In Praise of Unexpected Explosions
There are two ways to think about explosions and each is dependent upon the existence or nonexistence of prior expectation that an explosion would occur. If you expect an explosion to happen, and then one happens, that’s one thing. If you don’t expect an explosion to happen, and then one happens, that’s an entirely different thing that is impossibly more overwhelming and memorable. Think about the first time you went to see a Michael Bay movie. If you are like me, it was probably Bad Boys or Armageddon or Pearl Harbor. You probably left the theater on those occasions pretty blown away. They are all incredibly entertaining movies that, despite their flaws, included a ton of unexpected explosions. Granted, the Pearl Harbor explosions were less unexpected, given the subject matter, but the movie was made in a way that still made them pretty shocking. The characters didn’t expect the explosions, and Michael Bay was not yet a punchline, so the movie mostly worked. Now though, audiences so expect Michael Bay to include explosions at all times in all places that his movies, while jam-packed with more fire and action than ever before, fall flat. By now, we all expect Michael Bay to blow shit up, so when he does it, we are like wow great congrats on getting your rocks off Michael but now can we talk about character development please? The explosions in Transformers are not inherently more or less visually fantastic than those in his earlier movies, but they are several degrees of magnitude less exciting purely because we already assume they are coming.
The entire point here is to emphasize that our prior expectations have a significant influence over how we engage with and subsequently assess our experiences, and in particular, our experiences with explosions. I could have just said that, but a small part of me is afraid that if we don’t talk about Michael Bay often enough he might make a seventh and eight Transformers movie and- oh my god they are already making them. The expectation of explosion and its impact on entertainment value is a concept that I think translates pretty fluently to basketball, so it is in this direction I will now turn.
Tony Delk
Since the 2000-2001 season, there have been 57 instances of a player scoring 40 or more points in an NBA regular season game for the first and only time of their career. They had never done it before, and have never done it since. Explosions of such a singular nature are inherently unexpected, since they’d literally never happened before for any of these players. The fans at those games must have been so shocked and amazed. What an experience. Upon entering the arena that night, none of those fans had any reason to assume this random guy would take them on a magical journey to the stars, but lo and behold, it happened. That none of the scorers ever reached 40 again only further proves the fans were justified in their failure to predict the scoring barrage. These things aren’t supposed to happen! These explosive performances were indeed quite out of the blue, but the goal of this piece is not to celebrate just any old unexpected 40 point game. We’ve gotta find the most spectacularly unexpected 40 point games, and to do that, we’ve gotta make some cuts.
Of that original group of 57 players, 18 were at some point in their career named to an All-Star team. All-Stars are expected to perform at a high level, so even if their forte was something other than scoring, greatness was still at least somewhat expected by the fans. They are stars. Draymond Green has never scored 40 in a game but if he did I wouldn’t be totally shocked, you know? I’d be surprised, and perhaps I’d say, “huh, wow, nice Dray,” but it wouldn’t disrupt my day in any meaningful way. My eyebrows would not rise above their normal resting place is basically what I’m saying. That’s not what we’re looking for. We want eruptions that may or may not lead to the pooping of pants due to how startling they were. If on the day after the game, stadium maintenance staff didn’t have a conversation in the break room about how annoying it was to clean up brains off of the stadium floor because too many fans had their minds blown by how shocking Player X’s point total was, then the scoring outburst wasn’t unexpected enough. All-Stars scoring in bunches doesn’t blow minds, so sorry Josh Howard and Paul Millsap, you guys can take a hike. Also say goodbye to, among others, Kawhi Leonard, Michael Finley, and Mehmet Okur.
Before we move on, just a few words about Mehmet Okur, and how it was he arrived on this list. Or I guess now, off this list. Two things here. First, Okur getting taken off the list means Okur made an All-Star team. It happened in 2007. That’s insane. Look at him:
Mehmet Okur
He is the man finger-rolling the basketball in such a hideous way that the player defending him turned into the human version of that awkward-seal-with-five-chins meme. Gross. The second thing about Okur is that his being on our list in the first place means he once had a 40 point game. I can’t decide whether that is more or less insane than him being an All-Star, but in any case, upon discovering this eternal truth I went down a pretty unhealthy Mehmet Okur rabbit hole, which is definitely among the weirder and more Turkish rabbit holes to go down. I discovered that in the history of the NBA, only 14 players have had a 40 point game with 9 or more rebounds, 3 or more made 3’s, and fewer than 20 field goal attempts. Okur is one of them. Same with LeBron, and Durant, and Giannis, and surprisingly but also enjoyably current podcast host Richard Jefferson. I am fascinated by Mehmet Okur. I also learned he was packaged with a 2012 first round pick in the trade that brought Gerald Wallace from Portland to the then-New Jersey Nets. That first rounder became Damian Lillard. What a weird career Okur had. I wonder if he ever was in a grunge band. He sure had the goatee for it. More on him later.
Back to our list. Of the remaining 39 players on our list of single-time 40 point scorers, 25 averaged over 15 points per game during at least one season of their career. For those guys, scoring in *relative* bunches was not really out of the ordinary, even though they never became All-Stars. If you can score 15 per game, you can be reasonably relied upon to score 20 every now and then. And if you can score 20 every now and then, 40 points is not beyond the realm of possibility if you get hot. It’s certainly an outlier, but scoring in general was something at least somewhat expected. If you’re expected to score, sorry, you don’t get to make this list, seeing as the entire point of this piece is to praise people who are not expected to score. Adios Aaron Brooks, Eddy Curry, Tyreke Evans, Gerald Green, and the rest of you.
