Rudy Fernandez, Malfunctioning Highlight Machine

If Quentin Tarantino whipped up a basketball movie—and let’s say this basketball movie follows the stylistic trademarks of, like, Kill Bill, all quick-twitch violence and smooth colors and foreign music; not some sort of Reservoir Dogs basketball film, which would probably just involve Jeff van Gundy slowly torturing Charlotte Bobcats’ cardboard cutout Derrick Brown for 87 minutes—he’d want some players who could bounce. The highlight guys, as they say. So, not a Kobe Bryant. Which might at first seem counterintuitive, but while Kobe can bury flat daggered shots while pivoting violently, and waggle then dip towards the baseline and re-emerge with his teeth around the rim, he does it too often to be a highlight guy. Kobe Bryant’s off-ball movement, the way he bends his forearms out to throw bounce passes… every element of his game is a highlight, and a constant highlight is just a show.

No, what we’re looking for are 88 Rudy Fernandezes. Fernandez plays 2-guard/small forward for the Denver Nuggets. Before that, he plied his trade in Portland and the Euroball veldt of Spain. Dude is Spanish, an immensely important hitch when picking him out from the Americans and Eastern European operators who dot the NBA, and we’ll get to that in a bit. As the 24th pick in the 2007 draft, he came into the league with those back-half-of-the-first-round expectations: When it’s past pick 20 your team thinks, “Well, this guy can certainly ball, and he’ll maybe become the next, hell, J.R. Smith? Except not a sociopath?” But really, they’re just hoping you’ll be useful enough to play 20 minutes a game and spend the remaining half hour slicing apples for Joe Johnson.

Fernandez, however, has what the shamans call “serious upside.” Because let’s face it: If dunking all over Dwight Howard in the Olympics isn’t upside, then we should all stay down for the rest of our lives. Take 30 seconds to pay your respects to this play. Rudy makes for the paint in a sort of hopelessness— you can see it in the length of his strides—as Dwight, aka Superman, bears down on him. Superman has both the size and speed of a locomotive, but Rudy outruns him and, leaping, wraps himself around Dwight’s yacht-mast of an arm as he swings from the hoop. A superbly athletic swingman, Rudy’s made his name in the Association by popping off a supernova play like this often enough that you can’t forget he can do so (warning, video contains late-period U2): The switchblade three-pointer, the predatory alley-oops, the drives so quick and glitchy that you want to make sure he’s still in one piece afterward. For example, while playing against the Suns, he famously came sprinting from the corner and turned a beautiful Sergio Rodriguez Spaniard-to-Spaniard bounce pass into this irrational all-body layup, then vanished downcourt to theoretically play defense. But, being real for a second here, you do not find Rudy Fernandez under “Defense” in the Yellow Pages. All of a sudden you think he’s somewhere else, knocking a few back with Jared Dudley to end the half, when there he is, ball in hand, and his sloppy three-pointer has turned announcer Kevin Harlan into a shrieking puddle of meat right before the buzzer.

But then there are the moments between highlights, when Rudy oscillates between playing confused and reactive defense and missing shots in clusters of four and five. There’s a reason he was traded away by Dallas, which had him briefly following the lockout, for a 2016 second-round pick, the basketball equivalent of a flat, caffeine-free diet soda. On his career, Rudy shoots around 40 percent from the field, and he’s 36 percent from three-point range while jacking up 4.6 of them a game. Add to that 9.1 points, 2.5 assists, 2.2 rebounds, and you have a gun that doesn’t necessarily go off when you need it to. And it’s all been downhill since his rookie year—the uptick through ~25 games this season is too small to count properly.

We care, though, and we care because there’s that shade of Messi and Xavi and the Spanish footballer in Fernandez, a way of slicing seen space into tunnels that seems to be part of the Iberian birthright. (Also, the hair.) Rudy has the way of a creator in how he makes pliant the world in front of him. Not Rubio-level, not even close, and Rubio does it in a different way—Rubio’s a passing dilettante, whereas Fernandez mostly does his damage after his feet have left the ground. Basketball needs rangy guards like this to complement the juke-savants like Brandon Jennings and the captains of industry like Chris Paul. Those guys are leading men, while Rudy’s more of the asshole who comes screaming in in the middle of the war movie, strapped up and glistening with crazy, and destroys everything in 19 different ways before someone lights him on fire. But sometimes, that dude is the best part.

@KTLincoln