Romancing the Rim: The Most 'Swaggy P' Moments of Nick Young's Lakers Career

A flame once burned between Nick Young and the rim.

They met on a blacktop in Los Angeles in the '90s. He was probably wearing a terrycloth bucket hat, and she rocked a gray, skintight number.

They fell head over Razor scooter handlebars for each other, and soon Young was dialing her up over and over again on the stretchy-cord landline. She wasn't always there when he called, but she was always on time, giving him her all.

Now, in the Year of Our Lord 2015, the rim has grown cold and distant. She's stopped answering Young almost completely, and he explained their falling out over the last six months in simple terms at his exit interview Tuesday.

"I just blame it on the rim," Young said. "The rim was trippin' this year. Next year I'm gonna take her on a date and treat her a little better."

@DrCarson73

Exactly where "next year" will be for Young is unknown.

The Los Angeles Lakers shooting guard finished the season shooting a career-low 36.6 percent from the floor and missed a career-high 40 games due to injury. He continues to recover from a fractured kneecap sustained in February, and the screen door hadn't even slammed shut on the trailer fire that was the Lakers' 2014-15 campaign before rumors began cropping up about the franchise moving Young over the offseason, as Mark Medina of the Los Angeles Daily News noted.

This cannot happen.

Taking Young out of Los Angeles and putting him on a small-market team would mean losing him—not in a literal sense, but in the same way one would lose a peacock by keeping it in a lightless utility shed. A shed-cock is no peacock at all—just a soft clucking in the darkness that poops on your father's Skil saw.

With this uncertain future in mind, I find it only fitting that we look back on the good times while we can and appreciate the Nick Young-isms that cemented him as a national treasure. The following are the Swaggy-est moments from his Lakers career. Some are on-court basketball plays; many are not. All are essential Swaggy P.

The Death of Steve Blake's Ankles

Let's start this off by pouring out some Sprite Remix for Steve Blake's ankles, which Young reduced to a smoking pile of horse glue in February with a crossover in the lane.

It was one of the few highlights of Young's 2014-15 season, and he celebrated by trotting down the floor with an "Ooh that smell" face before realizing a timeout had been called.

I'll cherish you always, Slip-Slidin' Steve.

Pissing Off Kobe

Ninety-nine percent of Earth's living organisms have pissed off Kobe Bryant in some shape or fashion, but Nick Young may be the only one who's turned it into an art form.

No one can bring the inky rage pooling in Bryant's skull to a boil quicker than Young, who then uses it to paint his unintentional masterpieces.

One of his finest Mamba provocations came when Jimmy Kimmel showed Bryant footage of Swaggy P leading the celebration after Los Angeles' win over the slightly less wet-garbage-y Boston Celtics in February.

The team was 14-41, and this Kobe reaction deserves to play on a loop in the Smithsonian.

Illegal Use of Booty

Here's something some Nick Young fans don't know: You should like Iggy Azalea—if not as a human being, at least as a plot device in the Fresh Prince sitcom that is Swaggy P's actual life.

You should know that Young's Australian girlfriend is a very nice person who just happens to rap about clapping snitches with the steel. Moreover, you should appreciate that she's directly responsible for provoking some of Young's best quotes to date.

If it weren't for Azalea, the world would have never been blessed with the sight of a seemingly hammered Swaggy P pointing at his girlfriend's bottom before delivering a line that should be written in the sky over every major city on national holidays.

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"I'm a star. I am Swaggy P," Young said. "You see what I'm going in this car with? What I'm gonna do with this shouldn't be legal."

Azalea is the Bonnie to Swaggy's Clyde. Learn to enjoy it.

"Feeling Swaggalicious"

The Lakers beat the Golden State Warriors in December, which is a real thing that happened.

Another thing that happened was Young attributing the win over the Western Conference juggernaut to his feeling especially "Swaggalicious" that day.

He then claimed Vlade Divac, who nailed a half-court shot during the game's halftime break, only did so because "the swag rubs off on everybody."

He later added that his teammates played like Django Unchained, according to ESPN's J.A. Adande:

Then Young rode out of the Staples Center in a '62 Chevy Impala with his hands in the air and an American flag bandanna around his neck.

Again, this was not an early 2000s Nelly video. This happened in real life.

The Dolphin Incident

It's a not a popular stance, but it needs to be said: Most dolphins are punks.

Hollywood and the PR flacks at Big Sea Mammal have worked day and night over the last century building up dolphins as the Lassies of the sea, and they will destroy anyone who threatens to sully the dolphin shield. However, the one entity they cannot bring down is Nick Young.

Young is among the proud few who tangled with one of these blowholed bullies and lived to tell the tale—according to him.

This February, the guard stood before a group of beat reporters and casually launched into a story about the time he nearly drowned while playing with dolphins in Mexico.

Young said he attempted to ride the animal and it responded by taking him to the lagoon floor with the intent of murdering him.

B/R

"He was playing with everybody else, doing what dolphins do—the 'ack ack' and all that," Young said. "It was my time to ride the dolphin. For some reason, he took me all the way to the bottom.

"He went straight down," Young said. "He was trying to kill me. I think he was trying to get on Iggy. He was a little friendly, kissing her and stuff. He was trying to take my woman."

Byron Hates Booty Calls

Nick Young and Lakers head coach Byron Scott have a weird, sometimes playful, sometimes adversarial relationship.

The two don't see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, like the necessity of the three-point line in sustaining life on our planet. But the finest example of the yawning generation gap between teacher and student arose when Swaggy P walked into practice in March with a haircut inspired by the 1997 film Booty Call.

@ArashMarkazi

The new look spawned a verbal sparring session between Scott and Young, which ESPN's Arash Markazi documented. It started with Scott mocking the 'do as a terrible misfortune and ended with Young dropping the mic on coach's chrome dome:

I still think Swaggy just wanted honorary membership in Rae Sremmurd:

The Immaculate Miss

Last but not least, the most elementally Swaggy P play of all time: Young celebrating a missed three-pointer, realizing he Charlie Brown'd it and then getting back on defense.

#NeverForget.

Dan is on Twitter, celebrating Nick Young before his light is hidden under a Utah Jazz bushel basket.