What elevates the shot from sublime to great is that the basketball doesn’t go in.

Not immediately, at least.

This shot, it wants to think about it. The basketball plunges, shudders off of the rim, and launches skyward, unhurried, like a beach ball on a hazy summer day.

This shot has nowhere special to go. It takes its time.

It isn’t a swish, like that brilliant long-range game-winner Damian Lillard hit a couple of weeks ago for Portland, another upstart of these NBA playoffs. Swishes are decisive, dramatic knife wounds. There’s a reason they call a game-winning shot a dagger. Swishes feel ruthless.