John Wall Destroyed The Lakers Last Night

Kobe Bryant and Nick Young hit a bunch of fluky long jumpers in a row during the second quarter of the Lakers' game in DC last night; with around six minutes left in the half they led by 11 points, and if you saw the score (47-36) crawl across the bottom of your screen just then, you might've thought, Damn, they're putting it on the Wizards.

But, nah. The ridiculous heat-check jumpers stopped falling, the Wizards promptly tore off an 18-5 run—and then, when the Lakers ran one last possession to try to tie things back up before the half, John Wall fucking destroyed them:

Look at that man go. In the span of five seconds, Wall: rotates to bottle up Jordan Hill on the pick-and-pop, closes out hard on Jeremy Lin on the wing, leaps at Lin's head-fake, recovers, spins, and backhands Lin's shot just before the buzzer. If I so much as imagine doing that, my bones torque themselves right out of my ass.

This is some superhuman shit. With all apologies to LeBron, and Russ, and even Anthony Davis, this combination of anticipatory intelligence, stubbornness, explosion, speed, and sheer buzzsaw will belongs to John Wall alone; the poor Lakers had no way of planning for it. It flattened them, and kept right on flattening them in the second half, which Wall played with a velocity and competitive fury that verged on terrifying.

Not coincidentally, the Wizards won that half by 14 points and made the Lakers look like a waylaid high-school squad over the final few minutes. Wall shot a horrendous 6-for-18 on the night and turned the ball over four times, and yet was, by miles and miles, in his creativity and relentlessness and pure overwhelming speed, both the best player on the floor and the primary reason for the outcome. Fittingly, he punctuated the destruction with this:

If that's not a deliberate troll move, payback for all the ridiculous shots the Lakers made while building their hollow lead in the first half, hell, it works as one anyway. I love how hard Kobe was trying on defense, too. God bless him.

Look at the amped-up fist-pump at the end of the first clip; the seated 'Toine shimmy-dance after the shot banks in in the second. God, it must be fun to be John Wall. His range, with the ball, and with his body and will and imagination; the sense that the entire court and everything on it and everything that he can imagine happening on it are within his reach at all times. It's as close as a real person will ever come to being Spiderman.

Also the Lakers suck and are hilarious.

Photo via Getty