klay Thompson's 37-Point Quarter

Klay Thompson may be the most transparently practiced player in the NBA. The Golden State Warriors' shooting guard is the very image of basketball tidiness, a counterpoint to his backcourt-mate, the wispy, insistent, and joyously improvisational Stephen Curry. Thompson wears his hours of rehearsal on him as he plays, cutting around screens in measured steps, dribbling as if navigating a coach's plot of orange cones, crouching into a defensive posture that looks culled from some mid-century basketball instruction manual.

Even his jump shot, his most obvious talent, betrays with each instance of its use the work behind it. It is formally pristine: feet set square and facing the rim, right hand centered on the ball, left hand acting as a guide, raised from the waist, cocked at the forehead, released at the top of a perfectly vertical jump. It speaks not to the human body's instinctive grace but to its capacity to take direction. Watch Thompson shoot for any length of time, and you will be sure that he has spent more of his life hoisting jumpers than he has sleeping.

Saturday night in Oakland, where the Warriors hosted the Sacramento Kings, Thompson scored 52 points. 37 of these came in the third quarter, setting an NBA record for the highest total in a period. What had been a close game—the quarter began with the Kings trailing by only two, and was tied as late as three minutes in—became an exhibition of an increasingly unlikely sort, with Thompson making nine three-pointers in an assortment of circumstances, and missing none.

He dribbled around screens, spotted up in transition, and, at the moment things turned from contest to carnival, opted out of a developing pick-and-roll in favor of launching from almost thirty feet out. The Oracle was at that point fully bonkers, with Thompson's Warriors teammates no exception to the mania. They found Thompson over and over, determined to arrive at this tear's limit and delighting each time at their failure in this errand. The whole quarter became a heat-check. Watching, one felt a little unsettled by the pattern of it all; this was as metronomic as mayhem gets.

For Golden State, owners of the league's best record and highest average point-differential, this was one in a season of such bashes. For Thompson, it was a fitting cap to the first half of a year that has been the best of his career. He has benefited as much as any Warrior from the arrival of rookie head coach—and, perhaps not coincidentally, former avatar of jump shooting excellence—Steve Kerr, who has overseen his transition from spot-up specialist to a more multifaceted offensive threat.

With characteristic neatness, Thompson has asserted himself more as a ball-handler this season, driving past closing-out defenders and initiating sets. Indeed, scattered among the third-quarter three-point barrage were demonstrations of the new flexibility: a quick drive-and-spin leading to a short pull-up, a strong-shouldered maneuver for a layup, and a sharp assist from the mid-post to a cutting Draymond Green. No longer a mere sidekick, Thompson now belongs to the top group of shooting guards in the league. Even before Saturday's outburst, he had set himself apart as one of the few players capable of such a thing.

If Saturday's game contained a sour note—and it would take a pessimistic nose to try to sniff one out—it may derive from the basketball fan's inherent distrust of too good a run. The bad bounces will come, the thinking goes; those easy threes will turn scarce in the postseason. To skeptics, Thompson's third quarter may represent the Warriors at their most Icarian, rolling over an outmatched team to the delight of a January crowd, blasting away from deep and not quite aware enough of how close they are to the sun.

For reassurance, though, Warriors fans need look no further than that same game's opening period. Thompson's record-breaking quarter was a celebration, but a more ordinarily great first quarter was its justification. Golden State hung 34 points on the Kings in the first and did so as a team, without the slightest air of anomaly. Their offense rolled along with easy variety, a thicket of screens and passes resolving in Andrew Bogut hooks, Harrison Barnes layups, and Draymond Green threes. On live television, it looked like the work of a video editor. Each of the Oracle's shirsey-wearers had ample opportunity to cheer his or her Warrior of choice.

This is the type of basketball Golden State has played throughout the year, the type that, more than any aberrant outburst, gives cause to rational title hopes. Even misfortune was smiled upon. Missed jumpers, in such sunny environs, were only opportunities for offensive rebounds, and even when the Kings' Nik Stauskas hit a corner three, Warriors television analyst Jim Barnett saw fit to praise Green, who had been helping in the post and left Stauskas open: "He was doing his job." This team does not need to hope for moments of transcendence; its talent and tactics are enough.

Nowhere is this more evident than in its shooting guard. Were he not setting records Saturday night, Thompson would have been contributing in his standard way, spacing the court for Curry, navigating those mountainous Bogut screens, driving and pulling up, and playing keen defense. He would have been a fifth of one of the NBA's most egalitarian systems, one that's uniquely centered on its participants' liquid roles. Klay Thompson will never repeat that quarter, and nobody in Golden State minds a bit.