“It’s funny how one verse could fuck up the game,” Brooklyn-based poet Jay-Z once said in reference to how 16 bars of a track could have reverberations that far exceed whatever its original purpose was. The line is meant to convey the idea that a singular moment or happening can have a kind of butterfly effect impossible to fully understand as one lives through these moments, yet when we look back, it becomes so easy to pinpoint life’s proverbial big bangs.
For Chris Webber, his Big Bang moment has to be Robert Horry’s most famous bucket ever. A buzzer-beater in Game 4 of the 2002 NBA Western Conference Finals that tied up the series at 2-2 between Horry’s two-time defending champion Los Angeles Lakers and Webber’s ascendent Sacramento Kings. The context of how this shot came to be has to make the memory of it all the more haunting. On the Lakers’ final possession of the game, Kobe Bryant, the Lakers’ best on-ball threat,…
