Basketball
Body of Work
Anthony Davis says he wants to win a championship this year. Here’s how the Lakers’ newest star is prepared to leverage his larger-than-life physical gifts to deliver on that enormous goal.
Anthony Davis ducks his head as he enters the gymnasium. To be fair, the top of his sleeveless hoodie is brushing the doorframe, and anyway, the six-time NBA All-Star power forward is not taking any chances to ding any part of his priceless body on this sweltering August afternoon in the San Fernando Valley. The Los Angeles Lakers’ preseason opener — against the Western Conference champion Golden State Warriors — is 60 days away, and already Davis walks with the deliberate bearing of a big-game hunter.
The hunt is real. Davis, 26, has an inventory of personal achievements almost as long as his 7’6” wingspan. And there are team titles, too: an NCAA championship and Olympic gold. But the biggest prize of all — an NBA title — has eluded him. In seven seasons with the New Orleans Pelicans, he earned the reputation of a dominating scorer, tenacious defender, quietly accurate shooter and versatile playmaker. In short, an unquestioned superstar and all-around game changer.
But perhaps through no fault of his own, those seven years in the Big Easy left Davis with a grand total of 13 playoff games, and the closest he got to sniffing a title was a second-round loss to Golden State in the spring of 2018. He never had the good fortune to be on a team with enough healthy talent to hoist a trophy at the end of the NBA Finals.
Davis is ready to join LeBron James to revitalize Showtime in L.A.
© Miko Lim
That fortune may have shifted on June 15. That afternoon, Davis was stretched out in a Malibu hotel watching Matt Damon contemplate the implications of being a big man in "Downsizing" when his phone started blowing up. Davis tried to ignore the ringing and buzzing — he makes a point to watch movies uninterrupted — but eventually he figured that his agent, Rich Paul, must have important news.
He did. Davis discovered moments later that folks on Instagram had learned even before him that a long discussed and desired trade to the Lakers was a done deal. And then within minutes, his new teammate — four-time league MVP LeBron James, widely thought to be one of the best players in the history of the game — was texting him: Yeah bro, we finally got you.
And just like that, everything was different.
THE BICEP
Davis’s size-17 Nikes are stationed an inch behind the 3-point line as he rainbows set shots through the bottom of the net. His right arm, which points skyward at the release of each shot, is inked with tattoos that tell a sort of origin story. His right shoulder is decorated with a large portrait of his grandfather, Lamont Eberhardt, and emblazoned with the words “Rest Up Champ.” Eberhardt, who died in 2010, had been a tireless mentor to the future All-Star. And there on Davis’s right bicep is a large scripted tattoo that simply says “Chicago 1993,” ink he got in 2015 to honor where and when his narrative began.
The gymnasium at Crespi Carmelite High School in Encino is a far cry from the Staples Center — there’s no one named Leonardo or Denzel or Charlize or Jack crowding the floor, and you certainly can’t savor a Ludo Lefebvre sandwich while watching a laser-light show — but it’s an equally big step up from where Davis played in high school on the South Side of Chicago. There, he attended an academically oriented charter school called Perspectives that didn’t even have an indoor court. Practice occasionally took place in a tiny church gym nearby but more commonly it was just outside on a small patch of pavement at Perspectives. “We’d drag a rollaway rim out onto the blacktop and chain it to the gate,” Davis tells The Red Bulletin. “We just played half-court out there.”
The vision was there long before the path was evident. “I’ve always dreamed of being in the NBA — it was a goal of mine as a kid,” says Davis. And in the span of four years at Perspectives, Davis, who also was an honor roll student, sprouted more than 10 inches and progressed from solid to great to otherworldly. In just two years, the freshman point guard with a dream transformed into a power forward who could make it come true. “Around my junior year, when I started getting a little bit of recognition, I really started believing I could make it.”
It was more than a little bit of recognition. Quite suddenly, the top high school programs in Chicago came calling — after all, why would an elite player with pro potential play at a charter school better known for accelerated STEM classes than its sports programs? “Some powerhouse teams in Chicago wanted me,” he admits. “But I was loyal to my high school and didn’t want to leave.”
Well-meaning concerns that this choice might impact his scholarship possibilities turned out to be moot. In his junior and senior years, Davis started playing on an AAU team and in all-star tournaments and his star rose even higher. “I was the number-one player in the country, so I wasn’t concerned what high school I went to,” he says undramatically.
