Schrődinger’s Jump Shot: A Philosophical Defense of Swaggy P

On Sunday, the Los Angeles Lakers ruled out Nick Young for the remainder of the season. Young, known by literally anyone who has ever heard of him as Swaggy P, is a mercurial shooting guard with a history of ill-advised threes and getting snitched on by teammates. He’s been having a decent overall season this year but the Lakers are actively trying to lose games right now. They already shut down Timofey Mozgov and Luol Deng and now it’s P’s turn to ride the pine. And you know what, that’s okay with him.

P is unlike NBA stars who are celebrities after the fact like LeBron James or Steph Curry. Those guys prioritize basketball above all else. P doesn’t roll that way. P is a celebrity first. Even when he’s on the court, he places entertainment ahead of athletics. He is a movie star masquerading as a basketball player. It is thus fitting that the moment on the court P is most famous for is not a play, but a celebration:

This is P during March of 2014, just over three years ago. In this photo, P has just launched a step back three. He looked dope as he did it. P has turned around to celebrate making his shot before seeing if the shot actually went in. P knew he didn’t miss. Of course, he did miss, but in this moment P does not know that yet.

People called him arrogant and selfish for doing this, and they also called him childish and a bad influence. People thought he was cocky, never stopping to ask themselves, “What if we’re wrong?” What if head-in-the-clouds hubris was not the reason behind P’s swag in this moment? What if P has other motivations for ignoring his shot? We know he’s not doing it because he cares about transition defense, but maybe there’s some part of his underlying philosophical worldview that tells him not watching his shot is actually the most logical thing to do. Maybe Swaggy P is swaggy not because he’s cocky, but because he’s philosophically committed. Let’s start at the beginning.

Before becoming who he is today, Nick Young was a student at the University of Southern California. Young -not yet evolved into Swaggy P- was likely in an introductory philosophy class, and if he was he likely read all about a man named Erwin Schrődinger, and the paradox of his famous cat. Schrődinger’s Cat is a thought experiment that begins by asking you to imagine that you have a cat, and that this cat is inside a box. You do not know whether the cat is alive or dead. And because you do not know, the cat is in a state of “quantum superposition,” and is thus simultaneously both alive and dead. One interpretation of the paradox argues that that because you cannot know whether the cat is alive or dead until you open the box, it is essentially the act of opening the box and looking that kills or saves the cat. Had you not opened the box, the cat would have gone on being both alive and dead, but by opening the box and seeing that it was dead, you have killed it. This is a very rudimentary explanation but you get the idea.

Having read this, P would have laid awake in bed that night, pondering. He would have blocked out the various collegiate sounds and sirens echoing around his dorm room and thought, “If observation is all it takes to remove something from conditional ambiguity, maybe if I simply do not observe, I can technically prevent things from happening!” P would have shot up from bed and written all this down. Had Twitter been around at the time, P would have tweeted that shit immediately. But alas, it was 2004, so P only had a composition notebook.

If it's the case that Nick Young became obsessed with Schrődinger, then the real reason Swaggy P turned around before watching his jumper fall was not because he’s an arrogant clown, but because he was inspired to believe that if he never observed his ball missing, he would never actually miss. P might legitimately believe that much like the opening of the box kills Schroedinger’s cat, the observance of his jump shot is what makes it miss. As long as he doesn’t look at the end result, the shot will go on forever being both a make and a miss, but neither definitively. This is important to P.

It's important because deep down, P is about one thing and one thing only, and that one thing is buckets. Just straight buckets. And as long as he never misses, he is never not getting buckets. Thanks to Schrodinger’s Cat, P might have created a form of reality in which he is constantly living his dreams of bucketry. It would be following the discovery of this bucket utopia that Nick Young made his final metamorphosis into Swaggy P. He would have seen the light. He would have grown from bucket enthusiast into Bucket Incarnate. Living in a self-created reality like he’s the main character from Legion.

If you still aren’t buying the idea that P might be the world’s greatest living philosopher, you might point out that P has taken thousands of shots in addition to the one shown above, and he has not turned away from any of those. If you are one of those people that would argue this, go kick rocks, eat a Snickers, and stop raining on the parade. This is just a possibility we're talking about here.

Whatever the case though, P should instantly become every single academic’s favorite player. Even if P is just a preposterously cocky man-child with eccentric social media habits, just the tiiiiiiny chance that the opposite might be true should cause philosophy professors to flock to his games like lemmings to the sea. P might be a thought experiment come to life. He really might be. A man who believes he has the power, through logic, to never miss a shot. It is utterly fascinating. So next time P heaves an ugly three early in the shot clock and doesn’t watch it, ignore whether the shot goes in or not and just think about the possibility that in P’s mind, he already knows the answer. Buckets.