Jon Bois Exposes an Existential Nightmare. Baron Davis From 89 Feet.

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Fistoh

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Edited By Fistoh

This is a piece responding to this short documentary about a remarkable basketball shot just under 20 years ago now (I JUST REALIZED THE 19th ANNIVERSARY OF THE GAME IT'S LITERALLY TOMORROW AS I'M WRITING I WANT TO DIE THIS ISN'T FUNNY GOD) it is a fantastic video that showcases how some things just really can't be measured or predicted by data and numbers. Jon presents the events far more elegantly than I ever could, so if you're dedicated to the idea of reading this I would recommend spending the 15 minutes to marvel at something that happened. If you're half-dedicated to the idea of reading this, I do a good enough job. carry on.

--

I would call myself a half-active sports fan. I don't have the time or dedication to actively watch games and keep up with news, yet I occasionally find myself enthralled in the spectacle of competition. Sometimes for a season, sometimes for multiple. I loosely adhere to my team allegiances but I'm mostly just there for the ride.

Tell two groups of people to decide who's better and see what they come up with. By whatever boundaries they establish, whatever nebulous game principles, it becomes concrete when agreed upon. It becomes a contract; by these rules we will compete. By those rules they do, yet still we are not omnipotent game masters; we are strictly scoped by humanity's greatest foe, the rules of the physical universe. The universe as we understand it abides by rules just as we do in our games. Unlike the rules we come up with for our games, these rules weren't agreed on, they were forced on us and we don't know why. We weren't even told what the rules were. But we've been figuring it out for a while now, and it seems like we have a pretty good picture, at least within the scope of what's important to daily life.

By our understanding of these rules we can try to estimate how likely any certain something is to occur, the study of probability. Using statistics we can perform operations on data sets and get a pretty good picture about the likelihood of any given event. If you make two teams play each other in complete matches for all of eternity while recording each and every little number theoretically, as time goes on, you will get a more and more accurate prediction of who will win at any given point in the game. Patterns always emerge, because when there is rules there are patterns. It makes sense. Forget all that.

Forget all of it, it's been shattered.

Jon Bois makes videos on the internet. His content is incredibly well-crafted, You probably know him from twitter. He's hobbes. His series Pretty Good is a show about stories that are pretty good. This is a pretty good story. It's also a nightmare that I cannot stop thinking about. I'm not playing up the despondent tone for shits and giggles (I am a little bit). What ostensibly happened doesn't make sense. There isn't any logic to it, it breaks all the patterns, it just shouldn't have happened.

February 17, 2001. Milwaukee. This is basketball, by the way. The third quarter is just short of finished, there are only tenths of a second remaining. One Baron Davis is inbounding the ball, and he plans on making a shot to take the lead at the end of the quarter. Baron Davis is standing 89 feet (just over 27 meters) from the rim. That's far.

That's really far. That would be the longest shot in NBA history and not by inches. How long is a basketball court? Turns out it's slightly longer than 89 feet. His teammate is by the hoop as the ball sails over halfcourt in a pristine parabolic arc, he has his arms raised in the air. He knows it's going in. But he couldn't. But the ball does in fact go in, and it doesn't just go in, it slips effortlessly. I'm not convinced there was any contact with the rim at all.

No one would ever just think, "that shot is going in." Go stand 89 feet away from a basketball hoop and shoot for a while and you tell me it's even possible. No you're not a professional NBA basketball player, but this isn't a skill that professional NBA basketball players have. Back-court shot attempts happen semi-regularly in basketball, though it's widely seen as a mostly futile effort, according to Jon Bois circa 2017 it's 2.4%, and he went and marked the eventual location of the ball. Most weren't even close. You know what the hardest part is? Getting the ball to travel 89 feet; and even if it does, from that distance any minimal changes from the optimal angle of release is going to wildly change where the ball ends up. 89 feet.

Jon went searching for comparable shots, Magic Johnson, notably good at basketball, hit a backcourt buzzerbeater in a playoff game a long enough time ago that we don't have an exact picture of from how far the shot was taken from, but it seems to be around 80-85 feet. Whatever it was, it wasn't 89. Vince Carter, also notably good at basketball, hit a 70 foot buzzerbeater shot in 2016. Not 89, but at that distance it doesn't matter much. But watch the footage. Vince takes the inbound pass, starts his shot, decides he didn't like that look and sets up again to shoot just as time expires. That's deliberate. That's intent.