But the sequence of events that happened next would blow the mind of any kid, even a massively talented teenager with good reason to believe that NBA dreams were realistic. Almost exactly 13 months after being handed a high school degree, Davis was handed a New Orleans Hornets jersey as the top pick in the 2012 NBA draft. In between, he led the Kentucky Wildcats to an NCAA championship, earning both the award as the consensus national player of the year for the regular season and also the tournament’s most outstanding player. And that summer he played in London alongside legends like Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Kevin Durant on a team that won gold. “It was very fun to be able to experience that with future Hall of Famers and All-Stars,” says Davis, one of only a handful of American players in the modern era to play on an Olympic team without one game of NBA experience. “To be able to go straight to the Olympics and learn from those guys, it really helped my career.”
Davis is excited about his prospects of going to the 2020 Tokyo Games.
© Miko Lim
Davis arguably was launching toward a Hall of Fame career, but that didn’t stop him from remembering where his upward trajectory had begun. A few years before he got the word “Chicago” scripted on his bicep, the newly minted NBA star went back to the Joslin Campus at Perspectives — where he and his schoolmates had dragged a rim out for practices — and helped convert the former teachers parking lot into a high-quality permanent basketball court. “It’s a real court where you don’t need rollaway rims,” he says. “And if there’s an opportunity to build a real gym, I’d definitely be interested in that."
THE WINGSPAN
Though there’s no question that at 6’10” Davis is an Extremely Tall Guy, within the rarefied cohort of the NBA he’s hardly out of the ordinary. That is, until he stretches his arms out from side to side.
As Davis plays basketball, his arms operate like some kind of CGI special effect from a Marvel movie. He grabs rebounds and blocks shots and windmills dunks from spots where nearly all other human beings could not participate in the play. His 7’6” wingspan is almost beyond belief. Consider that the average American man has a height/wingspan ratio of 1.01 — meaning roughly even proportions. The average player in the NBA is hardly average, of course, with a ratio closer to 1.06. But Davis is an outlier among outliers, with a ratio above 1.08. The real-world impact of this quantitative exercise is that Davis winds up on "SportsCenter" on a daily basis with dunks and blocks that don’t seem possible.
Also relevant: Davis had his massive growth spurt relatively late, and so he spent some of his formative years playing point guard, developing the ball-handling skills and speed to excel at that position. And those qualities never evaporated, even after he grew to become an outsized power forward. The net sum is that Davis, who these days can play forward or center, is extremely challenging to guard — he’s too big for most forwards to handle and too nimble for most centers to shadow.
Davis’s remarkable versatility and athleticism, the impacts of his unearthly wingspan and skillful footwork — all this is hard to fully describe with words. Watching him play, of course, tells this story with visceral power — the way he can fly into the paint from stage left and dominate. But arguably the most effective language to explain his greatness is numbers.
Get ready for some statistics. Like this: Davis is one of only three players in NBA history to log 10,000 points, 4,000 rebounds and 1,000 blocks before turning 26. In his past three seasons, Davis averaged 27.3 points, 11.6 rebounds, 2.8 assists, 1.4 steals and 2.4 blocks. That means he scored more than Steph Curry or Kevin Durant, snagged more steals than LeBron James and rejected more shots than all but one other player in the league. He’s one of only two players in NBA history (the other is this guy named Kareem) who averaged 30 points and a 50 percent field goal percentage in their first two playoff series.
Even by NBA bigman standards, Davis’s 7’6” wingspan is otherworldly.
© Miko Lim
Still not convinced? Consider that Davis has scored at least 45 points, grabbed 15 boards and blocked two shots in a game seven times — that’s almost twice the total that every active player in the NBA has registered in the past decade. And he’s one of only three players in modern history (the others are Charles Barkley and Moses Malone) to get 45 points and 15 rebounds in back-to-back games. The executive summary is that Davis is playing like an all-time great.
Davis doesn’t think about the numbers so much. He’s too caught up in the day-to-day realities of his work ethic. “Like anything else that you’d pursue in a career where you constantly want to get better, it’s going to take a lot of work,” he says. “If you want to be one of the elite players in the NBA, there’s a lot of work. It’s hard to explain if you’re not in the NBA world.”
THE BROW
After two hours of launching 3-pointers — and himself toward the rim from the free-throw line — Davis sits down for an interview. At that point, his CGI arms get tucked to the side and I come face-to-face with the most celebrated eyebrows on the planet. Davis has famously called himself the CEO of his own business, and one of his first moves when he left Kentucky was to trademark the phrases “Fear the Brow” and “Raise the Brow.”
