Watching Paul George, Who Is Getting It All Back

What happened 15 months ago in the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas would have shocked regardless of particulars. An NBA superstar in the upswing of his prime, playing in a public scrimmage with his Team USA counterparts in preparation for the FIBA World Cup, tries a chasedown block. Instead of blocking the shot, he commits a foul, and most of the stadium makes a noise of gentle disappointment; people don't attend a glorified pick-up run involving twenty or so of the world's best basketball players to watch free throws, after all.

The spectators surrounding the basket, though, make a more severe noise. They have just watched this player's leg bend as if it had a joint where no human leg has a joint, and they have heard him shout in pain. It is the last gruesome play of the evening, one that will set off a short outpouring of sympathy from the public and the player's peers and a much longer road to recovery for the player himself. Within seconds, the whole arena is hushed, and Mike Krzyzewski is announcing in somber tones that the exhibition is over.

This freak happening, which would have been strange no matter the player, was stranger still because the player was Paul George. George had, to that point, enjoyed a blessed career in professional basketball. Tall and quietly gifted, he was as obscure as domestic lottery picks get—he played well but not dazzlingly so for two Fresno State that didn't make a NCAA Tournament appearance before becoming the tenth pick in 2010—and joined to a stable Indiana organization that could afford to bring him along slowly, adding to his responsibilities little by little every year in the manner of doting parents. His successes were met with celebration, his failures with patience. He went from a fill-in for Danny Granger to a cohort of David West's to a consensus MVP candidate in 24 months, and he did so in a way that made him seem impervious even to the notion of harm. His was a languid, kind of floating game; he moved around the court in the easy way homecoming kings move through the halls of high schools.

Then he wrecked his leg that night in Las Vegas, then Indiana bumbled through a down season (mostly) without him, and then they lost stylistic dictators West and Roy Hibbert and braced for a rebuild. Now, Paul George is back in earnest. The Pacers are no longer contenders, and George is no longer the image of unsullied promise. Instead, he is something more interesting: a player relieved of both his supporting cast and his illusions of invulnerability, trying to rebuild by will what had been his by circumstance, and playing—a couple weeks into the season, at the still-young age of 25—some of the best basketball of his career.

Watching a player with a serious injury in his recent past tends not to be much fun. When he takes a jumper, you keep an eye on his expression instead of the flight of the ball, looking for a telltale grimace. When he dunks, you parse the landing. You scan coaches' faces as he goes to the sideline for a breather, to see whether they are concerned and whether you should be.

It is natural to do all this while watching George, at first, but it is just as natural to stop shortly after, for a couple reasons. The first is that the leg seems fine, as far as anyone can tell. The second is that it seems almost irrelevant to the sum of his approach—as irrelevant, anyway, as a limb can be to an athlete. George does not so much run, stop, and jump as glide, pause, and just sort of lift. The tibia in question seems under exactly as much stress as if it were propped on a sofa during an afternoon nap. This is just how it was before it buckled, and there might be something to that.

George is a pawing, downtempo player, a maestro of angle and pace, an anesthetic drip with long arms and a smooth jumper. He is one of those athletes that seem not to sweat. His game has a measured, almost polite feel to it, as if he were putting up 25-and-10s simply by observing social protocol. Oh, well, if you're offering this catch-and-shoot off a simple down-screen, I guess it'd be rude to refuse. His defense is excellent but not combative; he is a bait-and-trapper, a shadow that suddenly turns opaque and pokes the ball away. Though he hails from California, there is something folksy and Indianan in his approach. More than any other player in basketball, he gets his points via the sort of 14-foot, forward-leaning jump shot that seems more relevant to an orange-coned high school shooting drill than an NBA game.

This season has featured the best iteration of this loping yet. Through 11 games, George has averaged career-highs in points, assists, and rebounds and has buoyed a team that really has little besides him to its credit. Despite lukewarm contributions from Monta Ellis, their splashiest offseason acquisition, and a frontcourt that is to the brawn unit of recent years what a panel of Ikea styro-lumber is to a century-old oak, the Pacers sit at 6-5 and look like a team that will have some input regarding the playoff picture. Some of this is on the Eastern Conference, but a lot of it is on Paul George.

Indiana's relevance is relative; I can say with some certainty that this season will not culminate in the Pacers squaring off against LeBron James in the Conference Finals, an event that was once a May tradition. Spring's loss, though, is winter's gain. The Pacers have played the Cavaliers once already this year, in early November, and George's newfound liberation was evident. Where Indiana had formerly tried to counteract James' prevalence with a cooperative and hard-shouldered effort, in the same way people in movies work to stop a battering ram by cramming more and more bodies behind the door, they now had no choice but to let George do what he could.

James went for 29, 6, and 4 that night. George, who guarded James for most of the game, put up 32 and 11 himself. James did his usual Superman-meets-supercomputer thing; George tiptoed around the elbows. At one point, George executed a deft little spin in the middle of the lane leading to a short fadeaway jumper, the old terrain of the Pacer loglegs now available for his nimbler work. The Pacers lost, but the match-up was thrilling. It was the clash of individual that Indiana's one-time collective style had obscured.

This is likely small consolation to Pacer fans, who had gotten used to certain annual doses of expectation and success. For everyone else, though, George's combination recovery and superstar-level autonomy nearly makes up for the loss of one of the few true powers in the Eastern Conference. After that disaster in his lower leg, George seems to have not only made it back to his prior form but continued his ascent. He is that rarest of NBA components: a player who makes an otherwise forgettable team worth checking in on for a couple hours on a random night. Just over a year after his career looked something very much like lost, Paul George is providing few reasons to worry and plenty of reasons to watch. Right back to business as usual, then.