If that twenty-five-point paroxysm against the Detroit Pistons[3] and the dispassionate dismantling of a proud-if-aging Boston squad both look almost effortless on tape, I suspect that on some level this is because they were. Not that he wasn’t trying—of course he was trying—but, as Csikszentmihalyi would have it, he was maximally in-Flow, and everything he did was within the unprecedented range of his abilities. . . . What if, when you’re really good at something, you don’t need this verified by external assessment? This is the obverse of the paradox at heart of Raskolnikov’s endlessly destructive self-inspection: if he really were Napoleon he wouldn’t need to demonstrate supremacy through ultimate transgression. Emperors do not transgress, they simply do. Napoleon claims his empire because he knows he is an Emperor; he doesn’t even need an empire to demonstrate as much—and this absolute self-certainty is, confoundingly, the engine of his conquest.

Of course, in sports, one counter-argument would go, the competition is the proving ground, there’s no room for Raskolnikovian doubt: nothing arbitrary about a given contest's final score . . . but. . . . Does winning—i.e., having more points than the other team after an arbitrarily designated period of time (for instance, forty minutes in the NCAA vs. the NBA’s 48)—the game, the series, the conference/league title—have to be the ultimate measure of an athlete’s ability or worth? And even more interesting, to me, is the possibility of an athlete authentically indifferent to such measurement regardless of criteria, so Napoleonically suffused with Rousseau’s Amour de soi that he knows something we speciously need to see cinched in record books, revealed in post-victory-press-conference euphoria, eternally confirmable in fan-edited highlight packages available for viewing and re-viewing on the Net until the end of Time. . . .

The question might seem idiotic at first glance, and then sort of obvious or at least easily answered when subjected to slightly closer scrutiny: