On April 10, 2019, the Dallas Mavericks, playing at home, took on the Phoenix Suns.
This game was the last home game of the glorious career of the great legend Dirk Nowitzki, Dirk was undoubtedly the most watched protagonist of the night, and his every goal would cause a wave of applause from the audience in the stands, excited, unwilling, unreserved, and the fans were remembering the night in their own way, witnessing the closing performance of the basketball king. But just when the "German Tank" repeatedly hit and killed the anti-aircraft guns that had been traversing the league for twenty-one years, a skinny and unassuming player in the Suns team unexpectedly stole the limelight of the King of Heaven - it was Jamal Crawford, who came off the bench and wore the Number 11 jersey.
With seven points in the half and the team trailing by thirty points, Crawford finally couldn't resist: in the third quarter, he first scored two points in front of Dirk's long-arm interference; then dribbled on the right wing, played a sign wide crossover past Justin Jackson, and then twisted back to jump to win; then the three-point line outside the ball soared to three points; then he started in the high position, using the cover of his teammates to shake Off Brunson, and then suddenly stopped jumping, Hit a difficult jumper against the latter's foul. By the fourth quarter, Crawford was in full swing, when he dribbled on the outside line and danced continuously, the eyes of the whole audience had all involuntarily focused on him alone, even Nowitzki became his background at this moment, watching him pull the ball smoothly from the front of the body for a quick touch, and then suddenly skillfully collect the ball, directly step on the ground and pull up, stab out a long two-point jump shot -
"Pass—" The basketball went through the net.
Dashing, sharp. Like a jianghu swordsman, like a street dancer.
Looking at his back as he withdrew, it was only then that someone suddenly realized that there seemed to be something unusual about the scene in front of him – wait! Has this guy who is tireless on the court and addicted to dancing playing in the league for several years? How did it seem as if I had seen his trick a long time ago? That's right, this is the 19th season of Jamal Crawford's career, and this year, he's 39 years old.
39 years old?! Just when someone was shocked, this "old guy" used continuous dribbling to shake off the defender, and once again stopped and jumped to shoot, with a smart body and a strong core. What does this rhythmic rhythm when shaking look like a veteran in the twilight of his career?
But don't be in a hurry to sigh, because Crawford's solo performance is not over:
A minute later, he dribbled in the backcourt, reached the three-point line and threw it at Burke's defense, completing another four-pointer of his career and improving the NBA all-time four-point record by one more.
Then Crawford's hand was still hot and hot, and he hit two difficult three-pointers in succession in a state of flurry! In the 3 minutes and 39 seconds before the final game, he narrowed the point difference to only 4 points by his own efforts!
He had been chasing wildly, whizzing past the center of the Dallas route.
But it was a night that belonged to the Dallas after all, and after that, the Lone Rangers scored three points like rain, dousing the Hope of the Suns to fight back. Jamal Crawford, who finished 51st on the NBA's all-time scoring list, scored a game-high 51 points, 26 of which came from the final quarter, making it a big splash in the nooja's home curtain call. At this point, Crawford's career regular season total score has reached 19414 points, which is almost the same as the 20,000 point mark, although it is much inferior to Dirk, but it is also wonderful enough. And after this game, he also surpassed the great "basketball god" Michael Jordan to become the oldest player in NBA history to cut 50+ players. He is also the only player in NBA history to have taken a 50+ on four teams.
At the age of 39, in his 19th season in the league, he can still use his unique gorgeous dance steps and intoxicating street ball style to break countless enemies. He was never a shining emperor superstar, never been named to the All-Star Team, and never won a championship, but even without the glorious honors, he wrote a lot of records that belonged only to him.
Even if he is not a winner, he has already made a name for himself.
