With a few well-timed steps, Amen Thompson obliterates conventional wisdom. You can’t be in two places at once, they say. The ball is faster than the player, they claim. Maybe that’s true on the soccer pitch. But within the confines of a regulation NBA court, Thompson, in just his second season, is rewriting the game’s internal logic. In the third quarter of an emphatic Houston Rockets win over the Golden State Warriors on Sunday night, Thompson simultaneously corralled Steph Curry behind the arc and broke up a lob headed toward Jimmy Butler deep in the paint. More than 22 feet separated the Warriors’ two best players; Thompson closed that gap in an instant:
“When you have a special guy like Amen Thompson doing what he does, that’s the result,” Rockets head coach Ime Udoka told reporters after the game—a rare moment of effusiveness from a generally stoic and withholding coach.
Such is the Amen Thompson Experience. There have been moments, all season long, when the Houston Rockets’ broadcast team has been reduced to astonished laughter while looking on at Amen’s work and the opposition’s despair. When Thompson fast-forwards along the sideline, when he spikes the ball into the stands out of nowhere, what else is there to do but chuckle and shake your head? Thompson has quickly become one of the greatest spectacles in a league full of historic performers. The numbers are well and good—only 15 other players in the past 50 years have logged a full season of his per-game averages in points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks—but they’re almost beside the point for an athlete like Thompson, who seemingly intuits basketball through abilities stripped from ancient mythology. There will be plenty of hyperbole here, but that might not apply to claims that Amen is the best athlete in NBA history, right up there with Wilt and LeBron. And even in his fledgling state, Thompson is already become a shape-shifting nightmare for some of the league’s brightest stars.
In the swan song of the regular season, Amen is staking his claim as the dark horse in the Defensive Player of the Year race—his shutdown master class from every angle against Curry is just one example. Shadows, ball denials, the kitchen sink. Thompson had a late-game swipe—sudden as a jump scare—that had Steph kicking the ball out of bounds and forlornly chasing after it, hunchbacked, like an old, weathered beagle:
Thompson’s combination of explosiveness and mobility creates its own veil of mysticism—he can completely warp the trajectory of shots without touching the ball or his opponent. At one point in the Warriors game, Butler and Curry initiated a dribble handoff wherein Butler did his best to serve as a barrier to both Amen and Fred VanVleet, giving Steph a sliver of daylight to get his shot off. Nine times out of 10, it would’ve been enough. We’ve seen how this image has played out for the past two decades:
Butler successfully walled off VanVleet, but Thompson managed to dart from inside the arc to challenge Curry at the apex of his shot from 29 feet out. Curry didn’t just miss the shot; he air-balled it. Amen wasn’t credited with a block, but his fingerprints were all over this stop:
The contest was remarkable, the presence of mind from a 22-year-old even more so. Amen doesn’t just lunge at Steph. He hangs in midair, twisting his body nearly 180 degrees to avoid body contact. It points to a special synchronization of intent and execution that serves as the bedrock for some of the best defensive talents the game has ever seen.
There are only six other players (with at least 2,000 minutes played during the season) who have ever recorded a steal and block rate comparable to Amen’s output this season while also fouling as little as he has per 100 possessions. That list? Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kevin Garnett, Ben Wallace, Andrei Kirilenko, Anthony Davis, and Victor Wembanyama. Therein lies the absurdity of Amen’s potential. He has the processing and flexibility of a guard, the frame and explosion of an archetypal swingman, and the statistical profile of a 6-foot-11 defensive alpha. And he conducts his game in a fashion and with an athletic vocabulary that only his identical twin, Ausar, could possibly understand.
But perhaps it was teammate Alperen Sengun, in a postgame interview after the Warriors match, who conveyed the Amen Thompson Experience most clearly: “He’s locking up the best players in the world right now,” Sengun said. “The best players in the league.”
Trying to convey Thompson’s extraordinary athleticism through prose is admittedly foolish. We’re contextualizing and quantifying a miracle when it’s probably best to just remain in wonder. It’s a futile exercise that could have just been a tweet. But is it so wrong to try? Is there any harm in dancing about architecture? There may not be any satisfying answers to the how and why, but sometimes it really is the thought and consideration that count. Because hearing Amen talk about his ability, you quickly realize that athleticism is a social construct—a quality that can only ever be defined and upheld through the judgment and comparison of others. “It’s just kind of instinctual. I’m athletic—I don’t really notice how athletic I am until people really tell me,” Thompson told Rockets beat writer Kelly Iko. “That’s really just how I am.”
