You’re a kid out on the playground, imagining you’re in the last few seconds of the biggest game on the planet. You’re on the verge of just being tall enough to curl your wrist over the rim for the first time. You and your friends take turns running from halfcourt to get up enough steam to leap into the air with that mix of athleticism, artistry and in-your-face WHAM required to execute …
The Dunk.
One of your friends cheers you on as you make your approach:
“The Nuggets and Clippers are all tied up at 100. Vinnie breaks free of his defenders and springs into the air from the free-throw line with one second to spare. He soars toward the rim, cocks his arm back and slams down a HUGE FACE-MELTING DUNK AT THE BUZZER! NUGGETS WIN! NUGGETS WIN! NUGGETS WIN!”
On Monday night, Aaron Gordon took all those kid hoop dreams and made them real, knocking down the first-ever buzzer-beater game-winning dunk in NBA playoff history.
It was, in other words, a Dunk for the Ages.
The look on his face as he skipped across the court after was that of a giant puppy who had just caught his first ball midair. It was the face of every 14-year-old on every playground in America after that first jam finally goes in.
The Dunk, of course, is one of the great crowd-pleasing signatures of sports, like a home run or a hole-in-one, only more so. It’s acrobatics, improv and hammer swing combined.
A truly great dunk can defy gravity itself, like the famous Air Jordan symbol, arms and legs splayed as he literally flies through the air on his way to the rim. It’s the ultimate statement of basketball swagger, a take-that-you-earthbound-losers posterizing of your opponents.
The Air Gordon Dunk changed the whole momentum of the playoff series for the Nuggets, setting up a 7th-game smackdown of the Clippers that sent Denver decisively into the next round of the playoffs.
And what made this jaw-dropping dunk so especially special was that it was a collaboration between one of the most dynamic duos in Sports.
My former colleague at the Washington Post, Kevin Merida, was recently bragging about what he called the best duo in basketball right now, LeBron James and Luka Doncic.
He said they outshone a golden age of duos that includes Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown of the Boston Celtics, Stephen Curry and Jimmy Butler of the Golden State Warriors, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard of the Milwaukee Bucks, and Kawhi Leonard and James Harden of the Los Angeles Clippers.
Funny, Kevin forgot to mention the best basketball player in the game right now, Nikola Jokic, and his partner in crime Aaron Gordon.
Oh and by the way, James and Doncic and Leonard and Harden are out of the playoffs already. Jokic and Gordon are decidedly not.
Now Jokic, I must admit, has more often been paired with Jamal Murray as the Nuggets’ dynamic duo, but I make the case that Jokic and Gordon are the true right and left atriums at the beating heart of the team.
Let’s take that dunk as exhibit A. Jokic threw up an off-the-back-foot, three-point Hail Mary with about three seconds left in the Monday night game. Even he knew it didn’t have a prayer.
But Gordon somehow knew right where to be, leaping into the air as the shot hit its arc, rising to meet the overshot ball perfectly on the other side of the rim, suspending himself in midair a moment and then slamming a put-back dunk through the iron microseconds before the backboard light came on, signaling End of Time.
Gordon does this all the time, this twin telepathy thing, finding mysteriously open spots right beneath the basket where Jokic somehow knows he will be at just the right moment for one of his no-look passes.
The ball often slithers its way through dumbfounded defenders’ arms and legs on its way from Jokic to Gordon like a homing pigeon darting home.
It’s like quantum physics in which too distant particles are synched up somehow on an invisible string the rest of us mortals can’t see.
Einstein would call this kind of basketball “spooky action at a distance.”
This pairing has bewitched us all.
“Gordon’s become the heart and soul of the Nuggets since Denver acquired him from Orlando in a trade right before 2021 deadline,” our Nuggets writer, Vinny Benedetto, told me.
His supernatural connection with Jokic continues off the court, where they’ve developed a deep friendship, often finishing each other’s sentences.
“It transcends basketball,” Gordon told Yahoo Sports. “Even if I never play another game again, I’d hang out with that guy. I’d run through a wall for him.”
When he joined the Nuggets, Gordon studied what his other teammates were best at and decided to settle into the garbage man role even though he once was a leading man himself. He said he learned unselfishness from the Joker.
“Gordon’s been willing to do just about whatever it takes to impact winning whether that’s serving as a back-up center when Nikola Jokic sits, developing a more reliable 3-point shot and guarding the likes of Kawhi Leonard and LeBron James in physical playoff series,” said Benedetto.
“Let me do the dirty work — let me run the floor, let me rebound, let me post up, let me move when Nikola is double-teamed,” Gordon once told his old coach, Michael Malone, according to Yahoo Sports. “Let me play behind the defense and let the game be easier for everyone else.”
That decision set up the tandem that is the bedrock at the Nuggets’ core.
That decision is exactly what put Gordon under the basket Monday night, waiting for Jokic’s throwaways again, a throwaway Gordon turned into the greatest slama-lama ding-dong dunk in NBA history.
“Now,” said Benedetto, “he has a moment that will long be remembered in Nuggets lore.”