Goodbye, Gerald Green
Now we have 14 players left. 14 may seem like a workable number, but it’s not small enough. For our next threshold, I am going to introduce what I have named the Bondurant Corollary. Here’s what it is: In the 2012 movie Lawless, Tom Hardy and Jason Clarke and Shia Labeouf play a trio of brothers who are backwoods bootleggers in 1930’s Virginia. Tom Hardy and Jason Clarke (but especially Tom Hardy) play characters who are big time badasses, and they do most of the work running the family bootlegging and distillery business. They don’t fuck around. In contrast, Shia Labeouf plays a character who at least at the outset is a shameful coward. Nobody takes him seriously. Except for some of the harder gangsters in the movie who are smarter, and more careful. They take him seriously not because of who he is as an individual, but because of who he is in the grand scheme of things. He’s a Bondurant, and the other Bondurants (especially Tom Hardy) are unfuckwithable, meaning Shia's cowardly character is transitively unfuckwithable. So in accordance with the Bondurant Corollary, I am going to remove Damien Wilkins from our list. Not because he’s a good player, because he most definitely is not. He’s in the G-League right now, and he’s 38 years old. The reason I have to remove Damien Wilkins is because much like the coward Jack Bondurant is a Bondurant, the washed-up Damien Wilkins is a Wilkins. He’s the nephew of Dominique Wilkins. Get the fuck out of here if you are related to Dominique Wilkins. Dominique Wilkins is unfuckwithable, which means all his relatives are unfuckwithable. Goodbye Damien.
The Bondurants
Our list now has 13 people on it. That seems like enough. Here’s who is left:
Trevor Ariza, Rodrigue Beaubois, Bojan Bogdanovic, Corey Brewer, Jordan Crawford, Tony Delk, Linas Kleiza, C.J. Miles, Darius Miles, Anthony Morrow, Terrence Ross, Ramon Sessions, and C.J. Watson.
Each of these 13 players scored 40 points once and only once. They never made an All-Star team, and they never averaged over 15 points per game in any season of their careers. These guys are definitively NOT scorers. They are perfect. Each of them deserves your praise. I could narrow this group down even further to find the single most unexpected explosion, but I don’t want to, and also I already know that answer, and you should too. It’s staring you right in the face. Or I guess it's not staring, but it's doing that thing that horses do with their lips when they want to say "shucks" but they can't because they are horses.
Linas Kleiza is here to have a good time.
There are a lot of things in the world that people are not supposed to do. People in line at Starbucks are not supposed to ask for change from the people behind them. People who live in apartment buildings are not supposed to drag their old Christmas trees down the hallway without cleaning up. Drivers in the far left lane are not supposed to go the speed limit. All of these are known as things that aren’t supposed to happen. Even more than all of those things though, Linas Kleiza is NOT supposed to score 41 points.
He just isn’t. That’s why of the 409 games he played in his NBA career, he did not score 41 points in 408 of those games. That’s over 99% of the time. Linas Kleiza is just as likely to not score 41 points as Purell is to kill all the bacteria on your hands. Due to the fact that Linas Kleiza is so reliably not a 40 point scorer, that singular occasion in which he was one stands out like Dikembe Mutombo in the Wonka Factory. If you were at that Linas Kleiza game, you remember it as “That game where Linas Kleiza scored 41 points.” That’s just a fact. It is seared into your mind. You probably have dreams about it. Kleiza definitely does.
I suppose that if during that game you proposed to your significant other and he or she accepted, you might remember that game as the night you got engaged, and if you didn’t remember it that way, your spouse might be quite upset. However, you should not be faulted for even still remembering it as the Linas Kleiza game because while it is entirely possible that you get engaged more than one time, it is utterly impossible for Linas Kleiza to score 41 points more than one time, seeing as he is now retired from the NBA and working as the curmudgeonly foreman at a shoe factory in Lithuania (I assume).
In the nine games prior to the one in which he morphed into Prometheus, stole fire from the gods, and injected it directly into his shooting arm, Kleiza averaged barely over 8 points per contest. He broke ten in only two of those games, and he went scoreless in one of them. Over the course of the season he scored under ten points on 37 occasions, and on no other night did he even break 30 points. He went scoreless 6 times. In fact, in his entire career Kleiza only scored 30 points or more twice. One of them is the 41 point game that brought us to this point, and the other is one in which he scored 30 exactly.
It’s not just Kleiza’s personal story that makes his outburst so facemelting. It’s also the team context in which he did it. It’s not like Kleiza was the only scorer on a bottom-dwelling group composed of the league’s flotsam and jetsam. He was on a playoff team. With two All-NBA players. Allen Iverson and Carmelo Anthony were on Kleiza’s team for this season, and so were J.R. Smith and Kenyon Martin, and they all averaged more shots and points per game than Kleiza did. Iverson, Anthony, Smith, and Martin combined to break 30 points 50 times over the course of that season, and they broke 40 a collective 4 times. Those guys are supposed to score. Not Kleiza. But don’t tell Kleiza that.
Linas Kleiza is here to end you.