John Wall announced his retirement from professional basketball on Tuesday, according to a tweet by ESPN's Shams Charania. You could be forgiven for finding that announcement somewhat redundant: Wall, 34 years old, has not appeared in an NBA game since January of 2023, missed both the 2021–22 and 2019–20 seasons in their entirety, and has not appeared in more than 41 games in a single season since 2017. After a series of knee and lower-leg injuries eroded the spectacular athleticism that had fueled his early-career rise, a 2019 left Achilles tendon rupture, suffered in a fall at home, virtually annihilated what was left of it; in a very real sense, the John Wall who electrified the sport as a freshman at the University of Kentucky, went first overall in the 2010 draft, and made five all-star teams in his first eight pro seasons has not played at all since then.
If any words could do justice to that lost athletic ability, I am struggling to find them. Plenty of players had been fast before John Wall. Even so, when people described, say, Jason Kidd as fast, what they were getting at was that he was fast for a guy also dribbling a basketball. When people describe Ben Simmons as fast, what they are getting at is that he is (or was) fast—terrifyingly fast!—for a guy the same height as lumbering oafs who can barely run at all and built like an armored car. Wall's closest basketball descendant, De'Aaron Fox, is fast, incredibly fast, perhaps the fastest guy ever in the category of Guys Who Are Not John Wall. John Wall's speed, with or without the ball, registered as a whole other thing, something uncanny and exhilarating and miraculous.
He was fast for a guy who was dribbling, or not dribbling; he was fast for a guy who was 6-foot-4, or 5-foot-10, or 12-foot-9; he was fast for a guy wearing Rollerblades or driving a Buick. I have worn this comparison out over the years only because they came along around the same time, but John Wall was fast more or less the way Steph Curry is good at shooting three-pointers, the way that wrenches the parameters of basketball out of shape and creates new forms: Is a guy gliding past five sprinting defenders for a layup a fast break, or is it just John Wall? Does it even matter what you call it, when no one else could hope to replicate it?
At full gallop John Wall looked like an Olympic sprinter; in transition with the ball he was not so much dribbling as shoving the ball far out ahead of himself so that it would not interrupt his running. His speed, the sheer kinetic energy of it, forced him to develop other cool stuff downstream of it. For example, nobody could do a hop-step gather or crab dribble around a defender at those speeds without the deceleration immediately exploding every joint in their body, so Wall would accommodate his speed by whipping the ball around his back at a full sprint, or leaping and twirling 360 degrees in midair, to finish a layup.
The sight of Wall running all-out on a court with nine other world-class professional athletes could make you laugh, the high yelping laugh when you are witnessing something ridiculous and impossible, the one where without thinking about it you clap your hands to the sides of your head and grip your hair to keep everything attached. The whooping adrenalized what-the-fuck-was-that laugh after an ordinary-looking swell at the beach suddenly rears up into a 12-foot curling wave three times the height of the day's normal surf and ragdolls you around like a tumble dryer.
Nothing was better for this than the chasedown blocks. An opposing player would be cruising the other way—at fast-for-anybody-else speed—for an easy transition bucket, and here would come John Wall, off the edge of the screen, a fast-forwarding object in a slow-motion picture, throwing his arms out behind him in a deep crouching gather, rocketing up into space, pounding the ball off the backboard or spiking it into the stands, and then helplessly wheeling his arms, the way a person does on their way down when they take the dare and jump off the 50-foot cliff into the lake, as the sheer explosion of his leap carried him up and up and yet farther up, higher than he'd needed to go, higher than he knew how to come safely down from. He wasn't ever a genuine MVP candidate as a basketball player, and maybe he couldn't quite have made an Olympic medalist sprinter, but I remain convinced that as a volleyball player he would have wiped his butt with the top of Karch Kiraly's head, both literally and figuratively.
In the early middle years of Wall's career, when he briefly lifted the Washington Wizards out of their native putrescence and made them fun and worth watching for a few seasons, his limits became a source of frustration for local and national fans. He was a poor jump-shooter and deeply reluctant (by non–Ben Simmons standards) to attempt three-pointers at a time when guards with limitless shooting range were revolutionizing the sport around him and three-point proficiency was becoming a job requisite even for seven-footers. This combined to make him much easier to defend against in the half-court than he should have been, highlighting and double-underlining the mandate to sag far off him and wall off his routes to the basket. Despite dimensional and athletic gifts that could have made him roughly Gary Payton plus Ninja Turtle Ooze had he wanted to be, he generally did not lock in and play committed defense, preferring to lurk off the ball and pounce for steals, and could lapse into cartoonish worthlessness at that end of the floor when disengaged, which was often. He by all reports had an awkward if not outright frosty relationship with Bradley Beal, the inferior player the Wizards drafted to be his co-star.
By the time the organization traded him—and his ruined Achilles, and his supermax contract—to Houston, in December of 2020, for an only slightly less wrecked Russell Westbrook, most observers and analysts regarded it as overdue. In recent years, as his playing opportunities dried up and to his immense credit, Wall has spoken openly and candidly about struggling with depression and even suicidal thoughts in the aftermath of his injury and his mother's death, a worthy contribution to the sport's culture even if he could no longer make much of a difference on the court.
The Wizards reconfigured themselves around Beal, went nowhere, traded Beal, and have remained nowhere ever since. Now that it's over, Wall's career registers as perhaps less than it once seemed it should have been, given his draft position, the hype that attended his arrival after a single incandescent season at Kentucky, and the sheer ability he brought with him. He never made an All-NBA first team; he never made a serious ripple in an MVP discussion; on balance he probably is not a Hall of Famer. All of that stuff certainly seemed attainable in those dizzy early years, creating the lingering sense that everything at some point went sideways.
Today, just now, caring about that seems silly to me. The Wizards were fun when John Wall was around, even if they never had a team worthy of his talents, even if they drove me insane every year of his prime; the sound of the team's in-arena announcer's drawn-out JOHHHHHNNNNN WALLLLLLL is the backing track to some of the most fun I ever had watching professional sports in person. Basketball as a whole, too, benefited from having in it a guy who, for a time anyway, could break games more or less the way the Road Runner broke Wile E. Coyote's traps, by sprinting straight through them at the speed of sound. (A fun contrast: Where the coyote would paint a road onto a rock face and try to tempt the Road Runner to smack into it, opposing teams would erect a rock face across a roadway and try to scare John Wall away from sprinting down it.)
Wall alone accounts for the only period in my adult life when a Wizards ticket was worth buying on a night when a fellow sad-sack team like the Detroit Pistons, Orlando Magic, or Sacramento Kings was in town, for the in-person sight of Wall taking the ball deep in his own half, turning on the jets, and turning everyone else on the floor into a statue. Or exploding out of a crossover at the top of the key, slashing across the lane, and punching a left-handed dunk down on somebody's head. Or screaming out of the depths of space to spike some poor bastard's layup attempt into the core of the earth.
Those are some of my fondest memories in a lifetime of watching basketball. In all of them John Wall is running. Holy smokes, man, he is running.
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