The basketball artistry of the Blazers’ CJ McCollum: ‘It’s me in one of my purest forms’ (2024)

When CJ McCollum walked into GlenOak High in Canton, Ohio as a freshman, he stood 5-feet-2 inches.

“I was very small,” McCollum said, chuckling.

In those early years of high school, he played varsity, his skills and smarts enough to overcome his size. Still, he wasn’t just small, he was almost tiny.

“So I had to be creative,” McCollum said. “I had to figure out ways to create space. I had to be comfortable in crowds, had to be comfortable shooting contested shots, and I had to be comfortable with failing because honestly, you aren’t going to make every shot when you are smaller. It was hard to do a lot of things.”

As he prayed for growth spurts, he worked on his skills and dabbled in experimentation. He tried floaters. Scoop shots. Different angles on the backboard. Fadeaways. Crossovers.

What first became an exercise in survival began to morph into an art form once he began to sprout. His sophom*ore year he was 5-foot-7. Junior year, 5-foot-11. When he committed to a basketball scholarship at Lehigh University, he was 6-1.

When he arrived on the Bethlehem, Pa. campus, he was 6-3 and not just an athlete. With a basketball in his hands, he had become an artist.

Today, in his eighth season in the NBA for the Portland Trail Blazers, McCollum has become one of the most creative — and aesthetically pleasing — scorers in the NBA. With delicate pirouettes, intricate dribbling, and a bag of shots that range from left-handed floaters to step-back 3-pointers, McCollum has elevated his game to an art form.

“Basketball is art,” McCollum said. “It’s a form of expression and creativity.”

This weekend in Denver, in the first round of the NBA playoffs, McCollum will return to one of his greatest works of art: his Game 7 performance in the 2019 Western Conference semifinals.

With the Denver crowd going crazy, and the pressure of the do-or-die game at its apex, the Blazers were in a timeout with 29 seconds left and leading by one.

McCollum said coach Terry Stotts began to diagram a play, then stopped to asked him what he wanted to do.

“I told him I didn’t want no screen, flatten it out,” McCollum said. “And I said I was going to get us a bucket and move on.”

He didn’t want a screen because he felt it would bring too many bodies into the scene. As an artist, he wanted an empty canvas with which to execute his vision.

“Since I got good at basketball, I never really worried about the other team or the defense,” McCollum said. “It’s about figuring out what you want and what you are comfortable executing. Then you go out there and do it.”

McCollum broke free of defender Torrey Craig with a crossover to his left, then stopped his drive at the free-throw line and rose up for a 16-footer with 12 seconds left. It was the shot that sealed the franchise’s first trip to the conference finals in 19 seasons and capped a 37-point performance, a franchise record for a Game 7.

As this playoff series begins, that Game 7, and that game-sealing moment are a reminder of the value of having such a diverse shot-maker as McCollum in the playoffs.

“In playoff basketball, at some point in the series there’s not a lot new, and it’s about making plays,” Stotts said. “And that’s what CJ can do.”

He will do it with silky smooth shots. Jitterbug drives. And how-did-he-do-that creativity. To many who play the game, the detail and precision of McCollum’s moves elicit smiles or simple shakes of their head in amazement. To fans who watch, they know they are seeing something not only unique, but beautiful.

“Super creative, man,” teammate Damian Lillard said. “Super crafty. CJ is just one of those guys who like when we practice and play pick-up, and even when I’m on the bench and he’s in the game — he’s just fun to watch. Right hand, left hand, fading, straight up, toughly contested by a center or a guard, off-balance, on balance … it’s creativity.”

That creativity is a byproduct of his work in the gym. There’s experimentation, refining and tinkering, and repetition drills. He has come to love the process as much as the result.

“Basketball is one of the most beautiful sports in the world because of what goes into it,” McCollum said. “The preparation. The execution. The movements and celebrations. The way I move, how graceful it is, how effortless it looks … it’s all years of mastered craft. Lots of hours and sacrifice goes into every step back, every floater, every dribble combination.”

And when it is unveiled on the court, it is not just art, McCollum says it is a reflection of himself.

“It’s me in one of my purest forms,” McCollum said. “One of my most happy forms, and most natural forms.”

In the season’s 10th game, against Toronto, McCollum made one of his prettiest moves — a full-speed pirouette in transition that evolved into a hard pivot, a between-the-legs-dribble and ultimately a nothing-but-net mid-range jumper.

Oh yeah, and it was with 9.9 seconds left and the Blazers trailing by one. And, the game-winning shot was against noted defender Fred VanVleet.

.@CJMcCollum is built different 🥶 pic.twitter.com/87IVXYPDHC

— Portland Trail Blazers (@trailblazers) January 12, 2021

The shocking part wasn’t the degree of difficulty of all four facets — the twirl, the hard pivot, the between-the-legs and the shot — it was the ease in which McCollum decided and executed a shot with the game on the line.

“The same way an artist just paints is how a hooper just hoops,” McCollum said.

