Warp and Weft

With no offense intended to Alex, I noted that he gleefully selected the eldest and most injured members of the Magic to critique, as if to reserve a place on the Look How Bad They Are Now diving board. I’m here to talk about youth and joy and hope. I’m here to talk about Elfrid Payton, and I’m here to bring you lazier jokes.

            

(All images shamelessly borrowed from elsewhere)

Elfrid Payon is like the guy from the Frigo Cheese Heads brand cheese sticks you’re eating while you read this and I’m eating while I refresh the site’s stats to see if you’re reading this. But hair can be distracting. We might, for example, think of Andrew Bynum as only a hairdo, when he is in fact an incredibly disappointing basketball player.

I extend to you this Cheese Head simile not because I want to bring up Payton’s hair, but because I want to remind you that the man does not have a spine. I mean this not necessarily in the Momma Held Him Too Tight sense. I mean that he warps his mass like the creature from The Abyss, materializing next to the basket and then popping it out to the perimeter. He, like our beloved mozzarella snacks, bends without breaking.

This seems as much grounds for critique as for praise. One might describe his form as “mamby-pamby.” The most generous assessment of his shooting I’ve seen in print is “competent.” Elfrid sees chances to get at the basket and often as not shuttles the ball off, elsewhere. This puzzling behavior manifests despite a demonstrable ability to manufacture a layup where no layup should have been—like I said, dude warps. But we’re left wanting the brittle to accompany our bend.

Perhaps the perfect yin to his amorphous yang, then, is the human fused vertebrae himself, Dewayne Dedmon. 

What Dedmon lacks in actual talent he recoups through raw intensity. The first note I wrote on him during Summer League viewing was as follows: “Dewayne will hit a dude if needs be.” And one invariably does the background digging. And one invariably finds the seeds of a great story. And one invariably finds that Sports Illustrated has already done a fantastic short film on the subject. Salient points for those who prefer spoilers are that his Jehovas’ Witness mother would not allow him to play basketball, but when he turned eighteen he played junior college, got taller somehow, redshirted onto USC. Hope from troubled circumstances, rah-rah. The aftermath of this story is that he went into an NBA draft not quite ready for the big show (600 minutes in 2013-14) but more than ready for Santa Cruz D-League ball. He seems to have developed well—remember he’s a relative newcomer to the game—and this year the hard-hitting big man returns. Maybe it’s just all of the broken hearts in the wake of Bismack Biyambos and Larry Sanderses before him, but there’s a potential here. Announcers who watch him talk of Big in a way reminiscent of Georgetown-era Patrick Ewing observers. The on-the-court Mean is there, the Big is there. The Talent? Maybe not. But two outta three ain’t bad.

-David