Jamal Crawford was born in Seattle, Washington, USA, brought up by his mother, and Crawford Jr. has been playing the ball since he was a child, and he loves the ball, and even likes to make fake movements to strangers when he usually walks. Crawford's basketball genes are inherited from his dad, Claude, who was a star guard at the University of Oregon and was a teammate of Kevin Love's dad Stan Love. Little Crawford showed his outstanding basketball talent since he was a child, but because he spent all day in the streets of Seattle and abandoned his studies, this made the mother more worried about the growth of her son, when she felt that she could not discipline Crawford, she sent her son to Claude in Los Angeles, but Crawford in Los Angeles always missed his hometown and had always been concerned about Seattle, so he only wanted to return to Seattle to dance in the streets with his beloved basketball again. During this period, he planned to abscond back to his hometown, but he was still repatriated by his mother, but when he arrived at high school, due to Crawford's poor academic performance, the local high school team actually refused to let him join, which made an angry Jamal determined to return to Seattle to do a big job. This time he stayed at his grandmother's house and joined the Rainier Beach High School Varsity team in the Number 23 jersey. Soon, Crawford led the team to win the Washington State High School Championship with his strong personal talent, and he was also named the Washington State High School Player of the Year, and began to make a name for himself in the basketball world in Seattle. In a high school game, Crawford suddenly performed the famous stunt that would later make him famous, "Shake and Bake". His Crossover followed by a ghost who jumped around the ball behind his back to the basket and surprised many street ball lovers at the time.
Then he met Christie, an NBA player who is also from Seattle, and Gary Payton, the future big brother and the number one star of the Seattle SuperSonics, and it was a great benefit and confidence to train with these two top NBA defensive masters. After rising to the University of Michigan with an average of 16.6 points per game, Crawford began to enter the NBA scouts' field of vision and was selected by the Cavaliers with the eighth overall pick in the 2000 draft, but on the same day he swapped with Chris Meeme and was traded to the Chicago Bulls.
In the Bulls' first three seasons, Crawford, who came off the bench, did not get many opportunities to show himself, and it was not until the fourth season that he suddenly had an explosion, playing 73 games as a starter, averaging 17.3 points per game from 10.7 points last season, becoming the team's top scorer. At the end of the season, in the game against the Raptors on the road, he showed people his explosive scoring talent for the first time, facing Vince Carter, who often soared in the sky, Crawford used another way to bring the game into his own rhythm, shooting 18 of 34 from the field, 6 of 11 three-pointers, including 8 of 13 in the fourth quarter, slashing 24 points, shooting 50 points, leading the team to defeat the opponent after overtime. The game also made him a new generation of Windy City killers after Jordan.
Unexpectedly, at the end of the season, he was traded to the New York Knicks as a chip, and in those years in New York, his and Marbury's "street backcourt combination" did not lead the team to a revival, the team became more and more turbulent, and Crawford's future in the team became more and more ambiguous. But Rao is so, as long as he has the ball in his hand and finds the rhythm, he is still the Jamal Crawford who sees the score as a probe! In the third season of the Knicks, on January 26, 2007, facing defending champion Miami Heat, Jamal Crawford suddenly made a big fuss, and after one-on-one single step past "Flash" Wade, causing the latter to foul and hit the fancy pull bar, Crawford turned on the no-solution mode. After that, he shot 16 consecutive shots, including eight consecutive three-pointers, and he kept pulling out his gun and hitting constantly, even Wade's hard pursuit was just a penalty for him. And it seems that with each goal he scores, the home crowd at Madison Square Garden will increase the cheers by one more block, and when he uses his signature continuous change of direction, left and right swinging protrusion an anthoven walker to his feet to reveal the cracks, he swims into the box in the noise, and then rushes to the front of Haslem's co-defense cover to shoot the front flying probe arm. As soon as the ball hit the net, the stadium erupted in a huge and enduring cheer, as if celebrating one of the most grand and gorgeous performances, and Jamal Crawford was undoubtedly the most dazzling protagonist in the center of the stage and in the spotlight. He turned the game into street bullfighting, and this street basketball won the praise of Broadway. That night, Crawford scored a career-high 52-pointer on 20-of-30 shooting, making the 37-pointEr The Flash bleak.
