Basketball for footballer

This article by Sam Fortier was published in "The Washington Post" January 24, 2025.  We believe this post falls within the "Fair Use" provisions of U.S. Copyright law.  If you have issues with it being used here, please contact happytrailsforever@gmail.com

Last year, the Washington Commanders’ deep ties to basketball could seem like a negative. ESPN reported Ben Johnson, then the Detroit Lions’ offensive coordinator and a hot coaching candidate, was “turned off” by the Commanders because the franchise was led by “basketball guys,” including principal owner Josh Harris, who also owns the Philadelphia 76ers; minority owner Magic Johnson, the former NBA superstar; and ownership adviser Bob Myers, who, as a lead executive, helped engineer the Golden State Warriors dynasty.

A year later, the upstart Commanders are full of basketball guys — many coaches and players love hoops — and there are times when quarterback Jayden Daniels looks like a do-it-all point guard on grass.

The star rookie loves to put up high-arcing deep shots. He dissects defenses and dishes to teammates cutting to lanes. He appears unfazed when an unblocked rusher bursts into the backfield because, in the split second that they’re one on one, he almost always shakes him with a kind of crossover.

Daniels’s pregame warm-up routine — which he’ll repeat in Philadelphia on Sunday before playing the Eagles with a trip to the Super Bowl on the line — involves shooting and passing an actual basketball.

Daniels picked up the practice from Houston Texans quarterback C.J. Stroud, a friend and childhood rival. “When you’re shooting a basketball … it’s kind of the same thing for the football,” he explained. “To get a little spiral, you got to flick your wrist in different ways. So that’s a different way to warm up my wrist.”

Daniels, who played basketball through eighth grade, credits the court for helping him develop better vision. “Playing quarterback, you got to have wide vision to kind of see different spaces,” he said, and that has helped him in ways easy to overlook, such as last weekend in the upset of the Lions, when he read the defense and consistently got the offense into the right play.

Over the past three seasons, Washington’s quarterbacks had some of the NFL’s highest rates of what Pro Football Focus calls “turnover-worthy plays.” This year, Daniels’s TWP was 1.7 percent, third best in the league behind Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson (1.6) and Pittsburgh’s Russell Wilson (1.6).

“To stand [in the pocket] and do what he does and get to those [third and fourth] reads has been as good as I’ve ever seen from a young player,” offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury said.

Coach Dan Quinn, another basketball fan, also sees parallels. He has compared training a hybrid defender to teaching a center how to dribble. He has encouraged players to develop signature skills, as did Hall of Famer Ray Allen, one of his favorite basketball players of all time. “[Allen] was known as a catch-and-shoot player,” Quinn explained. “If [our players] don’t know what they’re known for, we wouldn’t either.”

The basketball comparisons continued Friday as Quinn discussed defending Eagles star running back Saquon Barkley.

“Owning your leverage and tackling is a really big deal,” Quinn. “[If] we’re guarding each other in basketball and I lost my leverage and you go past me, that’s no different. … If you lose [leverage] on him, it could be a big play.”

Most often, Quinn brings up basketball in the context of Daniels’s poise in crunch time. Two weeks ago, he said it reminded him of former Villanova coach Jay Wright, who, in the 2016 NCAA national championship game against North Carolina, barely reacted to the Wildcats’ game-winning shot. Last week, Quinn explained Daniels’s calm at raucous Ford Field by saying: “If he was a basketball player, he’d want the last shot.”

The praise seems like one of the highest compliments Daniels could receive because it echoes the famous “Mamba mentality” of late Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant. Daniels grew up outside of L.A. and idolized Bryant. He followed Bryant’s games and went to a barbershop decorated with Bryant posters. He and his friends liked to shoot hoops and yell “Kobe!” In college, a friend motivated him by asking whether he wanted to end up like Bryant or Charles Barkley, the star who never won a title.

In Washington, Daniels has grown close with linebacker Bobby Wagner — a fellow Bryant fan from Southern California — and they commiserated about the difficulty of watching West Coast NBA games on the East Coast before early practices. “The game that I want to watch comes on at 10:30, comes off at 12:30,” Wagner said during the NBA playoffs.

In the locker room, players often argue about basketball. Everyone claims they were the best hooper — “You got to in this gladiator sport,” defensive end Jalyn Holmes said — and this week wide receivers Jamison Crowder and Dyami Brown got into an in-depth, hyper-regional argument about the legitimacy of Crowder’s high school basketball accomplishments, given the level of competition he faced from smaller schools in North Carolina.

“I could’ve played at Duke,” the 5-foot-9 Crowder said, and when a reporter laughed, he said, “Stop laughing. I’m serious.”

During early practices, defensive coordinator Joe Whitt Jr. realized Daniels was going to be hard to tackle — not just because of his speed but also his vision.

“They talk about Kobe in basketball; he was never worried about the first defender,” Whitt explained. “He was worried about the help side and what’s coming at him. That’s where Jayden’s eyes are when he’s running. He’s not worried about you tackling him. ‘He’s not going to tackle me. All right, now how do I beat him and make sure that this guy doesn’t get me?' That’s what he does.”

Daniels’s rare public appearances have included two Wizards games. He just wanted to watch “some good basketball being played,” he said, though he saw the home team lose to Golden State and the New York Knicks. In arguments, Daniels has compared his game to Oklahoma City point guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Wagner to Dallas point guard Kyrie Irving.

But during the season, Daniels has emulated Bryant. Daniels said the Hail Mary that beat Chicago made him feel “kind of equivalent to when Kobe dropped 60 in his last game.” He wore a Bryant shirt on his return to Louisiana, when the Commanders beat the Saints last month, and he donned custom Bryant cleats for the win against the Lions.

“My favorite athlete of all time,” he said, adding, “Growing up, [it was] falling in love with his game and who he is. As I got older, I fell in love with his mindset.”

Every Friday, Daniels, the other quarterbacks and a couple of coaches play a game early in practice in which they try to throw a football into a yellow trash can at the back corner of the end zone from about 30 yards away. Daniels has had little success for months.

But this week, after all the throws, Daniels walked over, picked up a football and from a few feet away shot it like a basketball. It went in. The only team between Daniels and the Super Bowl is the Eagles — Bryant’s favorite team.