There are better basketball players than Isaiah Thomas, the Boston Celtics' pint-sized point guard, but none that better qualify as "an absolute goddamn delight."
Consider, for example, his work one early-February night against the Toronto Raptors. Boston trailed by eight entering the final period, and Thomas took over. He canned jumpers and weaved into the lane for geometrically improbable layups. He bounced around the court like a pinball. With 45 seconds left, he buried a three-pointer that gave him his 40th point of the night (his 15th of the fourth quarter)—and the Celtics a lead they would not surrender. "The little guy!" Boston announcer Tommy Heinsohn shouted, pitching his voice over the roar of the TD Garden crowd. "He knows what time it is!" added Heinsohn's partner Mike Gorman, an allusion to Thomas's signature celebration: the tapping of an invisible wristwatch, a signal that the end of the game his is domain.
Among the invitees to this weekend's All-Star Game in New Orleans, Thomas is the unlikeliest. In 2011, he was the last pick in the NBA draft, selected behind such forgotten figures as Keith Benson and Ater Majok. As recently as two seasons ago, he was relegated to a role coming off the bench. Those setbacks derive from a more fundamental one: he has a listed height of five feet nine inches (which would make him shorter than 99.5% of the players in NBA history), and he may well be shorter than that. His official draft profile, written when he was fresh out of the University of Washington, cut right to the chase when it listed his primary weakness: "Size." Pictures of him standing next to fellow future pro hoopers in high school make him look like someone's kid brother who had snuck on the court; a decade-plus later, the impression is much the same.
Now, though, Thomas has become a full-fledged superstar, leading the NBA in fourth-quarter scoring on the team with the second-best record in the Eastern Conference. "Here's a guy that's always had to figure out how to do it," Celtics coach Brad Stevens says of his Napoleonic playmaker. "And boy, has he figured it out." The phrasing fits; Thomas's approach looks like he's solving a series of rapid-fire puzzles. A pair of defenders attempts to trap him, and he somehow makes himself tinier and squeezes between them. A center tries to block his shot, and he lofts a floater over his fingertips. In lieu of obvious physical advantages, he has subtler ones: an innate sense of angle, a squirrel-like ability to stop and start. At his best, Thomas resembles the smiling hero of a slapstick cartoon. He ducks around corners and into slivers of space, and his pursuers all bonk their heads together chasing him.
Thomas's height gives him a predictable underdog sensibility. "I go by 'Stay paranoid,'" he told Boston Magazine in November. "I'm small. I'm short. Everything's against me." But his stature has also made him a fan favorite. His crunch-time heroics light up basketball Twitter, and he received far more All-Star fan votes than known commodities like John Wall and Kyle Lowry. The NBA recently unveiled a 30-second spot featuring an undersized pickup player sporting a Thomas jersey, officializing his stardom. Thomas himself narrated the ad: "I've been against all odds my whole life, but that's not going to stop me."
Questions persist, of course. The Celtics lost in the first round of the playoffs last year, and another early exit this spring would raise questions about the wisdom of relying so heavily on the NBA's shortest active player. Thomas's ability to guard is a source of particular apprehension; he plays hard and sneaks in for steals, but he is incapable of doing much to bother taller players' shots. Boston's defensive rating, a strength over the past few seasons, has slipped to below league average. Thomas bristles at the notion that he's to blame but admits that there is a gap between his team and true contention. "We're not on Cleveland's level, so we got work to do," he said following a late-December loss to the defending champions. "We gotta figure it out."
There is a possibility that the eventual solution in Boston does not involve Thomas, that he once again finds himself unwanted. Danny Ainge, the Celtics' general manager, once shipped franchise icons Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett to Brooklyn for a slew of draft picks, so he would certainly be amenable to parting with Thomas given the right offer. Team-building in the NBA involves not only assessing present situations but also gauging future potential; Ainge will have to decide whether the best player on a good team can become the key to a great one. Thomas's recent play keeps him safe for now, but when you're a historical anomaly, anything can happen.
These days, though, Thomas remains a source of pure joy, both to Boston partisans and basketball fans generally. In what has been a fairly by-the-book season—the Cavaliers and Warriors will almost certainly meet in the Finals again—the star turn of the little guy has provided a rare shock. LeBron and Durant and Curry still reign, but their consistency has come at the cost of their ability to thrill; nothing they do really surprises anyone anymore. Thomas, on the other hand, is a nightly revelation—to the fans watching almost as much as the poor defenders tasked with trying to stay in front of him. He might appear silly when he takes the court, but it is his opponents who end up looking foolish.