In his fourth season with the Knicks, Crawford played 80 games as a starter, averaging a career-high 20.6 points per game, once again becoming the team's top scorer.
But his personal performance still could not improve the number of wins for the team, when the Knicks won 23-59, again missing the playoffs, Crawford and the Knicks' fate also quickly came to an end, after playing 11 games for the Knicks in the 08-09 season, he was traded to the Golden State Warriors coached by Nelson Sr., and Exchanged owners with Al Harrington. In the 54 games he played for the Warriors as the starter of the season, Crawford averaged 19.7 points per game, and on December 20, 2008, against the Bobcats, Crawford broke out again, scoring 50 points with just 26 shots to lead the team to repel the Bobcats. Scoring 50 points in the third team qualified him to rival the three ancient sages of Chamberlain, Bernard King and Moses Malone. However, the occasional outbreak of the feel is still unable to lead the team out of the quagmire, the team record is still less than the loss, the elder Nelson also made it clear that Crawford is not in the team's future plans, in the offseason, Crawford was traded by the team again, this time he was thrown to the Atlanta Hawks.
By this point, Crawford had spent his ninth season in the NBA, but had never tasted the playoffs. At this point, he has been labeled a "cancer" and "can't win", so what is Crawford's personal ability?
Crawford is 1.96 meters tall, slender limbs, excellent ball sense, excellent ball control ability, amazing combination of ball ability is even more breathtaking, his ball control realm to achieve a real "human ball unity", whether in the body before the change of direction, or behind the dribble, the ball can move like in his hand. Crawford's every move on the court will show the street style that goes deep into the marrow, but unlike many street players who are greatly restricted in their NBA play and no longer flexible, even in the rules of professional basketball, he can still instinctively do those strange and gorgeous moves at will. Every time he pulls the ball, he can step on some kind of wonderful rhythm point, watch him pull away and unfold Crossover, you will follow the defender to listen to the rhythm of the command with him, up and down, everything is natural, uncontrollable. The rhythm is so wonderful that a few times you will find that this is the "heartbeat" of basketball itself, and it is also Crawford's own "heartbeat". He has a lightning-fast breakthrough to start the first step, although the body is thin, but the core strength is strong, so he can drive the body at will in the blink of an eye on the defender to make a series of dizzying complex movements to make the opponent's center of gravity chaotic, thus shaking out of the offensive space. After creating offensive space, Jamal prefers to take the medium and long range emergency stop/dry pull jump shot to the end, and in his career, his long-range long two-point jump shot accounted for 26%, and the proportion of shots outside the three-point line was exaggerated 38.7%. The percentage of shots shots under the basket is only 13%, and the highest season of his career is only 20% of the Knicks. Crawford's back is as straight as a long sword when jumping shots, and the ball posture is high and stable, but because he is always in motion, his center of gravity is often followed by the rhythm and the position of the defender when shooting, or leaning forward, or leaning back, or twisting into a twist Vulture to rotate in the air, but regardless of the situation, his upper body shooting action is always stable and straight, which is also the mystery of his ability to shoot a lot of ballistic straight shots in the case of opponent fouls.
Crawford is a brilliant, difficult ball-handling singles player, an imaginative artist, but he's not a player who can influence the game in many ways. Crawford is very light, 1.96 meters tall, but he weighs only 200 pounds (about 91 kilograms!). Although his slender stature makes him agile and lightweight when attacking, it also makes him a key target for opposing players on the defensive end. The huge gap between the offensive and defensive ends makes Crawford's influence on the game appear very single, and the outside singles score is the main content of his game, and this style is difficult to lead the team to win as the team's head card, because the game is not only scoring, the professional league is not a street single, and Crawford's unstable shooting feel will often make his court performance often have violent ups and downs. Once scoring efficiency declined, his impact on the game became minimal, which was the main reason why Crawford was frequently abandoned in the first nine years of his career.