But the miracle of Amen is not just that he’s one of the most athletic humans who has ever played basketball; it’s that, in just his second season, he has near-complete access to each department of said athleticism. He is a marvel of the mind-body connection, a real-life member of the X-Men in our midst. Thompson can jump higher, run faster, identify windows of opportunity quicker and more intuitively than anyone else on the floor. And we have data to prove it.
Since 2012, the Peak Performance Project has had a part in the predraft process for a number of entrants every year—prospects go through a gamut of tests and workouts that assess athleticism levels and biomechanics issues to be addressed. P3 has data on a majority of the players in the league today, with more than 1,000 players assessed over that decade-plus span. In tests run in the lead-up to the 2023 NBA draft, Amen’s lateral force production placed him in the 99th percentile of players in the lab’s database. Lateral force production is “really what dictates lateral acceleration,” Eric Leidersdorf, P3’s president and head of research and development, told me. And that acceleration can be applied in any possible direction. “So not necessarily your top speed, but essentially how quickly you get up to that top speed—the process of a car getting on a freeway as opposed to going the speed limit.”
Of course, Thompson’s top speed is also outrageous. According to Sportradar data, Amen’s maximum recorded speed on the court over his first two seasons in the league was 33.7 feet per second, or almost exactly 23 miles per hour. For reference, Usain Bolt’s average speed during his world-record 100-meter time set in 2009 was 23.35 miles per hour. In other words: Amen can reach the coasting speeds of the fastest man in history. Thompson is also 2 inches taller than Bolt and 8 inches taller and more than 40 pounds heavier than Xavier Worthy, who last year ran a 4.21-second 40-yard dash (reaching a top speed of 24.41 miles per hour), setting an NFL combine record.
According to Leidersdorf, the closest comparison in the P3 database to Amen in terms of his combination of top speed and lateral force production is De’Aaron Fox, commonly considered to be the fastest player in the league. (Fox is also 4 inches shorter than Thompson.) Fox, coincidentally, recently suggested that Amen could be considered the best athlete in NBA history:
P3 categorizes athletes into archetypes that it calls “clusters,” based on body measurements, range of motion, and vertical and lateral force metrics. Fox and Anthony Edwards are “Hyper-Athletic Guards”; Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Darius Garland, whose flexibility and range of motion allow them to create advantages, are “Kinematic Movers.” Amen—as well as Ausar—falls under the “Specimen” cluster, largely reserved for the most vertically explosive wing-size athletes in the database. Think Zion Williamson or Vince Carter. “Most guys take your breath away vertically because when you take on gravity and beat it, there’s something that’s just really obvious about how impressive it is,” Leidersdorf said. “For Amen, within the Specimen category, he’s the guy who has these incredibly explosive traits to him, but he’s also able to create lateral force at a level that most guys in this group just can’t. So he’s wildly impressive in that capacity.”
That lateral explosiveness and malleability separate Amen from Ausar, who graded in the 96th percentile in P3’s vertical tests and had the same top-end straight-line speed but did not quite reach Amen’s standard laterally, according to Leidersdorf. That is the difference between athletes in the A tier and the S tier. Ausar demonstrates explosive bursts along the vertical plane that can surpass those of his twin, but Amen possesses an additional range of motion that opens up worlds no one else can access.
It makes sense, then, that Amen can feel like a player sent from the future in the way he solves contemporary problems. Deceleration has become as important a skill as any in basketball: evading the defense not by blowing by them but by forcing them to blow by you. Following in the footsteps of patron saint James Harden, offensive dynamos as disparate as Edwards and Luka Doncic have mastered the art of slowing down in their own ways, exerting control over a defense by dictating tempo and creating space through subtle shifts of the body. There are certain beats that players get a feel for. “A lot of shot blockers time steps; they’re not looking at the ball,” Spurs forward Harrison Barnes explained to The Athletic’s John Hollinger. “So it’s figuring out different ways of … getting that finish.” Layers upon layers of accumulated knowledge, experience, and basketball context can, in an instant, create a road map on a drive and finish. It’s a call and response—if a defender positions themselves at a certain angle, you adjust accordingly. But that accounts only for your typical NBA defenders. It doesn’t account for an outlier like Amen, who has the ability to practically teleport on command.
Decel may be a modern tool for survival, but it also plays right into Thompson’s hands. In our season predictions roundtable, I suggested that Amen had “an opportunity to rewrite the modern defensive code.” He may have already done it.
