A perfectly executed jump shot is among the most beautiful things in all of sports. Dunks are more ostentatiously athletic, but they end in a staccato thud, a brute pounding of the basket. Like baseball swings, tennis shots, and tackles in football, dunks have the quality of abrupt endings, of momentous and violent collisions between moving objects and determined people. A jump shot, by contrast, is all flow. An athlete takes one or two steps, pauses to gather his body, and then leaps—straight up, if he’s doing things correctly. As he rises, he holds the ball in the palm of one hand while the other gently cradles it from behind. The shooting arm is bent at a ninety-degree angle, its upper half parallel to the floor. The shooting elbow travels upward on a narrow path within inches of the torso, to insure an efficient and steady glide; the other arm folds over, framing the face of the shooter. Then the shooting arm uncoils, exploding into a rigid staff: the ball is launched upward, at an angle, usually, between forty and sixty degrees relative to the shooter’s body. At the top of the player’s leap, before letting the ball go, his shooting hand offers its final adjustments by flicking quickly forward and letting the ball roll backward off the fingertips, insuring that it spins in the opposite direction from which it’s travelling. The backspin works to insure that whatever the ball grazes—the backboard, a piece of the rim—will have minimal effect on its path. When all of this is done just so, the ball drops noiselessly into the woven nylon net, rippling the ropes as little as possible on its way through. By then, a confident shooter will already be on his way down the floor, perhaps with a hand raised in triumph as thousands of people scream and high-five strangers. A perfect shot is swift and noiseless and, when delivered at the right time, can end an opponent’s chances. This is why the man who has lately become its most storied practitioner has been called the Baby-Faced Assassin.
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