The fancy flamboyance of not being able to win, and carrying such a tone made Crawford's career in professional basketball bleak and unpredictable, until the 29-year-old was thrown to the Atlanta Hawks as a substitute.
People who were not optimistic about Crawford began to rejoice, and it seemed that he would soon be forgotten by coaches, teammates and fans, and fade out of the league. To their surprise, Crawford made a gorgeous turn after being reduced to a substitute. In all 79 games as a substitute, Crawford averaged up to 18 points per game, was the team's second-largest scorer, and most importantly, he and the Hawks also had a successful season, with 53 wins and 29 losses, ranking third in the East, and after 676 regular season games, Crawford finally made the playoffs for the first time. Interestingly, Jamal Crawford is actually the same J Crossover, except that he changed the role of the player. As a substitute, he doesn't have to find a balance between cooperating with his teammates and being himself, and when he comes off the bench, he just needs to be the super scorer who makes the defender miserable, and his task is to grab points and use singles again and again to build as much advantage as possible for the team in the rotation time. In recognition of his outstanding performance, the league decided to award him the honor of the league's best sixth man that season, which also proved that Jamal is not actually a "cancer" of the team, but he has not been used correctly.
After another season with the Hawks, the 31-year-old Crawford signed a two-year contract with the Portland Trail Blazers on the free agent market, but in the second year he jumped out of the contract with the player option, and in July 2012, Crawford signed a four-year contract with the Los Angeles Clippers, which is the sixth team he has settled in his career. In the previous two seasons, his points have dropped to about 14 points, and the Los Angeles Clippers are Paul and Griffin's team, and the local media has not expected him too much, but Crawford quickly proved to people that he is still the J Crossover, as long as the ball is in hand, give him the space to find rhythm, he will once again become that sharp, strange cutting blade, slaughtering the bench of other teams from beginning to end!
In the 12-13 season, Crawford, who came off the bench, contributed 16.5 points to the team; in the 13-14 season, the 34-year-old Crawford broke out again, playing a highlight season of 18.6 points per game, and was elected the league's best sixth man for the second time, becoming the oldest league best sixth man in history and the first player to win the best sixth man for both teams. What's even more amazing is that after playing an average of 15.8 points in the 14-15 season, in the 15-16 season, when Crawford was 36 years old, he still played a strong performance of 14.2 points per game, although the data was down from before, but he still had a super god performance of slashing 37 blood-washed Pistons and single-handedLy Favors to kill the Jazz, in view of his reverse growth phenomenon and many highlight battles in the season, the league decided to award Crawford the best sixth man trophy again. It also makes Crawford the only player in history to win this award three times, a unique player.
In the 16-17 season, Crawford was still able to maintain an offensive firepower of 12.3 points, but the "empty city" ushered in an inevitable disintegration.
After the Los Angeles Phantoms period, Crawford spent another season with the Timberland Wolves, winning the League's Best Teammate of the Season award, and then the current Suns.
There is magic, there are lows, there are turns, there are highlights, and then today's flattening, is the basketball story that belongs to Crawford going to end like this? Now under the pitch, Crawford is already the most intimate big brother of the other young players in the team, but once he walks on the pitch and shows his jersey, he is still the energetic, tireless street boy.
Fast forward to November 24, 2018, when the Suns challenged the Milwaukee Bucks, who were in hot form this year, with less than 10 seconds left in the final game, the two teams fought to 114 draws, Crawford had the ball in hand, and the high start was started. Facing Brogdon, he danced crosswise again, and then suddenly leaned over and accelerated to the free throw line after two consecutive rhythmic pauses, Brogdon chased after it, but Crawford immediately stopped and leaned back to swing himself in the air, while everyone was holding their breath, he calmly plucked the ball, and then the basketball slid softly into the basket, the Bucks fans in the stands held their heads in pain, and Crawford was dashing and brushed his clothes, without seeing the erosion of time.
The relentless years that have crushed countless dazzling stars never seem to have left a clear mark on him, and perhaps even time has watched this guy who swayed and danced left and right on the court like us.