He calls the gym his lab, and it’s where McCollum experiments and perfects his combinations of moves, and shots. He has put so much time in the lab that his body now reacts naturally as his mind processes how the defense is playing him.

“In terms of moves, sometimes it’s predetermined, but most of the time I just let my body react,” McCollum said.

He says usually, what type of move he executes depends on what type of defender is on him.

“Is it an aggressive defender like Marcus Smart or Patrick Beverley? Or is it a technically sound guy like Kawhi?” McCollum said. “You gauge that and the more aggressive defenders I tend to show the ball moves — between the legs, behind the back, spins, things like that. Like that play against the Raptors and Fred VanVleet, I went to a spin move because he’s more aggressive, and sometimes you have to hide the ball as opposed to crossing it over in front of them.”

For a more fundamental defender like the Clippers’ Leonard, McCollum is more comfortable using the crossover because he knows Leonard will rarely gamble.

“So I will hang a cross(over) as opposed to shooting the ball because you know you got space, or you know they are not necessarily going to reach,” McCollum said. “So those are the things I look at, but outside of that it’s more just the body reading and reacting.”

He says the moves he first honed as a 5-foot-2 high school freshman — the crossover and the hesitation crossover — are the staples of his attack today. But each season, and sometimes in the course of each season, his repertoire expands.

He figures much of his creativity is innate, but he isn’t ashamed to admit he steals from other players.

“Some of my creativity is DNA. I believe that some people are born with certain stuff and you just have to tap into it from a work standpoint,” McCollum said. “And some of it is, I can mimic stuff. If I see something I like, I steal it. I watch a lot of basketball, and I watch pregame workouts. I watch guys like Bradley Beal. I watch people who are unique at what they do, and there’s always something I try to steal from them, whether it’s footwork, a counter, a set-up.”

For instance, late this season McCollum has started to use an underhand floater that he says is a combination of a shot used by Stephen Curry and Mike James.

“Mike James, if you watched him in Europe, he has a nasty underhand-like floater that is unblockable off the bounce,” McCollum said. “So I literally watched him play … worked on it a bit … then the next game I did it. I did it against the Clippers and then I did it in the fourth quarter at Utah against Rudy Gobert. It’s really pretty when it’s high up. But that’s something I stole.”

He says he also studied Beal and how he sets up his pick-and-roll plays — “he has great feet” — and he took one of the more painful moments of the Blazers’ season — a last-second 3-pointer by Boston’s Jayson Tatum and benefitted from it.

“We all know James (Harden) likes to step to the side on his 3’s, but another guy who has a nasty step back is Jayson Tatum,” McCollum said. “That shot he hit on me to win the game — a step-back right — he normally does a step-back left. (Four games later) I did the same step-back right against the Denver Nuggets on the right wing. So, I’m very comfortable seeing something once and then go replicate it.”

This season, he has implemented his left hand into his bag of shots, much to the chagrin of his father.

“He hates the left-hand shot and the floater, all of it,” McCollum said. “He says it’s dumb. He says ‘Tony Parker never needed his left hand.’ He hates that I swish shots from the paint. He wants me to use the backboard.”

McCollum figures using the backboard is the portal to his game’s next advancement. He says he thinks he is the best shot-maker in the NBA next to Brooklyn point guard Kyrie Irving, who this season became the ninth player in NBA history to shoot at least 50 percent from the field, 40 percent from 3-point range and 90 percent from the foul line.

“I don’t know many players besides me and Kyrie who would use their left hand in the fourth quarter of a game, especially with the game on the line,” McCollum said.

Blazers assistant coach Jonathan Yim, who works extensively with McCollum, wants to draw closer the similarities between McCollum and Irving. Yim recently documented the shooting percentage between Irving and McCollum from different areas of the court. They were similar in the restricted area (Irving 60 percent, McCollum 56 percent), midrange (Irving 54, McCollum 49) and step-back 3’s (Irving 36, McCollum 37), but Irving was 76 percent on banked shots that were not layins while McCollum was 52 percent.

“Kyrie is special, the shots he can make,” McCollum said. “The way he uses the backboard is probably the next step in my progression, as well as paint finishing. Like, the English he can put on the ball … and he has great angles, and will bank any shot. I think that’s the difference between me shooting 50/40/90 — the paint finishes and the ability to find the backboard.”

McCollum this season averaged 23.1 points while shooting 45.8 percent from the field, 40.2 percent from 3-point range and 81.2 percent from the foul line. His scoring was a career-high and, before he broke his foot in January causing him to miss 25 games, he was on pace to have career-best shooting percentages.

The time rehabilitating his broken foot not only took away from his timing and rhythm, but it also prevented him from going into the lab and perfecting and expanding his arsenal. Before the injury he would have days where he just worked on floaters, followed by days where he just worked on shots in the paint. The next he would work on step-back 3’s.

“I couldn’t do a lot of that for a while, because I had to be off my foot. But at this point, I will do anything in a game. I’m comfortable shooting any shot,” McCollum said. “The only thing I haven’t done is shoot a one-legged 3-pointer, because I haven’t had time to. But I’ve worked on it, and if I didn’t break my foot earlier in the season, I definitely would have done it. But when I came back, I had to be more technically sound and make sure I was practicing good habits.”

