The Triumph of LeBron and a Moment with the NBA's Head of Security: Corbin Smith's Review of Online Highlights

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

Hello readers. I hope you and your family are well on this, a lovely NBA Playoffs Wednesday. Before we begin, I hope you'll take a second to center yourself. Are you up to date on all your self-care? Is it time to give some money to charity? Should you call a sex line and spill some dark secret ( … murder?) to the operator?

If all of this is squared away, please join me.

The NBA tide has turned, and public perception of LeBron James as a golden basketball god amongst sweaty mortals is on the wane. "Steph Curry this," speaks the rabble. "Steph Curry that." Because LeBron has continued to be blazingly, crazily great in Golden State's supernova shadow, we explore at least one quality LeBron highlight a week. This week, a discursive journey of his makes at the rim from last night's game.

(00:31) After he and his trusty ship, the good S.S. Cavalier, scattered the poor Atlanta Hawks like an ocean liner crashing into an old, molding, barnacle-encrusted dock, LeBron James didn't have a lot to do. He probably worked out, watched film on his opponents, maybe had J.R. Smith over to watch a movie. He also stared into the middle distance at the destructive void just out of our reach, not out of fear but so he could learn what it means to dominate without reservation. See the speed on that drop step: a merciless power is flowing through our man.

(00:37) With fresh legs beneath his pelvic floor and the darkness of death in his engines, James attacked the rim, over and over. Lebron went seven-for-seven in the first half, all at or near the rim. He missed two shots all game long: one that he immediately boarded and put back in, and a three-point attempt that he only took because it was the lone genuinely rational thing he could do in the moment. The other 11 shots LeBron took all went in.

(00:46) When I walk down the street in the suburb where I live, I have a habit—it's not bad, but I think maybe seems eccentric if you watch me for long enough—of sort of looping around the sidewalk, on and off the curb, up and down retaining walls, picking up handfuls of gravel wherever I can find them, stripping leaves and needles off plants and biting into them.

I can't help myself. I wander even when I walk in a straight line. I mention this to open your mind to the broad spectrum of focus in human movement. James managing to move off DeMarre Carroll and into the rim in a perfect geometrical curve is truly superior to ANYTHING my feet have or will manage to do for the rest of my life.

(00:55) Efficiency isn't entertaining in the way gunning is. Gunning tells a relatable story: of striving, improvising, bleeding, anything to get shit done. Watching someone just thoroughly not-miss over and over is more sinister, subtler. The other team doesn't find themselves contending with an omnipresent force on the court. They are instead slowly and methodically bled to death by a tiny little pebble of fixed energy in their sneaker. Only after the fact, when you look back on all that excellence in the absence of error, do you really see how poisonous it is. Would you recall this extremely short play on reflection if that wasn't the case?

(1:17) Excellent work by James to create a screen that doesn't seems mushy and malleable in the way a standard human body at rest is, and which is actually moving juuust enough to impose unfairly upon Kyle Lowry. Carroll, who is just back from injury and looking a step slow on the night, switches the coverage and finds himself looking at Matthew Dellavedova as James heaves himself into the air and catches an alley oop pass. Either he was hypnotized by Dellavedova's very existence—which is understandable, as he really is a deeply strange creature—or he was looking for a break from James, which is also understandable.

(1:29) Poor Carroll. After James recovers Richard Jefferson's wacky-ass pass attempt and settles in the corner, Carroll does his damnedest to seal off the baseline and prevent an easy drive to a helpless basket. But remember James' insane depth of connection with his own feet?

What a tiny little space to exploit for a drive that ends in a dunk. A sliver of wood holding two giant, speeding feet. So precise.

(2:24) If you could jump in the air and just expect people to like fall off you like so much duckwater if they tried to get in your way, how would you exploit that power? Is it only useful in a basketball context? Could you get a better spot at a concert? Can it stop crime, somehow? Is James using this power for its only Goddess-Intended purpose?

(2:42) Carroll, who is having a terrible evening, does everything he can to keep James from scoring on him in the post and ends up fouling James on a made basket anyway. You chop the carrot nice and even and it just gets up off the cutting board and chops you back.

(3:10) "A beautiful pass from J.R. Smith" is covered by by a floating ECF logo. The pass only exists as a memory in the minds of the people in that arena, now. It is more beautiful that way.

