Hassan Whiteside Is Here to Save Your NBA Season

The NBA regular season can lull you to sleep. It's not unexciting--sometimes it is--but it's a brutally repetitive exercise. 82 games for each of the 30 teams is too much, probably. Movies generally don't sink four-fifths of their runtimes into ponderous first acts, and books that take 300 pages to get going test the limits of tedium. There is stuff to learn and to marvel at, even in the most ho-hum mid-January tilt, but patience and time are finite resources, and you wonder, while watching an implication-less Heat-Clippers game, if all this basketball consumption is dulling you, filling you with dubious psychic nutrition until you feel bloated and tired.

Fortunately, this feeling occasionally subsides, and you remember why you care in the first place. The game shakes you. Hey, dummy! Behold this wondrous thing. Sometimes the thing you're beholding is a nifty pocket pass, and sometimes it's bigger. In the case of Hassan Whiteside, it's seven feet tall and moves like if an anvil could jump a little bit. The until-recently-anonymous big man is enjoying a stretch that Marcus Camby would be proud of. He tortured the Clippers frontcourt this past Sunday afternoon, collecting 23 points, 16 rebounds, and a pair of blocks. "Where did this guy come from?" Clips announcer Ralph Lawler asked at one point.

Whiteside didn't come from anywhere in particular, which is to say: Sacramento, Reno, Sioux Falls, Hidalgo, Lebanon, China, and Des Moines, all in a span of four years. Until receiving some garbage time minutes from the Heat in early December, he hadn't played in the NBA since the 2011-12 season, when he participated in 18 games with the Kings. According to Whiteside, he almost got a workout with the Clippers this past offseason, but Doc Rivers nixed it. The Raptors had him in summer league and the Grizz had him in training camp. Both declined to keep Whiteside around. Now he's much more than another borderline talent waiting for his chance to play the role of warm, tall body at the end of somebody's bench. He's making himself known in a major way.

The curlicuing path Whiteside has taken and where he might go from here--your potential is limitless when you've only been on everyone's radar for a minute--are things worth pondering, but what's most remarkable is what he is at this very moment, and it's worth savoring because, if history is any indication, things could go south rather quickly. (NBA history is littered with Lester Hudsons and Xavier Henries, who played well only for exceedingly brief periods of time.) Whiteside is the bone the universe tosses you for slogging through the regular season; he is the mind-expanding drug baked into a very large and not wholly appetizing cake.

The NBA is the most predictable of the major sports leagues. Its best players stay good for a relatively long time, and so, by extension, do its best teams. Its historical eras are sorted, not by rule changes or aesthetic developments, but dynasties: Russell's Celtics, Magic's Lakers, Jordan's Bulls, and so on. This is more feature than bug, but one of the drawbacks is that, on a macro level, the NBA is rarely surprising. The overlong regular season and seven-game playoff series are designed to reward stronger teams and weed out weaker ones. It's not a league that brooks cinderellas; its underdogs face nigh impossibly long odds.

This feeling that the NBA tends toward inevitability, that it is comprehensible and orderly, is what makes improbable rises like Hassan Whiteside's doubly enjoyable. Some of the most interesting things scientists say are about shit they don't understand. Some genius from NASA sits down with Charlie Rose, explains all manner of complex things, and then she happens upon a question she can't answer. We just don't know enough yet, Charlie. But I'm excited to find out more. Whiteside gives us a glimpse into what we don't know. How did every team in the NBA whiff on this guy?

Maybe Doc Rivers declining to give Whiteside a workout wasn't a mistake. We're six games into this brave new era in which the Heat might have the next Tyson Chandler on their hands. A few months from now, we'll have a better idea of what we're looking at. But no matter which direction Whiteside's career breaks, he has already jarred us, reminded us that--duh!--sports can disorient and thrill us. This is the sort of brain food we need, as we trudge through a sometimes-monotonous expanse of basketball. Who the fuck is Hassan Whiteside? we ask. We are excited to find out more.