And it’s that practice, that attention-to-detail, the repetition and insistence on perfection that differentiates between average and great. What separates action from art.

“There’s a distinct difference between the players who really can hoop,” McCollum said. “The same way a shark just swims and eats unbothered, unworried, is how the greatest players perform their craft.”

There has been an unmistakable joy to McCollum’s game this season. He shimmied his shoulders against the Raptors, wagged his finger like Dikembe Mutumbo after a block of Detroit’s Cory Joseph, and he has laughed and smiled often throughout the season.

And there is a reason behind that joy: “Life, man, is fragile,” he says.

In the past year, his aunt passed away. His chef and close friend died suddenly. His wife’s grandmother passed away. And this month, his cousin, whom he grew up playing with, was killed after getting hit by a car on his way home from work. His funeral will be in Ohio during the middle of the Blazers’ playoff series with Denver.

“There’s just a lot. A lot of stuff,” McCollum said, also mentioning the pandemic and social justice issues. “That’s why you have to enjoy each day.”

One of his greatest joys is basketball, and he has tried to remember that and embrace that, as often as he can.

“Life is precious, man, and the game is supposed to be fun, so I try to make it as fun as possible,” McCollum said. “I think people take stuff too seriously sometimes — like the locker room, the season — it can wear on you to where you just have to come to terms with your life and your situation and realize that we really are playing a game every day. This is supposed to be fun. So I try to make it fun as possible, and some people like it, some people probably don’t. Like, I probably make jokes at the wrong time at times, but it’s just like, life is supposed to be fun.”

He has also tried to compartmentalize work from his personal life by drawing a hard line between the two.

“Sometimes, I just need to be away. I’ve got a wife, I want to be home,” McCollum said. “Like people asking me (after the regular-season finale), ‘What are you going to do to get ready for the Nuggets?’ I’m not worried about the f*cking Nuggets right now. I just want to get home. That’s not disrespect to anybody, but the game just ended and I want to go home and be a normal person for a little bit. Enjoy the comfort of playing with my dog in my backyard, or talking to my mom and dad, or having a normal conversation with my wife that doesn’t involve basketball.

“I put so much into it, so much energy, so much attention, so much preparation that sometimes I tell my family — ‘I don’t want to talk about basketball.’ Let’s talk about anything else. How are you? How are you feeling? How is everything going?” McCollum said. “And some days, I can’t watch it. Like, I have to turn it off or else I’ll get burned out. And this is the type of season that will burn you out, 100 percent.”

A word that McCollum uses often these days is “unbothered” and it’s a word that goes a long way in explaining the why and the how of his free and creative approach to the game.

“People joke about it, but I play like I’m in the backyard with my dad, or mom, or brother or wife rebounding for me,” McCollum said. “That’s how I play the game: free, loose, confident, unbothered. Because when you work on it, you become comfortable with success, but also comfortable with failure. Like, I can work on something, go into a game and miss it, and say, ‘Well, I have to tighten it up,’ as opposed to ‘I’m never doing that again.”’

His confidence, and his loose and relaxed style, are why he so looks forward to the playoffs. Between the pressure and the concerted game plans to stop players like himself, it is the perfect canvas for his creative art.

“The playoffs are about creativity,” McCollum said. “The playoffs are all about taking away stuff, but if you have a variety or an arsenal, there’s not much anybody can do about it. You can score one-on-one, isolation, catch-and-shoot, floaters … but in the playoffs, the big shot is most often the mid-range.”

McCollum, of course, likes to consider himself the King of the Midrange, a claim in part justified by that Game 7 two years ago, complete with the game-winning shot from mid-range.

“In the playoffs, when there is not as much space, and the game is not as fast, it’s important to have guys who can be creative, and guys who can get things done in small spaces and make tough shots,” Lillard said. “And do it consistently. Some people might hit a tough shot, then after that there’s no telling when they will make another one. CJ is one of those guys who can have a full game of tough shots. Like he did in Game 7 in Denver. I was having a tough night shooting the ball, and you know, here comes CJ with tough shot, after tough shot, after tough shot, after tough shot.

“Only players with that ability can take over a game like that and have a moment like that in the playoffs,” Lillard said.

Which brings us to this season, and this playoff series against Denver. Unlike the 2019 Nuggets that had noted defenders in Craig and Gary Harris in the backcourt, this year’s Denver roster is shorthanded at best. Jamal Murray is out for the series with a knee injury, Will Barton is out for Game 1 with a hamstring injury and Austin Rivers is questionable for Game 1 with a non-COVID-19-related illness.

Is Denver weaker defensively than they were when the Blazers beat them in 2019?

“I guess we are about to find out,” McCollum said. “I guess we will know by about 9’oclock if the game starts at 8:30 … 9 o’clock or 8:45.”

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(Top photo: Cameron Browne / NBAE via Getty Images)