UrbanUpdate

In any other season, Ben Simmons would be a revelation. Through ten games, the 6’10” Sixer is averaging 17.8 points, 10.1 rebounds, and 8.0 assists a night. His subliminal playmaking, rangy athleticism, and keen feel for the game make Simmons a nightly triple-double threat; he’s no less deft or versatile at the defensive end, either. Some have compared him to LeBron or Magic Johnson, while others invoke Lamar Odom, one of basketball’s great what-ifs. As far as rookie seasons go, the only real comparison is Oscar Robertson. There’s every reason to believe that the 21-year-old is a once-in-a-generation talent whose mix of size, athleticism, and skill is rewiring our sense of what’s possible in the sport.

In basketball parlance, Ben Simmons is what we now call a “unicorn,” after Kevin Durant’s description of fellow upstart Kristaps Porzingis. Loosely speaking, these are positionally fluid players of a certain size, age, and skill level who make us feel we’re watching something unprecedented or unknown unfold on the court. In the realm of fantasy, unicorns—if they’re even real—are so rare that encountering even one seems implausible. You’d expect the same to be true of their sports equivalent. But this season, considered a done deal because of Golden State’s loaded roster, has seen the remarkable rise of a cadre of unicorns. It’s a small wonder any of them exist at all. That they’re cropping up all over makes it feel like a small-scale movement.

Simmons isn’t even the only young player on his team who fits this bill. Joel Embiid has picked up where he left off after his truncated 2016-17, putting up 20.5 points and 10.1 rebounds in a scant 27 minutes a game. Simmons uses the court in unexpected ways; Embiid, as if not to be outdone, flat-out destroys its topography. It’s impossible to overstate the strangeness of watching the towering, muscular center put the ball on the floor at the top of the key, effortlessly pop out to sink a three, or stalk opposing scorers outside of the paint. Embiid may be slightly more of a traditionalist than Simmons, but the sheer unpredictability of his game, his ability to turn the logic of the sport on its head at any time, make him no less remarkable.

Basketball unicorns aren’t just improbable. While there’s a loose typology in place, they’re defined by their singularity. As Giannis continues to astound with his joyous, anarchic play, his place in the NBA’s “good, better, best” hierarchy seems almost beside the point. Antetokounmpo’s dominance is unquestionable but how he gets there feels ethereal and undefined. His game is a new language that he may not yet fully understand himself; the rest of us are playing desperate catch-up. Miracles may be amazing but they’re also disorienting, even violent—a fair summation summation of Giannis’s effect on the league thus far. He’s utterly indecipherable, which may make him the purest unicorn of all.

Porzingis, the original inspiration for the term (unless KD was pulling a “takes one to know one”), so far this season looks every bit the franchise player the Knicks hoped he would be. Not only is putting up 30 points a night and terrorizing opponents at both ends of the floor. He’s put the team on his back by forcing other teams to try and make sense of him on a nightly basis, which is all but impossible. You can’t plan for something you only dimly understand, something that appears to be reconstituting itself and constantly evolving in real-time. Ironically, KP may be the one unicorn whose game directly echoes that of an older player: If you took Dirk Nowitzki, stretched him several inches on the rack, gave him a nasty streak and apocalyptic leaping ability, upped his defense considerably, and had him mainline old DJ Clue tapes, you’d get a rough approximation of Kristaps Porzingis. But none of this accounts for the disruptive effect that he has on games. Great NBA players have to be creative; Porzingis, like his fellow unicorns, reinvents himself on every possession.

It’s hard to know exactly where unicorns came from or where they’re going. Kevin Garnett may have been one; I’ve heard arguments for Hakeem Olajuwon as pre-history. LeBron probably belongs in this conversation and Durant certainly does. But by definition, every unicorn is different and there’s no real lineage or even linkage between them. Certainly, in today’s game versatility is at a premium; in some ways, unicorns are ideally suited to this era. If it were that simple, every GM would will one into existence. There’s an element of dumb luck in finding mythical unicorns, as if the quest for one misses the point. It’s supposed to be an inscrutable, arresting moment, not the result of a well-laid plan. The same is true in basketball. While Simmons was a highly touted #1 pick, Giannis, Porzingis, and Embiid all had to prove their legitimacy. To different degrees, no one saw them coming.

The season is barely underway and yet it’s these players, not stacked playoff teams like the Thunder or Rockets, who are commanding the most attention. It’s a tacit admission that teams built to succeed in the present will fail and that maybe it’s time to go ahead and start thinking about the league’s post-Warriors future. It looks like the unicorns will be a major part of that. But do they really tell us anything about where the sport as a whole is headed? Can irreproducible players influence the league in the same way that, say, a system like Golden State’s can? Or is there nothing to do other than hope one falls in your lap? Can you groom, manufacture, or devise a lesser version of these players? Or does their elusiveness in large part make them what they are?

The answer may lie in the final piece of the unicorn metaphor: If you believe in magic, they’re real. At the same time, if they’re real, then magic is, too. Maybe their impact on the sport is as hard to anticipate as these players are on the court. If you buy this reading of Simmons and the others, then you have to accept that we have no idea where they’re taking us. Unicorns—whether in basketball or as larger, more broadly applicable idea—are less about specifics and more about the principle: That, far from being a passive activity, seeing one transforms you. You get that anything can and will change at all times, in ways we may never understand, and that the forces leading this charge will never fully reveal themselves to us. To embrace a unicorn means admitting that you yourself may only be so real or stable. And that’s when the fun begins.

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