The summer is the only break in the NBA’s protracted schedule, the best time for players to pursue extracurricular shenanigans. While most of Davis’s time this summer has been dedicated to physical training for his day job, the newest Laker has kept himself busy with other projects and diversions.
About a month after the trade was announced, Davis scored the toughest seat in the red-hot Los Angeles dining scene — a place at the table at Taco Night at LeBron’s house. James Instagrammed highlights of the meal to millions, and before long Davis was recounting details of the meal with Jimmy Kimmel. (Dying to know whether they ate hard shells or soft? The answer is both.) “It’s a little tradition for him and his family,” says Davis, sheepishly describing the most viral weekly family dinner in human history. “I don’t know what else to say — it’s tacos.”
In the weeks after the big trade, Davis says that James offered to give up his number — 23 — which Davis had worn for more than a decade. On June 27, James even tweeted a suggestion that he was going to switch to number 6, the digit he wore in Miami. But that plan fell through when Nike refused to go along, saying it had invested millions manufacturing inventory of James’s 23 on jerseys and other apparel.
Suddenly Davis had a dilemma, and he solved it by playing NBA 2K19. “I just went through all the numbers,” he recalls. “I went into the edit player mode and ran through a bunch to see what looked right,” he says, noting how he wound up picking number 3. “I went back to my elementary school days — that’s the first number I started with.”
Davis hardly shies away from public debate about the Brow
© Miko Lim
You have to embrace yourself — you have to embrace your dopeness.
Davis’s summertime collaboration with James also involved time on a Hollywood set. The two are involved in the production of "Space Jam 2," a long-long-awaited follow-up to the 1996 film that teamed Michael Jordan with Bugs Bunny. The sequel, scheduled to be in theaters in 2021, will feature LeBron and Bugs as stars, but Davis will be along for the ride (as well as hardcourt stars like Damian Lillard, Diana Taurasi and Klay Thompson).
“It’s a very fun experience,” says Davis. “The original 'Space Jam' was one of my favorite basketball movies of all time, and to be able to be a part of 'Space Jam 2' with other great cast members as well — it’s going to be exciting. When it comes out, I think everyone will appreciate it.”
Davis says his move to the entertainment capital of the world hardly means he’s looking for a second career. He’s been in a film before — "Barbershop 3," where he did a cameo with Ice Cube, Common, Cedric the Entertainer and other stars. Not surprisingly the scene had a couple of brow one-liners, but the yucks helped focus attention on an issue Davis cares about — gang violence in Chicago, and the CeaseFire program to end it. “I want to only have good content out there about me,” says Davis. “If I’m going to do something, I want it to be something I have a personal connection to.”
Still, many people remain curious how Davis feels about the years of conversation about his eyebrows. And this past summer, he admitted on an ESPN podcast that he’s so scared of the dark that he sleeps with a light on. We live in an era in which the biggest stars, especially men in marquee sports, typically try to cultivate a public image that’s seemingly flawless. But then there’s Anthony Davis, with a trademarked unibrow, talking about his nightlight.
“I think you have to stay genuine to yourself,” Davis says. “Honesty is key in everything. You have to be honest — first with yourself, and then with everyone else. And so when it comes to talking about the brow and stuff like that, it doesn’t bother me. You have to embrace yourself — you have to embrace your dopeness.”
Davis pauses. “I embrace it, so it’s easy for me to talk about it,” he says with ease. “And I don’t really care what people think of me.”
Anthony Davis
© Miko Lim
THE TENDONS AND LIGAMENTS
While much of the media chatter around Davis has weighed the Lakers’ championship prospects, the focus of Davis’s off-season has been to train to that end. A big man who earns north of $20 million and is expected to help carry a storied franchise to a title has to put in the work in July so he doesn’t wind up on the injured reserve list in January.
If you listen to experts who work with NBA players and other elite athletes who play long, intense seasons, one term you’ll hear a lot these days is “load management.” It’s a trendy approach to training that aims to maximize an athlete’s performances and physiological adaptations while minimizing the risk of injury. It’s a simple idea that leverages some complicated calculus to factor in variables like hours of training, sleep quality, travel volume, psychological stress and power output.
After his first four seasons, Davis overhauled his training and nutrition regimen to stay healthier. In his years in New Orleans he used cryotherapy and yoga, wore a fitness tracker to minimize the time his nervous system spent in a parasympathetic (fight-or-flight) state and did extensive training to improve his hip stability and strength.
