The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Paul George

The trendy explanation for the Pacers devolution into steaming-garbage team was, at its nadir, that they were never very good in the first place. No one deserves any blame here—we were all trying to make sense of our confrontation with a terrifying chaos—but that was probably pretty wrong. The Pacers were good when they were good, and bad when they were bad, and if that seems obvious, it's because we talk so much about this sport that sometimes we circle back around to platitudes. But the real horror of the Pacers inexplicable transformation was that they were good, at one point, only that then they somehow later on were just really, really bad.

Paul George was at the center of that mess, because first he was an anointed superstar, and then maybe we wondered if we could take that back, because, hey, regression and sample size and make more threes, Paul. The regression to the mean criticism makes sense as a statistical interpretation of his career, but it's also vaguely dismissive of actual accomplishment. When Paul George was playing like an MVP candidate in November and December (24 points on 47/40/83 splits with 6 boards and 4 assists), that was real performance and real productivity. That was one Paul George. When his shooting cooled off in January and remained cool until April, that was a different Paul George. They were all Paul George: the good Paul George, the great Paul George, and the meh Paul George.

That's the fiction of "regression to the mean," which implies that there's some deep and true Paul George who may occasionally deceive us into wondering if he's someone else, but who will, eventually with enough time and a large enough sample size, reveal his unalterable self, the one he had tried to hide. Of course, that's not really what it means. "Regression to the mean" is a descriptive label for a statistical phenomenon, not an existential exploration of identity, but it's also not an explanation for who Paul George is, because Paul George stoically defies anything of the kind.

But who, who more than Paul George, makes those off-balance threes look that good? That pure? That inevitable? An off-balance three is crooked, a bad variation on the right and good and Steve Kerr jump shot, and yet he's smooth, so smooth, when he shoots it that it doesn't look crooked or off or wrong. If anything, that essential Paul George shot, fading left as he shoots it, feels like it's the world's alignment that's wrong. We should all re-orient ourselves to that shot and lean left like an amateur video game player so that we can be where he's gone.

That move, that fading left and urging the ball in sequence and pose, which you can see here around the 1:54 mark or here around the 4:37 mark, was where I kept returning, again and again, as I journeyed through the steps of the grieving process for Paul George's 2014-15 season, this last weekend. The injury was gruesome, but more than that, it felt like a betrayal of the cruelest kind. If Paul George's body, so long and fluid, could get dealt that ruthless blow by the game for which it looks particularly designed, then what did it say about basketball? Maybe something awful, but also, maybe nothing at all, because it's just a game, as indifferent as the universe.

So this too is Paul George, lying in a hospital bed, recovering from surgery. Optimistic reports have him returning in a year at best, which means we will watch an entire basketball season without Paul George. He will go on existing—at rehab, watching his teammates from court side, in the occasional check-up interview—but, at the conclusion of one of the most dynamic seasons, one that has left an imprint on the league's collective consciousness for its good moments and its bad moments, he has disappeared.

It's an act of balance, ironically, for a player who is so great without any. He appeared last season in a way he never had before, as one of the ten best players in the league on one of its most fascinating teams, only to now face having to spend this upcoming season into the uncomfortable background of injured players. But this time, regression will signify something else. This time, if he regresses back to any mean, it will be back to the pre-injury Paul George. He'll regress on a trajectory that will be, like all those off-balance shots that somehow go in so often and so easy, a crookedly beautiful success.

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