As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic Nick Young. He was lying on his tattoo-less, "strictly for buckets" arm and when he lifted his afro-ed head he could see Iggy Azalea, who was absorbing African-American music to allow white people to feel comfortable with it. His numerous (ok, two) legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of the professional athlete world, waved helplessly before his eyes.
What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream. In his dreams, he always turned around and walked away like a badass while his threes swished home instead of... this. Above the table on which a collection of horrifically skinny pants was unpacked and spread out- Swaggy P was a horrible dresser- hung the picture which he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put into a pretty gilt frame. It showed Gilbert Arenas, with a fur cap on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a basketball. What about sleeping a little longer and forgetting all this nonsense, he thought, but it could not be done, for Swaggy P was accustomed to getting buckets all morning and in his present condition he could think of nothing else. However violently he forced himself to attempt to get an assist or rebound he always rolled the ball off his fingertips from 23 feet for the three. He tried it at least a hundred times a game, shutting his eyes to keep from making it too easy, and only desisted when he began to feel in his side a faint dull ache he knew to be Kobe stabbing him.
Oh God, he thought, what an exhausting nickname you have bestowed upon me! Swagging about day in, day out. It's much more irritating work than doing the actual winning of games, and on top of that there's the trouble of constant traveling, of worrying about my next contract, casual acquaintances on the roster that are always new and never become good at basketball. The devil take it all! He felt a slight itching up on his right arm: it had been hours since he had last shot an ill-advised jumper. His "In Swag We Trust" tattoo begged him awake.
He slid down again into his normal position, just an inch inside the three-point arc. This practicing multiple facets of the game, he thought, makes one quite stupid. A man needs his threes. Other players live like fools. For instance, when I come back to the hotel in the morning after a night of riding camels and crashing Pakistani weddings, these others are only sitting down to breakfast. let me just try that, I'd be bored out of my brain. Anyway, that might be quite a good thing for me, who can tell? It's a queer way of doing, too, this trying to get better at anything but buckets, especially when they have to come quite near the coach. Well, there's still hope; once I've made enough buckets to do this with regularity-that should take another five or six years-I'll do it without fail. I'll cut myself completely loose then. For the moment, though, I'd better get up, since swag never rests.
Swag. Never. Rests.
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