DeMar DeRozan Vs. Paul George Is The Best Thing About The First Round

This article is part of VICE Sports' 2016 NBA Playoffs coverage.

DeMar DeRozan clanks a few jumpers and suddenly his breakthrough begins to look like a con. Or, anyway, this is the conclusion at which my mind—polluted and amphetamized as it is by too much time in the NBA take-miasma—arrives too quickly. It's a mind sped up by a need to extrude takes with great regularity. In DeRozan's case, my idiot take-brain howls fraud based on 33 minutes of lousy basketball, because this is the postseason and it's put up or shut up time, or whatever. Hear a bromide repeated enough times and it will start to seem at least a little bit true, even if your conscious mind doesn't believe it, and even if you know that DeMar DeRozan really is for real.

DeRozan, for his part, is rightly calling bullshit. He said after the Toronto Raptors' win over the Indiana Pacers in the second game of a first-round NBA Playoffs series on Monday, a contest in which he was benched for the fourth quarter, that his woes are overblown, and that he's going to be fine. Even if this mini-slump is indicative of a blemish on DeRozan's game, it points to nothing worse than some understandable early-postseason nerves. He knows, whether it matters or not, that he's in the most interesting head-to-head match-up of the first round.

And so he might as well be nervous. DeRozan is, after all, trying to make good on what's supposed to be Toronto's year of ascendancy, in which Kyle Lowry tightened up his thunder-booty, Jonas Valanciunas developed some skills beyond tallness, and DeRozan himself emerged as a slashing menace who can mix in the odd three-pointer. DeRozan displayed his new, refined self for 78 regular season games, and his reward is proving that it wasn't a mirage. You showed us who you are for six months; now do it again, this time for real. That sort of pressure would put a few winged critters in anyone's stomach. Or, you know, maybe DeRozan just had a couple bad shooting nights.

Another thing that does not help: DeRozan is being checked, most of the time, by Indiana's Paul George, who isn't struggling with anything. George is chilling like a mutt in a motorcycle sidecar. Or, less metaphorically, he is gliding through the paint, jumping passing lanes, lofting jumpers over everyone the Raptors throw at him. What's singular about George's game, especially when he's on a roll, is how natural his grace can seems. The NBA is full of tall men who shouldn't be as quick or springy or agile as they are, but even the league's best forwards give off the impression that they are constantly steering their bodies out of skids—calibrating, from moment-to-moment, a balance between power and control. George moves like everything is going according to plan all the time. He imagines a pirouetting turnaround in his mind and then simply does it. It can't be as easy as it looks, if only because nothing is as easy as George's jumper looks.

George's current form is doubly worth celebrating because, after that beyond-gnarly leg break he suffered two summers ago, this future—any future—seemed very much in doubt. He essentially took a year off, coming back at the tail end of last season for a rehab cameo, looking very much like a person who had spent a lot of time healing and wasn't quite ready to be a basketball player. We know how this could have gone, because we've seen it happen—the awe dissipates, suddenly and for good, and phenomenons just aren't anymore. Usually it's age that does this, but a tibia snapped in two will do the trick. The thrill of watching George do what he do is lightened by simple relief; he is not just a skyscraperish fellow shimmying and leaping like a dancer, he's the same one he was before.

There is all that, and there is the pleasure of watching George and DeRozan face off directly. They're not twinned on a possession-by-possession basis, but as the ball swings and assignments shift, they find each other occasionally and pick up their argument on the merits of power versus grace. DeRozan is all explosion and furrowed-brow purposefulness; George never really looks like he has to try to do the things he does. It's a dialectic on style. Also it's staggering how athletic the two of them are.

Of course, both of them have been doing this, apart and together, for a while. But it's different now. The regular season is more than an extravagant instrument-tuning session, but it is muddled and indeterminate in a way the playoffs are not. Where the regular season is a mess of intentions and effort levels and gradations of players-having-partied-the-night-before that can't be fully figured out, the postseason is simple, and the way in which it matters is clear and urgent.

This is why DeMar Derozan's two-game skid feels like a referendum on the six months of terrific play that preceded it, and why Paul George doing what he's done all season is dazzling in a way it wasn't before. We're in a low-oxygen environment, here, and that has an effect. We've got at least a few more games of these two going at it, dusting off a rivalry that goes back to high school. We do not know what will change and what won't in this dizzy new season, but it's a good guess that whatever happens will happen loudly. It will make a noise so thunderous we can't think straight.