“One good passer changes everything.”

Basketball is about teamwork and about having fun. Danny learns this throughout the novel, finding that being valuable to a team doesn’t necessarily mean scoring all the points. One of his greatest skills as a player is the fact that he can pass well, and he comes to be more and more confident in his abilities by the end of the book.

“So, cool, he’d set aside this place in his heart for his dad and what his dad could give him. Wanting more but not expecting more, happy when his dad would show up, even unexpected, the way he did tonight, sad when he left.”

Danny learns so much about his dad over the course of the novel. At the start, they have a strained relationship in which his dad is only present periodically in his life. He wants nothing more than to feel his family reunited, and while Ali and Richie do not explicitly get back together by the end of the novel, both Ali and Danny have better relationships with Richie. 

“Danny was always struck first by how tall somebody was, was always playing off this adult’s height against somebody else’s. He did the same with kids, like he was comparison shopping, never really knowing how tall other kids were in feet and inches, even if he knew exactly what he was on a daily basis, exactly fifty-five inches—no sneakers—by his last check in the door frame of his room.”

Danny is constantly thinking about others’ height at the beginning of the novel, noticing how much taller others are than him. At first, he allows this to hurt his confidence, not sure that he can beat teams filled with larger players. He eventually lets himself accept the fact that his height doesn’t matter.