DECAPITATION DEMANDS A schedule. And so it is that every summer for George now commences with a customary review with Indiana coach Frank Vogel, a man whose office wall is conspicuously adorned by an oversize photo of three Pacers shielding the rim from Derrick Rose. The caption reads SWARM. It continues with George returning to LA, his offseason home, to break down tape of every second of every Indiana playoff game that year. (Regular-season games, George asserts, reveal little; only the postseason truly exposes a player's flaws.) And then, and only then, notes in hand, does George go back to work.

So it was in the summer of 2012 -- the one after George's resolution -- that he self-diagnosed a case of extreme timidity off the bounce, evidenced by how often he'd caught and swung the ball in the playoffs. "I felt like I let the team down," he says. "I was scared to put the ball on the floor because I didn't want to turn it over." George enlisted Jerry Powell, a ballhandling guru who'd worked with LeBron and Kevin Durant, for two-a-days. Powell told George he'd been dribbling the ball straight up, as if he were still 6'1", and that he needed to stay lower to protect the ball, attack angles, shift speeds and create offense for himself. George went to work. "I had never met a kid that humble, that young," Powell says. "I told him, 'You're a handle away from being an All-Star.'"

That hypothesis would be field-tested that October. On the eve of the 2012-13 season, Granger, the incumbent star swingman, went down with left patellar tendinosis, effectively ending his season and handing George, the understudy, his leading role. A fretful George, who'd averaged 12.1 ppg the season before, went straight online to pore over the numbers from Bryant's third NBA campaign. By then, his idol was already averaging 19.9 a game.

The season looked dead on arrival. This is going to take time. "But thankfully for us," a chuckling Vogel says, "Paul exploded."

Granger -- who has the same agent as George and remains close friends with his teammate -- had a courtside seat to his own transformation into the Wally Pipp of Indy. He watched the new kid proceed to launch 50 percent more shots than he had the year before (up from 9.7 to 14.9 a game), doubling his prior season's beyond-the-break three-point tries, midrange jumpers and attempts in the paint. Deferent no more, George was named an All-Star, just as Powell had predicted. In the playoffs, a regular-season line of 17.4/7.6/4.1 blossomed into an even more efficient 19.4/6.0/5.1 in seven head-to-head bouts with the league's apex predator, James. At times, George appeared to conjure offense at will: draining a 32-footer with 0.7 of a second left to send Game 1 into overtime; blowing by James in Game 2 and unleashing a tomahawk jam that left Chris Andersen on all fours.

But after Game 7, in the hush of the visiting locker room at AmericanAirlines Arena, the NBA's Most Improved Player was all but catatonic. Not only had the same team eliminated George for the second straight postseason, but he'd gone from peak to valley at the most revealing moment of his career, scoring a mere seven points in the Game 7 loss. "I remember, specifically, that he talked about how he hadn't prepared for the role he was in," West says. "We immediately started talking about next year." George vowed to return, in his own words, "a complete package, offensively."

This is going to take time.

And so it was, last summer, that George reunited with Powell and located a new trainer, former Lakers sharpshooter Mike Penberthy, to iron out a hitch in his jumper, widen his stance and condition his body to square up to the basket. ("Paul had this intensity," Penberthy says, "like, man, this guy could hurt me.") George tested his repertoire in pickup games with NBA players at 360 Health Club in Reseda, Calif. A crew involving Granger, John Wall, Taj Gibson and Reggie Jackson was witness to a new ferocity in George, the Pacer howling at himself whenever the others managed to score on him. Then he reached out to development coach Justin Zormelo, the founder of Best Ball Analytics, whose primary client is, not coincidentally, Durant. "Before this season, Paul told me, 'I'm coming for everybody,'" Zormelo recalls. "And he mentioned Kevin and LeBron by name."

And so it is, this season, that upon the end of every Pacers game, Zormelo emails George a link to video of every possession he was involved in and a stats-minded edit of past duels with his next matchup. Since George prepares to guard point guards, shooting guards and forwards, the videos routinely run two hours long -- so long that in December, Zormelo figured he'd test his client's attention by withholding the link after a random game. George immediately emailed him, in confusion. And at his Miami hotel a few days later, before a matchup with the Heat, he pulled a visiting Zormelo aside to make one thing perfectly clear: Yes, indeed, he watches (this ...) every (is ...) single (going ...) frame (to ...) every (take ...) night (time).

SO EXACTLY HOW good has Paul George become? Funny you should ask -- and good timing too. Because it is only now that George's chosen profession has built the metrics to contextualize how complete his game has become.

Let's start on offense, where this season George's usage rate of 28.2 has conspicuously climbed to 12th highest in the league, while his PER has risen to 27th overall (20.4). He has scored more points than ever (22.2 a game, 11th highest in the NBA), more efficiently than ever (true shooting percentage: 56.3 percent, up from 53.1 percent last year), while turning the ball over less than ever (12.4 times per 100 plays, better than James and Durant). He ranks second in scoring off screens (1.11 ppp); 11th in isolation (0.95); ninth in catch-and-shoot (1.27); and sixth in spot-up possessions (1.29). "Honestly," Zormelo says, "Paul scares me," noting that George's 0.99 overall ppp this season mirrors that of the 23-year-old James (1.00) and the 23-year-old Durant (1.06).

