Thomas, Mathurin, and outdated paths to greatness
What happens when the world doesn't appreciate what you do the way it used to? We're about to find out.
Leave it to Rick Carlisle to put my feelings into beautiful words.
“A challenge with Benn,” Carlisle told Caitlin Cooper of Basketball, She Wrote, “is that he saw a path to being a great player in the NBA that was a little bit dated,” specifically referring to Mathurin’s reverence for the ball-dominant style of Kobe Bryant.
I heard that and immediately went back to a Cam Thomas interview from a few years ago, in which he proclaimed that Bryant is “the staple of what I view basketball as.”
Nine years after Bryant’s retirement, and five years after his death, there are still hordes of fans and players who think of Bryant as the peak of what a basketball player can do, what a basketball player should be.
More than the footwork, more than the flash, it was the self-belief. The Mamba Mentality™. You’ve put in the work. You can make the shot. More importantly, you deserve to take the shot.
Back in the 2000s and early 2010s, the league was dominated by guys who made their living getting Tough Buckets, most of whom patterned their game in one form or another after Michael Jordan. Kobe Bryant was the leading light, of course, but Dwyane Wade, Vince Carter… even bigger players like Paul Pierce, Carmelo Anthony, and Tracy McGrady liked to work guys off the dribble and get to their spots for pull-ups, fadeaways, turnarounds, and other hyphenates and closed compound words. The Tough Bucket-getters excelled at scoring from everywhere, but picture the highlight reels. It’s a whole lot of one-on-one battles in which the shotmaker comes out on top after a dizzying array of moves.
The appeal is obvious. Backyard and pickup basketball players will play nearly as much one-on-one as five-on-five. Regardless of how you feel about the state of the game then, or the particular players involved, there’s something pure and beautiful about entering the ring with one defender and emerging victorious.
For many talented youths, the seductive allure of modeling their game after the time’s predominant star(s) was irresistible. And it worked! The AAU circuit and all its attendant pageantry, its heavy reliance upon individual stars playing as many games as possible to create YouTube and TikTok highlight reels, reward guys who can make lemonade out of lemons. It’s a valuable skill to have, no doubt, but it’s also a pretty skill. “Damn,” sideline spectators will say after a particularly difficult shot, “that’s a Tough Bucket.”
And for players like Bennedict Mathurin and Cam Thomas, getting Tough Buckets (and the mentality required) has never failed them. It led them through successful college stints, got them into the NBA, and has resulted in plenty of points on the world’s most competitive stage.
But coach Carlisle hit the nail on the head. The NBA of old would’ve rewarded Thomas and Mathurin with immediate, massive paydays. The NBA of new, however, doesn’t value Tough Buckets quite the same.
Sure, it’s nice to have the ability to make shots under duress, but it’s so much better to generate Easy Shots in the first place! Efficient, high-volume scoring is still the single most critical skill, but we no longer measure efficiency by contested jumper conversion rate.
Passing, off-ball movement, spacing, and quick decision-making have never been more important, as those are the things that lead to Easy Shots at the rim and from beyond the arc. There’s still a role for the ball-pounding isolation artist, but that player has to be utterly elite for that playstyle to lead to team success — think Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
Mathurin and Thomas have made some concessions to modernity. Notably, they’ve traded some of Bryant’s tough midranges for threes. But the days of pounding the ball into dust to create separation from one defender are over for all but historical greats. How can a Tough Bucket-getter thrive in an era where his primary skill, his way of being, is devalued?