On the things Mitchell Robinson can and can’t do
Mitchell Robinson captivated Knicks fans with a fancy driving finish vs. Charlotte earlier this week. But do those sort of plays just serve to muddy the waters surrounding what Mitch is and what he could be?
In the last couple of years, masks have become more common than faces, to the point where chancing on someone you see masked-up every day suddenly sans mask — seeing their soberingly naked face — is sometimes jarring: the abnormal has become normal, and the normal abnormal. It can tell us a lot, this role reversal of what is and isn’t routine.
On Monday, Jan. 17, 2022, Mitchell Robinson did a thing that made Knicks Twitter squeal in amazement.
Mason Plumlee and the Charlotte Hornets were his canvas. Catching the ball off the inbounds pass at the top of the key, Mitch turned towards the opposite sideline, and took one routine dribble towards a routine dribble hand-off for RJ Barrett, the same DHO he’s run a thousand times in his four year NBA career.
That DHO never happened. Mitch wanted more. The Garden held its breath.
He took another dribble, that’s two now, in a disorientating right-to-left cross. It was fast and slow. The beginnings of an avalanche. Plumlee was burnt toast. Mitch was in the lane now, and he took a scandalous third dribble — one, two, THREE! — to evade a helping and helpless Hornets defender. That third dribble set up a left-to-right baby euro step. This is fact, not fiction. He deftly planted his right foot in the paint — moving horizontally, parallel to the rim, downhill momentum sacrificed to the Gods of European Misdirection — before casually rising up for the two-hand flush.
The Knicks bench stood and gawped. The Garden giggled. Twitter rose in all-caps unison, questioning everything: they’d all seen the face of possibilities long forgotten.
Of course, the problem with all this is that I’m only half joking. It did feel miraculous, momentous, magical; because it’s never happened before. Three dribbles shouldn’t be news. Three dribbles and a dunk shouldn’t feel this good. Three dribbles and a dunk once in four years shouldn’t, if we’re being honest, happen so rarely that you could convince yourself you dreamt it. The problem with this play is that while it looked like the finally blooming bud of mixtape potential, it was actually the exact opposite: a reminder that plays like this never happen for Mitch.
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