Aaron Gordon was running a fade route, straight downfield, but the ball wasn’t lofted up for him to chase. It was thrown on a line, about head height. As he turned to make a catch, multiple defenders were converging on the space between him and the trajectory of the ball.
“It’s not a great pass,” Gordon’s high school coach, Tim Kennedy, recalled.
But Gordon was already mastering a rather niche art: ensnaring the unpredictable and the unwieldy.
The Archbishop Mitty sophomore extended his left arm while in stride, trying to get the first touch on the ball before his opponent.