And now, Davis’s focus for the 2019-20 season is about preparing his body for the most difficult moments he’ll face out on the hardwood. “I’ve watched how a lot of people get hurt during the seasons, and obviously that’s something we all dread, and so I’m training to find ways to prevent that,” he says. “I’m going into crazy positions.”
In the name of load management, Davis trains for the worst-case scenario. “I’m trying to maximize my strength in these awkward positions,” he says. “That way, when I’m in those positions with a lot of load or someone is pushing me, my body and my ligaments and tendons can handle it.”
Davis knows there will be times when he is diving for a loose ball or colliding with a 280-pound body — moments that produce huge stress on an elite athlete’s body. These dynamics are an issue for any pro, but biomechanics experts say taller athletes have it extra tough — because when levers (translation: limbs and bones) get longer, forces get greater. In the same vein, Davis has bulked up a ton in the past eight years — he weighed 190 as a high school senior and tips the scales around 250 now. That mass is very useful when he’s trying to dunk on a power forward but a potential liability if he lands awkwardly on his ankle.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. In his first seven NBA seasons, Davis missed 108 games due to injuries or illness. That total isn’t particularly high — Shaquille O’Neal and Allen Iverson sat out more in the same period of their careers — but Davis can’t help win games if he’s on the bench. A list of his past injuries catalogs a painful litany of strained knees, bruised hips, sprained and fractured digits, sore shoulders and quads and back spasms.
And so Davis trains — he works smarter, he mindfully considers his tendons, he even rests with scientific precision. “I’m 100 percent healthy and I feel fine,” Davis says. “I feel very confident in myself.”
THE BACK
In the end, wins and losses will determine how people interpret the narrative of Anthony Davis, LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers. Nobody grumbles today about how Kareem Abdul-Jabbar demanded a trade from Milwaukee in 1975 because he wound up helping the Lakers win five championships. In that vein, Davis’s big move may look like a perfect marriage and the rebirth of a basketball dynasty in L.A. Or maybe injuries or personality clashes or just imperfect chemistry will lead to a different outcome. The answers will come soon enough.
Anthony Davis
© Miko Lim
We have a great group of guys — nobody who wants to showcase their skills rather than do what's best for the team.
But with the 2019-20 season looming, Davis knows what’s expected of him and he’s prepared — to sometimes put the team on his back and carry it. And he knows that he will be surrounded by quality players he already knows. There’s LeBron James, of course, but also his former New Orleans teammate, Rajon Rondo. “I’ve got Rondo back as my point guard — he’s a guy I can count on to get the ball in my sweet spot.” (This interview took place two weeks before center DeMarcus Cousins, another former teammate and friend of Davis’s, suffered a potentially career-altering ACL injury in an off-season workout.)
Davis knows that talent can only take a team so far — that chemistry ultimately wins championships. “Everyone has to be on the same page — the players, the coaching staff, the front office, ownership, everyone,” he says. “I think we have a great group of guys — no one causing locker room problems and nobody who wants to go out there and be selfish; nobody who wants to showcase their skills rather than do what’s best for the team.”
Still, everyone really wants to know how Davis and LeBron James will mesh. As we sit and talk in Encino, Lakers practices have not yet started, but Davis says that he and LeBron “talk every day — about the team and our goals, what we want to do this year and what we want to accomplish, and breaking it down to the very smallest molecules,” he says. “I think two guys like us, we have a very good chance of doing something special.”
He adds: “We haven’t done anything in terms of basketball together — that time is going to come.”
Thanks to the acquisition of Davis and other roster moves, the Lakers — who lost more games than they won last season and failed to make the playoffs — are suddenly one of the favorites to contend for an NBA title. Curiously, the odds-on favorite for the trophy plays in the same arena — the Los Angeles Clippers, who will pair All-Stars Kawhi Leonard and Paul George.
Davis is careful with his words when asked about the rivalry transfixing fans in L.A. “I’m not sure what the Clippers are thinking,” he says. “But I know what the Lakers are thinking — and that’s to play basketball. Obviously, they have a great team, but we know that for us it’s going to be bigger than a rivalry. You know, winning a rivalry game doesn’t win the championship. So for us the goal is to win a championship this year.”
Asked whether the team has explicitly discussed that goal — to win a title this year — Davis laughs out loud. “We haven’t talked about it yet, but I don’t think it needs to be said,” he says. “I think that any time that you’re on, your goal is always to win a championship. If it’s not, I don’t understand why you’re playing.”
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