Eric Bledsoe & Isaiah Thomas Take Flight

In a game that featured DeAndre Jordan, Blake Griffin, Terrence Williams, and a variety of other forwards with above-average leaping ability, who’d have thought it would be each team’s smallest player making it happen above the rim?

Not often does a 6’1″ point guard time his leap so perfectly that he can two-hand a putback dunk, and even less frequently does a man 5’9″ leave his hand print on the glass… let alone halfway up the square.  As a matter of fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a blocked shot/goaltend quite like the one Isaiah Thomas pulled off last night, but we’ll get to that in a minute.  Eric Bledsoe’s dunk came first.

Bledsoe went on to score 11 points in the second quarter, making his dunk the standout moment of an impressive nine-minute stint.  The Clippers were only up a bucket when their reserves funneled into the game, but led by ten when Chris Paul made his return.  With CP going 5-16 (+5 TOs), Bledsoe was arguably LA’s most effective point guard last night, although he didn’t make much noise in the second half (finished with 13 and 3).  No matter, his recent energy and his slam dunk are much appreciated.  As Ralph Lawler put it, you don’t know if it’ll be good or bad but Eric Bledsoe’s always making something happen.

As cool and relevant as Bledsoe’s dunk was, it can’t really hold a candle to Isaiah Thomas’s third-quarter goaltend.  They say Thomas is 5’9″, but I’ve been skeptical of that listing ever since watching him guard 5’5″ Earl Boykins.  Anyway, watch him put all 38.5 inches of his reported vertical leap to use on this play…

Looks to me like he touched somewhere around 10’6″, maybe 11′ (I believe the top of the square is 11’6″, but I could be wrong).  Thomas has a standing reach of 7’8.5″, which means you just watched a man jump somthin’ like three, maybe three and a half feet off of the floor in a game situation.

Unlike the Kings’ bench, you can consider me impressed.  Goaltend or not, how were guys not jumping up and waving towels after that play?  No one even flinched.  Isaiah must be swatting them all in practice.