Indiana Pacers backup guard T.J. McConnell exemplifies a type of basketball player I generally regard with disgust: the Skittering Little Rat Guy. This is the frenzied little gremlin always very visibly going 40 percent harder than anybody else at every single moment, constantly poking for steals, throwing himself theatrically to the floor (on his back to draw charges against better players, on his front after every halfway-loose ball he can turn into a monument to his own commitment), fouling a degree too hard, sprinting and yelling and gesticulating. Slapping the floor, even. Skittering Little Rat Guys are far more common in college basketball than in the NBA—some mid-major colleges start entire lineups of fifth-year Skittering Little Rat Guys—but they are found at all levels of the sport.
I regard the Skittering Little Rat Guy as basketball's most objectionable player type, both ethically and in simple visceral terms. For one thing, the Skittering Little Rat Guy's whole deal, his very presence on the court, is antithetical to the best, most breathtaking basketball stuff—and to the very idea of basketball as a stylish, expressive, creative game. He gunks up the works. He is an intruder into the cool sport from Mike Krzyzewski's vision of what it should be; not coincidentally, some of the most hateful Skittering Little Rat Guys in living memory—Bobby Hurley, Steve Wojciechowski, Grayson Allen—made themselves famous at Coach K's Duke program.
Coaches love the Skittering Little Rat Guy, for his total personal sublimation into the numbers on the scoreboard, for his utility as a cudgel against the reserve and self-respect of the other guys on the team. In his practice habits he is Martin Prince, forever asking Mrs. Krabapple for a pop quiz. Match his effort, Capable Scorer and Ball-Handling Wizard, or he will take your minutes.
The Skittering Little Rat Guy by his nature invites a certain stripe of viewer to see him as a vessel for basketball sanctimony; it's hard at times to resist reading that sanctimony into the Skittering Little Rat Guy himself. After all, all he's really doing out there is going insanely hard, with total focus and commitment and exertion, for every second he is on the floor. Look at how red he is! By contrast, everybody else on the floor can seem as though they're playing at half-speed, half-attention, half-desire. The Skittering Little Rat Guy offers those certain viewers an opportunity to go "If [so-and-so star player] competed like the [Skittering Little Rat Guy], he'd average 50 points a game and his team would never lose ... but he doesn't want it enough!" From there this certain fan is a short transit from issuing takes about star players being overpaid, and then it's a gentle right-hand turn to using the words winner and coddled, and then he's talking up how the college game—the highest level 999 out of 1,000 Skittering Little Rat Guys will ever reach—is more pure, and if you have not bailed by then he would love to talk to you about the scourge of "reverse racism."
Among the many things that certain stripe of viewer can't or won't understand is that the Skittering Little Rat Guy's whole style of play depends upon him occupying a specialized niche on a team with better players handling the more important stuff. This is especially true in the NBA, where Skittering Little Rat Guys as a rule cap out as role players. Over the course of a game, the Skittering Little Rat Guy will play like 18 fewer minutes than the guy the team depends upon for both voluminous scoring production and the decisive plays. Over the course of an 82-game regular season, that adds up to a couple dozen fewer 48-minute games of basketball than the guy carrying the team's championship hopes on his back. The Skittering Little Rat Guy's express job is to wear himself out in a modest portion of playing time—a portion of playing time delimited by how long it takes him to wear himself out.
Put another way, if everybody in the NBA went that hard at every minute, the Skittering Little Rat Guy might very well be an assistant on his dad's high-school coaching staff. With few exceptions, the Skittering Little Rat Guy brings little else to the court that stands out nearly as much as his sheer intensity. He is less an NBA player plus maniacal focus and intensity than he is an NBA player because of maniacal focus and intensity.
Credit the Skittering Little Rat Guy with knowing this, and for embracing the deal available to him. If he did not, he would chill out a little bit, like an ambitious baseball pitcher who, hoping to rise above the station of a seventh-inning flamethrower, learns to take a couple miles-per-hour off of his standard four-seamer so that he can throw 70 of them in an outing instead of 15. This is why Jalen Brunson, a literal coach's son and fanatical dark-artist whose movement style certainly calls the word skittering to mind, is not really a Skittering Little Rat Guy: He chills out, relatively speaking, on defense, saving his legs as best he can for hunting buckets at the other end. He values buckets more highly than he values Grind; moreover his ability to provide buckets is of vastly greater value than whatever increased number of steals and charging fouls he could produce by sprinting around like like a madman on defense. His Knicks and Villanova teammate Josh Hart, though? At the very least he is Skittering Little Rat Guy–adjacent.
The Skittering Little Rat Guy, that is to say, is above all else an attitude, a martial disposition toward the game, most distinctly but not exclusively found in short-armed, hyper-competitive little bastards, the type who were lauded as "floor generals" in high school and then found they did not have the juice to be more than Basketball Tracy Flick when they got to the sport's highest levels. Many of them skitter as a movement style; all of them skitter as an approach to basketball, darting around in the game's crannies and unwatched hinterlands, shaving an advantage here and there through wily opportunism and sheer exertion and then, well, skittering back into the shadows. The Skittering Little Rat Guy does not value dignity; his terms are those of total warfare. The mark his meager abilities leave him unable to put on the box score or in the highlight reel he will die to put on the standings chart.
