Rudy Gobert Is Here to Smash Everything

You know the empty-calorie feeling of an ankle-breaking crossover that ends in a brick? If this were on a menu of NBA experiences, it would be "The JR Smith," and it would taste weird and not be ordered often. It's still impressive and pretty, but something about it doesn't go down right. Moments out of time are fine, but moments without resolution disappear quickly. It happened, and it was beautiful, but it was fleeting and ultimately meaningless, and it is gone. This is how good the NBA is. Brilliance like this flashes and disappears like sparks from a campfire.

Rudy Gobert, 7'2" center for the Utah Jazz and blossoming cult figure, does this to other teams' possessions, routinely. A team—the Memphis Grizzlies say—will move the ball quickly and purposefully through their set, and the Utah Jazz's defense will move with them until it can't any more, at which point Mike Conley will drive through a seam in the defense and put up that sublime offhand floater of his. Sets like those are also a beautiful thing—like "The JR Smith," but both more prosaic and more practical. This is also how good the NBA is: the way an elegant offense can slide a defense around, waiting for the second it shows weakness, which it will then ruthlessly exploit for a good shot. It's all fluid and pleasant to look at it, or anyway it is right up until Rudy Gobert swats that graceful and hard-won shot into the second row with extreme prejudice.

Gobert does this only about twice per game, and it's always destructive in that way. But what he does on the possessions where he doesn't even get his fingers on the ball is maybe even more ruinous. A block may alter a possession, but the threat of a block alters whole games, and any time Gobert, who has a 9'7" standing reach, is on the floor, he's threatening to block shots.

To say that Gobert changes shots is accurate, but not quite sufficient. He warps plays as they develop, and players are forced to contort themselves in new ways to avoid his reach. Guards pull up when they otherwise might drive in for a layup, and bigs are a touch more willing to kick the ball back out from the post. You can drive on Rudy Gobert and risk abject humiliation, or you can do literally anything else. Here's Tim Duncan choosing humiliation.

Here's Tim Duncan choosing humiliation again.

Gobert turns games into long sequences from Michael Bay movies—all crashing and violence and physical bluster, with very little payoff. The Jazz, in a high-scoring period for a high-scoring league, regularly hold teams to scores in the low 80s and high 70s. Earlier this month, the Jazz held the extremely hard-to-hold offenses of Dallas, Portland, and San Antonio to scores of 87, 76, and 81 respectively. The points per possession numbers and opponent shooting percentages are even more murderous. What Rudy Gobert does works. The bigger question is what it's doing.

It is, I should admit, not doing that much for me. I generally subscribe to Bethlehem Shoals's theory that there has never been a good NBA game in which neither team scored over 100, and nothing brings me down more than a Thibodeau-coached defense grinding some magnificent Western Conference offense into a twisted wreckage of bricked fadeaways. But maybe we are a little spoiled. This is our NBA Golden Age, and we realize it, even if we are perhaps a bit bratty about it in the moment.

Basketball is in such a good place aesthetically right now that a team like the Hawks, who have zero future Hall of Famers on their roster, could win the Eastern Conference simply by playing prettier basketball than everyone else. The last four NBA champions were teams that whipped the ball all over the court, shot a ton of threes, and played at a pleasingly quick pace. He may not be coaching in it at the moment, but the NBA in 2015 is Mike D'Antoni's league. Where once ostensibly enlightened fans sought out fluid, pure-basketball teams like Steve Nash's Suns, it's hard to find a good team that isn't playing the game beautifully. (It's the Chicago Bulls, by the way, if that is something you're interested in.)

The Jazz, it should be noted, are not a good team. Even after their February onslaught of wins, Utah is still ten games under .500 and starts two players with PER's under 10, which is a technical way of saying they're about fifty percent worse than the average player. So, despite their upward trajectory, you would not tune into a Jazz game to watch good basketball. You especially would not tune in to watch beautiful basketball. What you might tune in to see is the destruction of attractive basketball—the reduction of something graceful and pleasing to something like a smoking crater. What Rudy Gobert brings to the NBA landscape may be an unsightly departure from its modern style, but it is no small departure.

As I watched Utah's 16-point win over Portland, a game in which Gobert blocked five shots and anchored a merciless annihilation of a top-10 NBA offense, I kept thinking about the original 1954 Godzilla. There's visceral appeal to Godzilla in that movie, ugly as its effects may look to us now, that goes beyond Godzilla's basic Big Ole Lizard charms. He's an out-of-control monster, but the real shock comes from the way in which he is juxtaposed with simple fixtures of modernity. Godzilla tearing down rows of power lines; Godzilla stomping on corner stores; Godzilla torching suburban mini-mansions. The more Godzilla destroys, the more the viewer marvels at how many shiny things there are to flatten.

This is what Rudy Gobert does to NBA games. This is how he shows us just how far NBA offenses have come. The Blazers, the Mavericks, and the Spurs each sport offenses that represent something like the pinnacle of the modern game. They are tall and shimmering monuments to progress. On a bleak night in March, after sixty games of staring at them, it can be easy to forget just how tall those skyscrapers really stand. Rudy Gobert, as he levels them to rubble, reminds us.