The Irresistible Rise of Alexey Shved

It was a YouTube fad a few years back, which is ancient history in internet time. But the moment when Russian dash cam clips and compilations became A Thing was weird enough and wonderful enough to stick in the memory long after the rest of the web had moved on to babbling Iggy Azalea Vines.

This is a hard world, and Russia’s dash cams captured its harshness, from Road Warrior-level collisions to the Gorky-esque comedy of a bent, black-clad babushka furtively keying a car. These cameras were slapped on dashboards not out of a desire to cultivate page hits and LOL’s, but out of practicality and necessity—civilians were looking to create exculpatory evidence to be used should they run afoul of crooked traffic cops that are “known throughout their land for brutality, corruption, extortion and making an income on bribes,” or of the Kafka-esque requirements of the insurance companies, or even roving bands of con artists that will, without warning, make a mad dash into the oncoming traffic. The dash cams were in place to record things that should not have happened, but which nevertheless happened all the time.

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Which brings us to the New York Knicks, and their breakout Russian avant-gardeist Alexey Shved. The Knicks are unwatchable and beyond bleak, as they have been all year. Their season has been as miserable as a Central Asian winter, and seemingly just as interminable. And yet there is Shved, who has recently put up a string of performances that rival those of the top guards in the NBA.

It’s a small sample size and also just doesn’t look right, but it is real. This season, Shved has managed to rack up more win shares than Iman Shumpert and J.R. Smith combined, he’s in the top 20 among guards in both WS/48 and PER, and his total shooting percentage is identical to Dwyane Wade‘s. With Shved on court as the primary ballhandler, the Knicks… well, they’ve still been pretty crappy. But without Shved, they go from an ordinary, subpar 97.5 offensive rating and 102.0 defensive rating to an execrable 90.2/110.1 line.

Shved is something of a point guard of last resort, what with José Calderón nursing a sore leg like a kid ditching school on the day of an exam and Pablo Prigioni in Houston. But even given his default-driven usage, there’s no earthly reason to expect Shved to be this effective. Check out all these downright crafty leaners, off balance floaters, wrong-handed and wrong-footed layups. Shved has a jittery, slippery, oddly appealing style, a combination of slapstick careening and actual danger not unlike an out of control GAZ Volga barreling down the highway. Shved’s not fast or even quick, but there’s something jankily out of rhythm from the (dare I say it) James Harden School of Ref-Baiting that seems particularly conducive to drawing fouls.

So what gives? This is, after all, Alexey Shved we’re talking about here. Well, maybe after serving as a footnote to three trades built around conditional second round picks, something just snapped. Maybe being treated like the most disposable of NBA quantities made him realize that the only thing left to do was throw caution to the wind and play like a rail-thin Gilbert Arenas with a Brighton Beach accent. Whatever it is, it’s happening.

To be clear, Shved is not Arenas, nor is he the second coming of Drazen Petrovic—that hilarious comparison courtesy of veteran basketball writer Peter Vescey—or in any way comparable to Pete Maravich, as was suggested by the Knicks broadcast team. This isn’t some mid-career explosion that you’d be tempted to slap a -sanity at the end of, if only because Knicks fans have spent most of this season feeling insane enough. Shved remains a sub-40 percent shooter getting a boost from what is in all likelihood an unsustainable and fluky streak of hot shooting from three-point range. Plus, when it comes to defense, he’s still the hollow-chested, bespectacled weenie getting sand kicked in his face by any and all of the league’s Atlas-sculpted bullies. There’s a non-zero chance that Shved can’t find a NBA job next year, even after this.

The one way in which nods to Pistol Pete do work—aside from the fact that he’s a pro athlete somehow competing while possessing Tom Green’s physique and mid-90s goatee/haircut—is that there is a haunted, existentially doomed quality to Shved’s whole mien. Even by Knicks standards, he is wan and washed out; it’s as if massive doses of Krokodil and vodka were the only thing keeping him feverishly and twitchily upright throughout a game.

You can see it in this post-game interview. Even in victory, Shved’s face is contorted into a tight, forced grin that drops whenever he forgets that he should be smiling, his eyes darting to the far corners of the room, as if anything, even a glimpse of Lou Admundson’s pimpled rump, was preferable to chatting face-to-face with Tina Cervasio.

His tenure with the Timberwolves—the highlight of which is being the object of Ricky Rubio’s delightful “Alexey, change this face—be happy” psych-up speech—seems to reinforce this idea as well. There were flashes of playmaking ability and the occasional burst of bench scoring, but Shved apparently never really got comfortable in the good ol’ US of A, avoided learning English because it justified some legit social anxiety, and used his friendship with Andrei Kirilenko during his rookie year as a crutch that eventually led to a permanent disability. And the less said about his various coiffures, the better.

What’s so much fun about Shved, aside from the numerous pun–tastic tweets he engenders—well, that and the fact that Clyde Frazier will never learn to pronounce his name correctly—is that he seems to have let go of all that. Maybe he did manage to change his face.

Some part of Shved may know that he might not even be around for year two of Phil Jackson’s to-date failed experiment. There are systems bigger than him, and they will do what they want, just as a bunch of grainy clips of Russian road rage are in no way a solution to the overwhelming problems of a profoundly unjust, non-functioning kleptocracy. Perhaps hitting rock bottom has afforded Shved a certain measure of freedom, or just lets him sing more wildly in his chains.

Sometimes Shved still fails in ways that boggle the imagination. Sometimes the ancient Soviet technology that guides his ill-considered rockets improbably hit their intended target. But take a moment to watch Shved go full железобетонное очко (literally “anus of reinforced concrete.” i.e. a skilled driver with the nerve to navigate unimaginable and unpredictable danger while keeping his or her cool) against San Antonio. See him lead the Knicks to a hilarious and goofy win, including a delightfully daft sequence in which he blocked a shot that Shane Larkin had already stolen, dribbled the rock off his knee, and then pleaded with the ref with all the rheumy, bug-eyed passion he could muster.

Shved got hurt against the Raptors on Sunday, when he was clobbered after juking James Johnson into the air with a head fake. The Knicks being the Knicks, Johnson’s blow came at the exact moment that Clyde Frazier and Mike Breen were discussing his off-season martial arts training. Shved being Shved, he wound up taking a serious kick to the top of his rib cage. Some people can’t win. Alexey Shved is at least making the most of it.