“It’s not just that he produces a ton of force or accelerates incredibly impressively; it’s that he does all these things really quickly,” Leidersdorf said, stating that Amen’s total movement times, both vertically and laterally, were in the 95th percentile to the 96th percentile of athletes in their database. “And so when you start to stack those advantages on top of each other and you have these force production tools that he possesses, I think you’re going to start to see a guy who just appears a lot of places that you wouldn’t expect an athlete to be able to appear.”
So, let’s do it. Let’s dance about architecture. This is how I perceive Amen: He changes the nature of the game by making the other nine players on the floor environmentally aware. That is to say, when Amen takes the court, he has the potential to do something spectacular in every bit of space; every sliver of time is essential; and the three-dimensional plane upon which basketball is played becomes almost unnervingly, disorientingly apparent. He’s never out of a play, never out of the picture. And when he strikes, even the best athletes in the world can appear like they’re trapped inside their own bodies as Thompson runs rampant. Amen affects the players around him like a bong rip. And everyone watching is stoned in the hotbox.
“There are just some gifts that he has that maybe we don’t quite know how to fully describe,” Leidersdorf admits. “We should probably learn more from his data, or his data should be used to inform more of our analysis when it comes to understanding what physical traits can really manifest or dominate on an NBA court. We should learn from him as opposed to maybe us being able to just speak to his greatness as it is.”
The Rockets are back in the playoffs for the first time since 2019-20, the last full season Harden played in Houston. The Rockets’ likeliest first-round opponents—the Timberwolves or the Grizzlies—each feature supreme athletes who know what it’s like to have Thompson chasing them down. It’s not pretty, and the results are damn-near identical. Both Edwards and Ja Morant have hit only 33 percent of their 18 shot attempts with Amen as their primary defender; they’ve both been blocked by Thompson twice. He’ll occupy an outsize portion of mental real estate when it comes to game-planning, despite ostensibly being Houston’s third or fourth option in any given lineup. Amen has become the Rockets’ avatar, both in style and standing. He’s not their best player—that would be Sengun—but he’s not not their best player. He is role-malleable in ways few rising stars are—a Ghostfaced guiding principle rather than the center of a solar system. It’s fitting that Amen is now becoming the first true face of the franchise in this post-Harden era. He is, in a lot of ways, Harden’s inverse.
At the peak of his Rockets powers, Harden was a micromanager who identified as a creative. He was a high-usage superstar who unceasingly nickel-and-dimed the league in increasingly twisted ways, crafting one of the most undeniable offensive runs ever. The side steps, the stepbacks, the contact baiting—they were all extensions of his ethos. His game was a sort of perverse bureaucracy that he fashioned into an art form: He knew the rule book better than anyone, which is how he seemed to defy it so often. He pounded the air out of the ball as a means of seizing total control over the state of play. Harden dribbled the ball roughly 40,280 times, spanning a total of roughly 12 hours, during the 2018-19 regular season, the highest-usage season of his career. Since player tracking data was introduced in 2013-14, no player has dribbled the ball more in a single campaign.
Amen, on the other hand, has a usage rate lower than that of some mid-tier centers. Across his first two seasons, he hasn’t dribbled the ball half as much as Harden did in 2018-19, and he has held possession for almost exactly half as long. His defense is omnipresent and undeniable, but his offense remains a work in progress. The Rockets are being patient with Amen, careful not to overburden him with offensive responsibilities he doesn’t yet have to assume, knowing how vital he is on the other end—like I said, Harden’s inverse. There is a true point guard inside Amen that the Rockets will hope to unlock one day, but in the meantime, the notion of Thompson exercising control over a game takes on a more nebulous form. (Sometimes, explaining the future looks a lot like a Rockets fan telling the world that their brightest young star is currently a Shawn Marion clone who could eventually become … a bizarro LeBron?) Thompson will be one of the most interesting players to watch in the playoffs for both his own exploits and how teams aim to neutralize his impact. Can you place a big body on him and dare him to shoot? Does his ridiculous defensive impact both on and off the ball allow him to stay on the floor in crunch time, in which the Rockets have underwhelmed all season offensively? Amen doesn’t hold all the answers, but he’s the dose of radioactivity that makes the Rockets’ physical, explosive defense glow. It’s finally time to see how brightly it burns in the postseason structure.
In short order, Houston has molded itself around Amen’s bounty of gifts, around his ethos. He is the capstone of an overwhelming defense that, in spite of its youth, has smothered its way into the West’s elite. The Rockets are doing things differently this time around. In their brightest star, the Rockets have found something more enthralling than an offense unto himself; they’ve found the ultimate chaos agent on defense. Unlike Harden, Amen doesn’t have to dance along the fine line of regulation to dictate play. By virtue of his athletic supremacy, Thompson is practically ungovernable.
