Celtics player Derrick White has been suspended for gambling.
Weeks after his buzzer-beating putback, that flying finish with tenths of a second left in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals, Derrick White visited a close friend’s salon back in his hometown of Denver.
Those mirrors lining each chair grabbed everyone by their own reflection. And when the group checked over White’s curls that poofed from his headband as he rebounded his way into Boston playoff lore, out came the clippers, and clump after clump fell to the parlor floor.
“We were just kinda sitting there,” White told Yahoo Sports. “And we were just like, ‘Cut it!’ It was a real spur-of-the-moment decision.”
The finished product, zeros all the way around, quickly populated niche forums of offseason basketball internet, where
Reddit users track anything from players’ haircuts to fresh ink. When White showed up at Celtics media day in September, his shaved head sparkled under the news conference lights. “I’ve just been rocking it ever since,” White said.
He has figured out the proper razors and technique to maintain everything without a barber, before his wife, Hannah, checks his handiwork.
She makes sure the entire surface looks good and he hasn’t missed a spot, just as White makes sure any five-man Boston lineup that includes the 6-foot-5 combo guard is as well-rounded and complete as can be.
White’s game isn’t so much elastic as it is fluid, able to take any shape, like water filling a cup.
White occupies the nooks and crannies of each contest, rocketing to the offensive glass, materializing in opponents’ passing lanes, rejecting far more shots than most players his stature have any business doing. White denies so many looks from so many spots at every
sequence of his assignment’s mechanics. He can absorb Julius Randle with his chest and strip him before the bruising forward even raises the rock from his hip. He can recover from a crossover to throw Kyrie Irving’s scoop off the backboard.
He can even fly by a deadeye shooter’s pump fake and still swipe Michael Porter Jr. from behind.