In many respects Chris Paul could be considered the patron saint of Skittering Little Rat Guys, with his infamous zeal for diving and crotch-punching; his aggregative, Tom Thibodeau–ian approach to competition; his total war mentality. Paul's career accomplishments testify to Skittering Little Rat Guy attributes more than those of perhaps any other genuinely great NBA player, ever. Had he not also been one of the best ball-handlers, playmakers, and orchestrators of his or any generation, he certainly would have settled for the life of the itinerant shrimpy shithouser, hanging onto pro basketball's ass end with his teeth, and he likely would have excelled at it.
But Chris Paul can't be considered a true Skittering Little Rat Guy. His mastery of the skills and nuances of basketball puts him in a different category. By perfecting the art of controlling the game's tempo and flow, during his peak years he if anything played the game at far lower levels of minute-by-minute cardiovascular exertion than most of his peers. The true Skittering Little Rat Guy doesn't have that, and can't; his mode is not control but chaos.
As a category, the Skittering Little Rat Guy is one of the chief beneficiaries of the space the sport's dumber rules carve out for try-hard goons specializing in stuff that annoys the hell out of everybody else. By treating open retaliatory shoves as tantamount to murder, the NBA has made an actual valuable skillset out of the type of bullshit that draws those retaliatory shoves, and then a brick-handed asshole like Matthew Dellavedova can scrabble together an entire career out of diving through people's legs and thwacking them in their crotches. In this respect T.J. McConnell stands out from most of the other Skittering Little Rat Guys: For as annoying as he can be with the full-court pressing and flinging himself after inbound passes and diving after every loose ball with total abandon, he has never earned a reputation for dirty play. That is commendable and also, in its way, pretty impressive.
Nevertheless I have mostly been grossed out by McConnell in the decade he's spent redly skittering around the NBA, harrying ball-handlers the length of the floor, Nash dribbling in tiny-radius curlicues around the restricted area. For a while there even I regarded him as maybe my least favorite basketball player, ever—more despised even than other notable Skittering Little Rat Guys like Patrick Beverley, Austin Rivers, and the above-mentioned Duke pricks. I think what has bothered me the most about McConnell is what fans of his, in Philadelphia and then Indiana, have tended to admire: There is something unseemly, undignified, vaguely weedlike about a shrimpy little college guard of plainly modest skills flailing and thrashing around out there among bigger and better players, nipping at them like a high-strung little terrier. Fans see an indefatigable underdog refusing the game's agreed-upon terms, the Little Engine That Could chug-chug-chugging up that hill; I, by contrast, see the exact same thing, and simply want him to fuck off so that the actually cool players can test their otherworldly abilities against each other instead of dealing with friggin' Rudy Ruettiger over here.
Very probably I will go back to despising T.J. McConnell, as soon as next season. But I must admit, over the course of this spring's playoffs he won me over a bit; I even shifted into Hell Yeah Teej mode a few times as he helped Indiana give hell to the heavily favored Oklahoma City Thunder in the Finals. The key thing, I think, is his fit with the Pacers, whose entire team-wide approach matches his: On a team dedicated to stomping on the gas pedal at all times and defying the opposition to keep up, McConnell's personal frenzy blends in instead of distracting.
In that light I could more comfortably appreciate that this Skittering Little Rat Guy is NBA-good at some actual basketball stuff. He's nails from the middle of the lane, both for his diminutive size and just for a guard in general, with that high-release jumper/floater thing of his and the quick spin-gather he uses when a defender beats him to the spot where he wants to take that shot. For key stretches of hard-fought Finals games, his value to the Pacers—and for more than just racing around like he'd had a bowl of NoDoz for lunch—was undeniable.
After Indiana's Game 6 win, in which McConnell posted 12 points, nine rebounds, and six assists, his father and (naturally) former coach crashed the postgame interview on NBA TV. What followed was a set of interactions the likes of which load the term "coach's son" with so much sickly meaning: When asked what he thought of his son's performance, the first thing out of the elder McConnell's mouth was disappointment that T.J. had missed his first two free throws in the game. The segment ended with the old man reminding everyone that while T.J. had lost the state championship in high school, his sister, Megan McConnell of the Phoenix Mercury, won it.
The younger McConnell punctuated this display with a few sardonic looks at the camera, which effectively cut the tension but also—or maybe I imagined it—seemed to reveal some real angst behind the eyes. For the first time it occurred to me that T.J. might be just as tired of being a Skittering Little Rat Guy as I am of watching them.
Anyway I have said and written many mean things about T.J. McConnell over the years, so I figure I owe him equally vocal credit where it's due. The ornery li'l hobgoblin had a hell of a series. There! I said it!