(3:20) James only missed at the rim when the game was out of reach, and he still gathered the board and put it back in. What is it like to be in control of everything in your own life?

(3:30) That's 11 makes on 13 shots, all at the rim. Dunks, drives, cuts, posts, that's it. Did James do it on purpose? Was he rested and ready and decided, on a whim, to forgo the perimeter altogether as a celebration of life? Is this a rejection of the outer path trod by Curry and his disciples? A tribute to arcana, an exhibition of living history on the court? Or is it more a minor masterpiece, a short and dominant performance in an obscure game that re-impresses the point of LeBron's essential dominance?

Whatever it is, it's spectacular.

GRADE: A+

It doesn't exist on the Internet, so I, Corbin Smith, will have to recreate the video I am going to talk about right now with words. Please copy the upcoming paragraph, paste it into a text-to-speech program, close your eyes, and let your computer read it to you while you imagine the terrain and texture. If you don't get a clear picture on first listen, please repeat the exercise until you have a perfect understanding. If my accounting isn't detailed enough, feel free to add texture with your own handmade details, or ones you excerpt from a Henry James novel that is available for free online. It will probably still work.

At the beginning of the NBA Draft Lottery, a lady who works for the firm that conducts the actual lottery walked to the center podium and set down a small binder that supposedly contained the results of the draw for NBA Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum to read into a camera. She was not the only person who walked on stage. She was accompanied by Jerome Pickett, the NBA's Chief Security Officer. Jerome is bald and he was wearing a suit. He is mentioned by name and title. (I believe the announcer called him "The NBA's Director of Security" or some such title in lieu of utilizing his proper title.) At this point the broadcast transitions into a commercial.

I cannot, for the life of me, divine Jerome's purpose on that stage. Was anyone in that TV studio, under any circumstances, going to bounce out of their chair and steal the results from that nice accountant lady? Is the NBA worried that Woj is hiring street toughs to break into NBA facilities and steal information?

And if someone did rush the stage and try to steal that folder, for some reason, what would Jerome have done? Tackled them? If they fought back, then what? Would NBA Director of Security Jerome Pickett have kicked this dude's ass? Would the cameras keep rolling as we watch this ex-Secret Service dude lay a thorough beating on the interloper?

More to the point, is the draft lottery a disappointment because this DOESN'T happen every year? If it happened for three years in a row, would it just become a tradition? Imagine the possibilities: Every year, the NBA sticks a plant in the audience, they rush the stage, and Jerome Pickett delivers a beating that defies the imagination. Soon, the event is so prominent that it commands the sport content cycle for the entire day. The NBA begins pursuing celebrities to rush the stage and get their asses kicked. Rumors, rumors of rumors, about who is going to take the whooping this year. My friend Dave works in Knicks' PR, and he swears it's going to be Jay Baruchel. Would you watch that? Would you watch Jerome Pickett kick Jay Baruchel's ass? Would you stay tuned through the commercials if a presenter, say Doris Burke, said it was coming up next? Would you please answer those questions again in exchange for Internet purchasing credit?

(ping)

This is unlikely, but consider this, too: What if Jerome Pickett fails in his task, and someone manages to destroy him in personal hand-to-hand combat—does the NBA's Chief of Security carry a taser? Can two people fight each other with tasers?—and take the documents out of the nice accountant lady's hands, then what do they do? Do they read the results on air themselves? Do they sell the information, which is only really valuable for only the next five or so minutes, to the highest bidder? Or would they crack open the case and see a giant document with the scheduled lottery winners on it, clearly printed with a DotMatrix machine 20 years previous? Is the whole NBA planned? How deep does this go, and how high? Has a real game of basketball, one without a pre-determined winner, ever been played at all?

In the hours since I watched that unforgettable scene, I have explored all of these questions, in and out, and have come to two possible conclusions:

ONE: There is a very sensitive document outside of the lottery's purview in that case, and the NBA only trusts their best man to protect it.

TWO: The entire thing is, in fact, a play, a sort of mimicry of the seriousness of National Security proceedings, the NBA communicating to the world at large that they are taking the Lottery VERY SERIOUSLY because it is COMPLETELY DEVOID OF MONKEY BUSINESS. Of course, as we all know after watching three large market teams strike gold on the same night, that is an outright lie. Fake empire, man.

Thank you for reading this week's column.