But it's Vince Carter, who is good at basketball. Understatement aside, these two shots were made by hall of fame caliber players. Actual legends who defined the game during their time. Baron Davis is a good basketball player, he played really well in a playoff series in which his team (the lowest seeded or ranked team) beat their opponents (the highest seed). Oh did I say beat? I meant they wiped the floor with them, and he was a major reason why. They were eliminated in the next round. He does analysis on TNT now.

This is not to disparage Baron Davis, but to say that he was in absolutely no place to be standing 89 feet from a basketball hoop and being certain that you are going to make the shot. Certain enough to say it out loud. Do we know he actually called it? Well, even though the two were standing in the back corner of the court, even though we watch Baron rev up a god damn football pass, his defender felt compelled to block.

Sorry, I think it's important to remind you, I said there were tenths of a second left? Yeah 0.7 seconds. Baron Davis had less than 1 second to inbound the ball, line up his throwing arm and chuck that ball so perfectly that it sails through a hole barely wider than it. He decided to call out his defender, and he was blocked. And it wasn't an effortless garbage time block or joking indulgence of the ridiculousness of the situation; no, he tries his best to seriously play the game of basketball and try to block this shot that by any measure of consistency, of regularity of-

Doesn't matter. That shot was going in. Nothing could have prevented it. You could go back in time, murder a baby James Naismith so he never invents basketball, and something would correct in the flow of spacetime so that Baron Walter Louis Davis would be in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on February 17th 2001 to throw a 9" diameter ball into a 18" diameter hole from 89 feet away while some guy tries his absolute hardest to stop him.

This has to be some kind of inflection point where all of the split timelines in human history converge to a single shared moment of inexplicable greatness. To put it in context, Jon decided to pick up from Vince's shot in 2016. In the year that followed, 57 shot attempts were made from at least 70 feet. At 0 for 57, that gives us a success rate of 0%. 4 shots hit the rim, which is a 7% success rate. This includes perennial distance shooting threats like Steph Curry and Andre Iguodala. Decades of incredible shooters; LeBron James, Ray Allen, Jason Kidd, they all tried long shots, they even hit some of them, but none of them hit one that far. They weren't sure. They didn't know. There was uncertainty, and as soon as there's uncertainty it can't happen.

Jon points out that among players who attempted at least 100 3 pointers (from roughly 24 feet/7m) in the previous season Baron Davis ranked dead last in three point percentage. Dead last. That is to say, no one under him.

But, Baron Davis knew, Vince Carter knew, Magic Johnson knew. That's what matters apparently. If you know you know if you don't then airball.

On February 17 2001 at the end of the third quarter, Baron Davis knew exactly what was going to happen. He was going to make the longest NBA shot in history.

That counted.

November 4th 2015. Time is called and Jae Crowder has the ball on the sidelines,

Okay look, I know I did that really cute basketball court length joke before but it's important now, a regulation NBA court is 94 feet (28.65m). He's outside the court, outside the game, across the court from the game is in fact, because he's passing to his team on the other end of the court, and he's standing 95 feet (add about 30 cm and fuck off) away from them. His plan? Inbound the ball by chucking it and hoping one of his teammates can force someIt went in. Banks off the backboard and in.

From ninety-five feet. The basket doesn't count, you can't score from out of bounds, so this doesn't go down in stat books. It's as if it were erased from history because it was just such an astronomically small chance of happening that the mere fact that it did happen caused some quantum shit to happen and

--

I can't try anymore, I've been trying for hours. There isn't an explanation. This is a thing that happened because it did and it is and that is all.

In 2001 the longest shot in NBA history was made. in the 19 years that have followed, dozens of people tried, the best of the best, to even come close and only one of the very best of the best could even come close.

Then some guy lobbing it into a crowd of dudes pushing each other nails it from outside the boundary of the game itself, shattering the composed reality we accepted as truth when we first starting figuring out what the rules for the game were going to be. For a single moment.

A half-committed roar followed by widespread mumbling from the crowd as players are sheepishly looking about trying to find some kind of explanation for what they just saw. Forget it, didn't happen, keep playing.

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Fistoh

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No but actually it's just a bunch of dudes throwing a ball around who cares.

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Nodima

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Thank you!

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OurSin_360

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What's crazy is that these types of shots are becoming more and more common place as kids these days are practicing them like regular jumpers lol.

Also every time I think of Baron Davis I cringe cause of that horrific injury he had.