But all of this constitutes just half of George's professional life. Consider the other side of the court, where this year's Pacers allow a Scroogeian 96.2 points per 100 possessions, not only the best mark in a decidedly offense-centric league -- the second-place Bulls clock in at 100.7 -- but the lowest in a decade. Since 1978, per NBA.com, precisely zero other defenses have outperformed the NBA average (currently 103.2) by as large a margin as Indiana has this season (minus-9.6).

This is no accident. In Indy there is a culture, implanted by Vogel, who broke in as a Celtics video coordinator and offers no shelter amid marathon film sessions -- sessions that George (note the pattern?) has requested even more of. Bite on a ball fake? Neglect to box out or rotate? "Coach has no shame in calling you out," George says. "If you don't know what you're doing, you're going to get embarrassed." Then there is the personnel, handpicked for length, from George Hill (6'9" wingspan) to Lance Stephenson (6'10") to West (7'4") to the absurdly long-limbed Hibbert (7'9"). And then there is a philosophy that's designed to exploit all those long arms.

Thanks to Hibbert -- whom Vogel plants in the paint like a guard tower, arms up, to capitalize on the resurgent rule of verticality -- Indy's perimeter D is unleashed to "close out, run guys off the three-point line and attack," as Kings coach Mike Malone notes with awe. The result: The swarming Pacers allow the second-lowest three-point percentage (32.9 percent) on the fourth-fewest attempts (960) in the league. And the tip of their spear, policing passing lanes and hounding the most perilous threats over picks, never under? That's George.

Vogel often marvels at how a 6'9" human can move so slickly as to be almost impossible to screen, and the data bears it out. No NBA player guards as many ballhandlers on pick-and-rolls while permitting so little scoring. "If you're going to compete with the Durants and LeBrons, it starts with having somebody like Paul," Vogel says. "If you don't have somebody like Paul, you're probably going to lose."

Of course, somebodies like Paul aren't falling off trees -- or all teams would have one. Consider that George has rated first overall in Defensive Win Shares for two straight seasons while ranking in the top 10 in steals per game for three. Meanwhile, among those who play at least 30 minutes a game, he ranks second in opponent field goal percentage at the rim, barely behind Hibbert. "I don't know if I've ever seen anyone Paul's size defend like he does," says Bird, a man hardly prone to hyperbole. "It's unbelievable."

Shaw sees Bird's disbelief and raises it into blasphemy, christening George the NBA's best two-way player, ahead of James, for a simple reason: "LeBron doesn't always guard the other team's best player." Defense, George notes, used to be the "only way I could get on the floor," and he never shook that survivalist desperation, patrolling both ends as if he's paid on commission, by the step. Simply put, he demands the hardest assignment, on behalf of arguably the most unforgiving defense ever, for most every minute he's on the floor.

"He's got Pippen's body and Iverson's instincts in terms of using his hands to disrupt," Vogel says. "If Paul didn't score a point -- a point -- he'd still be a top-15 player in the game."

AND YET, FOR all these fancy metrics, it's the NBA's seminal stat that remains its most persuasive. Wins matter. They're why 20 of the past 25 MVPs played for a team with at least the best record in its conference. They're why George's numbers -- even compared with those of James and this year's revolutionary iteration of Durant -- feel far more substantial than the empty calories of a Carmelo Anthony. They're why Granger is comfortable declaring that his replacement will win the MVP award "in one of the next three years, I promise you."

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Which is not to say that doubts about George's place in the NBA's upper echelon do not persist. In an informal poll of 20 league sources -- players, coaches, executives and scouts -- seven respondents declined to name George a superstar. When asked why, each cited George's inexperience.

One of those seven dissenters, it's worth noting, was Paul George.

And so it is, back at Kilroy's, once the breadsticks have arrived and the napkin-wielding masses have dissipated, that George is asked to defend a self-deprecation that would be inconceivable to his boyhood idol. "Honestly," he says, "I just feel like there are a couple steps I still need to get to in order to be on that 'superstar' pedestal."

And with that he dips a stuffed breadstick into marinara and pauses, as if suddenly afraid of something essential being misunderstood. As if considering, for the first time, that he's already taken enough time; that maybe the person he's envisioned being could be within earshot of the person he already is.

"I want to be taken seriously," George says finally, breadstick still in hand. "I want to be one of the most decorated players in this league. I want to win the MVP. Be the Defensive Player of the Year. I'd love to be the scoring champion. Be a real champion. Be a gold medalist."

This sounds like a lot, he is told -- for any superstar. And as he looks up, nodding, what he does next feels like a warning to everyone he has ever deferred to, and idolized, and devoted himself to decapitating. "It is," he says, his gaze steady, his voice unwavering. "I want it all."

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Pablo S. Torre is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. Follow him on Twitter: @PabloTorre.

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