Have we finally found the best version of Julius Randle?
Julius Randle has established himself as a star, but could his key to shining brighter be to marginalize the shot that brought him there last year — the midrange — to become a bigger threat inside?
That’s my kind of Julius Randle. The kind that attacks the rim like a bloody-eyed Isaiah Stewart attacks the bodily obstacles standing between him and The King. The kind that drops 30 on 67% shooting because he’s bigger, faster, stronger. The kind that hauls in 12 boards and dishes out six dimes and claims two blocks to boot.
That — minus the seven turnovers, we’re not focusing on those because these are happy words, but please get those down big fella — is the version of Julius that lives up to last year's label as an All-Star.
“Star” is an interesting designation that we give to the league's best, useful in its catchy simplicity, dangerous in its lack of distinction for type. The NBA’s helio-centers come in all shapes and sizes, which is important to remember, else we end up overly glum at all the ways in which Julius Randle isn’t Kevin Durant — a comparative recipe for a doomed flavor of day-to-day fandom.
The mechanics of the stars up there can teach us something about our variable shiny heroes down here. Stars are essentially a balancing act: the force of gravity is relentlessly trying to collapse it, pulling its spicy elemental ingredients closer together, creating a nuclear mosh-pit that unleashes energy, precisely enough to sustain a gravity-resisting pressure that holds the star up and together. As the size of the star increases, the amount of energy needed to stop it collapsing increases.
Finding the Goldilocks middle between doing too much and not enough is a challenge universal to the violent and volatile gas giants up there, as well as the violent and volatile human giants down here. Just like Randle can’t sustain the output of Durant, our boring old sun can’t sustain the output of RMC 136a1 (the result of googling “most massive star,” which, funnily enough, was described as “packing a lot of heft into a surprisingly slim frame,” and resides in the Tarantula nebula).
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