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Lance Stephenson Is Back on His Bullshit, Toronto Raptors Are Not Amused

With the Indiana Pacers up 15 and the clock winding down, Lance Stephenson made an uncontested layup. This made people very upset, but he did it because he's Lance.
Embrace debate. Photo by Trevor Ruszkowski-USA TODAY Sports

What you are looking at here is three members of the Toronto Raptors screaming on Lance Stephenson; that little wedge of forehead between P.J. Tucker's mouth and Stephenson's temple belongs to DeMarre Carroll. They are screaming at him, well, here is the actual, specific reason why they are screaming at him:

Here was the final sequence where Lance Stephenson made the layup to end the game. — Grant Afseth (@GrantAfseth)April 5, 2017

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It looks innocuous enough, but that layup you just watched Stephenson make, with his team up 15 and the clock winding down, was extremely rude and disrespectful. Not rude in the manner of Russell Westbrook running through an entire team en route to a crazy-eyed dunk, or disrespectful in the way Stephen Curry tossing in a contested 37-footer is disrespectful. It's more a breach of basketball etiquette, the sort of unspoken rule that makes red-ass baseball players scream until their necks get all weird. "Disrespect to the game" is how DeRozan put it afterwards. "Tasteless" was Tucker's word. Looking at that photo, you can almost hear them screaming the words "tasteless" and "gauche" and "it's just not done" into Stephenson's impassive face.

It's all a bit much, maybe, but taking that layup is the sort of thing that other players don't do. That's why I keep coming back to Stephenson's impassive face, to him walking past three large men who very much want to punch him—Tucker is so angry that droplets of sweat formed on my computer screen just watching that video—as if he didn't understand why they were so upset, with the same head-down hustle you see on the subway when people encounter someone screaming profanities at no one in particular. After the game, Stephenson insisted that he intended no such offense. If you're familiar with Stephenson's work, it's easy to believe that he didn't.

— Clark Wade (@ClarkWade34)April 5, 2017

Stephenson is in just his second game back with the Pacers after blankly circling the drain with five teams over the last two years and change. He has played well in those games, but it's probably too early to say that he's made a return to his form of a few years ago, when he was one of the NBA's most ardent poker-faced trolls and one of the most idiosyncratically valuable backcourt players in the game. But much more than anything in his stat line on Tuesday night, Stephenson's layup and the white-hot jock-rage it inspired suggest that he could be on his way. Stephenson is strange in ways NBA teams don't know how to parse, let alone manage. If he is indeed back on his bullshit, he's also both fascinating to watch and useful.

"That's, like, a cardinal rule to not lay the ball up when you're up," Stephenson's teammate Paul George said after the game. "But he did it. It's the reason why Lance is Lance." What that means is complicated, to the point where it's unclear if Stephenson himself even quite understands it. But you know it when you see it, and this, friends, this is 100 percent Lance.