When a Slump Becomes a Crisis of Self

The Moment Before the Pass

Late in Game 7 of the 2021 Eastern Conference semifinals, a strange pause appeared under the basket.

Ben Simmons caught the ball in open space with a clear path to the rim. For a moment the geometry of the play looked simple: two steps, a dunk, maybe a foul. Instead he hesitated, drifted past the hoop, and kicked the ball to a teammate.

The play is remembered because of what did not happen. The dunk was there, the lane was open, and yet the action dissolved into something else — a small retreat disguised as a pass.

Fans often describe moments like this as a lack of confidence, or a mental block, or simply a bad decision. Those explanations capture part of the picture, but they leave something out. What looks like hesitation on the court can sometimes be something deeper: a player who no longer inhabits his own game without friction.

In those moments, the issue is not only the shot. It is the self who must take it.

Despair and the Self

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard described a particular kind of human difficulty that he called despairDespair in Kierkegaard’s philosophy is not simply sadness but a fundamental misrelation within the self — a failure to hold together who one is and who one hopes to be. It is a structural problem of identity, not merely an emotion. . He did not mean sadness or frustration. Despair, in his sense, is a problem in the way a person relates to himself.

A healthy self holds together two things at once. On the one hand there is possibilityPossibility in Kierkegaard’s thought is the open horizon of what a person might become — their ambitions, hopes, and imagined future selves. Without it, life feels trapped; with too much of it, life becomes ungrounded. — what we might become, the ambitions we carry, the image we have of ourselves at our best. On the other hand there is necessityNecessity in Kierkegaard’s framework is the concrete reality of one’s current situation — bodily limits, past actions, and circumstances that cannot be wished away. A healthy self balances necessity with possibility. — the concrete reality of who we are right now, with our limits, our bodies, our circumstances, and the results we are producing in the world.

Most of the time those two sides cooperate. We pursue what we hope to be while accepting the conditions under which we actually live. Despair begins when that balance collapses. A person either cannot bear the self he currently is, or he clings so tightly to an imagined version of himself that reality starts to feel like an insult.

This is why the idea translates surprisingly well to professional sport. Basketball players live in an environment where possibility and necessity collide constantly. Every possession is a small public referendum on who you are as a player.

When things go wrong, the danger is not only that shots stop falling. The danger is that the player starts relating to himself through those failures.

The Shot and the Self

In an ordinary slump the problem is technical. The jumper is short, the handle is loose, the timing is off. Players still move naturally through the game even while the results are disappointing.

But sometimes the texture of action changes. The shot feels heavier. Decisions take longer. Movements that once happened automatically start to require conscious permission.

Philosophers of skill often describe elite performance as a kind of absorbed activity. The body reads situations and responds without constant supervision. Basketball players live in that state when they are playing well — driving, passing, adjusting angles, reacting to defenders before they fully register what they are doing.

Despair interrupts that ease. The player begins to watch himself act.

Instead of simply rising for the jumper, he notices the consequences that might follow: the miss, the groan from the crowd, the replay on television, the comment from a coach, the comparison to who he was supposed to be. By the time all of that passes through the mind, the moment for action has already shifted.

The game has not changed. The player’s relation to himself has.

Markelle Fultz and the Collision of Possibility

Few cases illustrate this tension more starkly than Markelle Fultz at the beginning of his NBA career.

Fultz entered the league in 2017 as the first overall pick, a guard expected to become the centerpiece of Philadelphia’s future. That status carried enormous possibility: franchise savior, elite scorer, cornerstone of a rebuilding team. Yet his early seasons were dominated by injuries and by a strange breakdown in his shooting mechanics that made even routine free throws look uncertain.

The situation eventually received a medical explanation — a nerve condition affecting his shoulder — which reminds us that basketball problems often have physical causes. But the philosophical interest lies in what that situation represents. The player who arrived in the league with unlimited possibility suddenly had to confront a body that would not cooperate and a public identity that had already been written for him.

Kierkegaard would recognize the pressure immediately. The self must somehow hold together what it hoped to be and what it is now capable of doing. When the distance between those two becomes too large, the self can fracture.

What made the Fultz case so unsettling to watch was not only the altered mechanics. It was the sense that the simple relation between body, shot, and identity — something every shooter relies on — had been disturbed.

The possibility of greatness had arrived too early, before the player had time to inhabit it naturally.

The Fear of the Next Action

Ben Simmons’ hesitation against Atlanta shows a different form of the same tension.

Throughout the 2021 playoffs his free‑throw struggles became a central storyline. Each trip to the line carried the possibility of embarrassment, which slowly changed the meaning of attacking the rim. What had once been a natural act for a large, athletic playmaker began to carry a second layer of calculation.

If he drives, he might be fouled. If he is fouled, he must shoot free throws. If he shoots free throws, the arena will hold its breath.

By the time the Game 7 moment arrived, the decision under the basket was no longer purely basketball. It was also existential. Dunking meant exposing himself to the very situation he had begun to dread.

Kierkegaard describes despair as a kind of inward recoil from the self one cannot bear to be — what he calls the sickness unto deathThe sickness unto death is Kierkegaard’s metaphor for despair — a condition in which the self cannot escape itself yet also cannot accept itself. Unlike physical illness, it does not end the person but persists as a lived crisis of identity. . In basketball terms, that recoil can look like a pass when a dunk was available.

The problem is not cowardice in a simple sense. It is that the player no longer trusts the self who must perform the action.

When a Moment Becomes Identity

Nick Anderson’s free throws in the 1995 NBA Finals offer another angle on the same phenomenon.

In Game 1 against Houston, Anderson missed four consecutive free throws in the closing seconds, a sequence that allowed the Rockets to force overtime and eventually win the game. Missed free throws are common enough in basketball, yet something about this moment hardened into memory.

What followed made the episode more than a single bad stretch. Anderson’s free‑throw percentage dropped dramatically in later seasons, and the foul line — once routine — began to carry a visible tension.

One way to understand this shift is mechanical. Another is psychological. Kierkegaard’s framework suggests something subtler: the public event had been absorbed into the player’s own understanding of himself.

A moment on the court had become a mirror.

Once a player begins to see himself primarily through a particular failure, each new attempt risks confirming the story. The problem is no longer just technique. It is the meaning attached to the act.

Collapse and Reconstruction

LeBron James in the 2011 NBA Finals shows that this fracture does not have to be permanent.

During that series against Dallas, James looked unusually passive. His scoring dropped well below his normal level, and in several games he seemed reluctant to impose himself on the offense. For a player defined by relentless force, the change was striking.

Yet what followed over the next few seasons was not a continued collapse but a reconstruction. James returned to the Finals, refined his game, and eventually produced some of the most dominant playoff performances of his career.

From a Kierkegaardian perspective, that arc matters. Despair is not a fixed label attached to a person forever. The self is something that must continually reassemble itself, finding a workable balance between ambition and reality.

In basketball terms, recovery often means restoring a simpler relation to action — accepting the possibility of failure while acting anyway.

The player stops arguing with himself about what each shot means.

He takes the shot again.

Seeing Slumps Differently

Fans often treat slumps as puzzles to be solved: adjust the mechanics, change the rotation, rebuild confidence. Those things matter, and many cold streaks are exactly that — technical problems waiting for correction.

But occasionally the difficulty runs deeper. A player may still possess the skill to make the shot while no longer inhabiting the self who takes it freely.

When that happens, the real struggle is not with the rim.

It is with the fragile relationship between possibility and reality that every athlete — and every person — must hold together in order to act at all.

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Footnotes / Philosophy Terms

1. Despair ↩

Despair in Kierkegaard’s philosophy is not simply sadness but a fundamental misrelation within the self — a failure to hold together who one is and who one hopes to be. It is a structural problem of identity, not merely an emotion.

2. Possibility ↩

Possibility in Kierkegaard’s thought is the open horizon of what a person might become — their ambitions, hopes, and imagined future selves. Without it, life feels trapped; with too much of it, life becomes ungrounded.

3. Necessity ↩

Necessity in Kierkegaard’s framework is the concrete reality of one’s current situation — bodily limits, past actions, and circumstances that cannot be wished away. A healthy self balances necessity with possibility.

4. Sickness Unto Death ↩

The sickness unto death is Kierkegaard’s metaphor for despair — a condition in which the self cannot escape itself yet also cannot accept itself. Unlike physical illness, it does not end the person but persists as a lived crisis of identity.