the peach basket

poets on basketball

[thepeachbasket]

The Monastery

How someone plays basketball is its own personality, a distortion of their actual personality. We see the basketball personalities of NBA players comprehensively, under bright lights. LeBron James is a maestro. Russell Westbrook is a maniac. Giannis Antetokounmpo is Olympian. Steph Curry is Houdini. 

Kawhi Leonard’s basketball personality feels a little more obscure. Announcers describe him as a robot, a cyborg, and a machine. It’s not hard to see how they reach those comparisons. Kawhi’s expression oscillates between muted and blank. He plays with an even-keeled relentlessness that resembles the plot of The Terminator. The form of his shot has a programmed consistency. But when I watch him play, these things don’t strike me as artificial. His non-reaction to everything, including a big play or devastating call, reminds me of a studious meditation on joy or sorrow. He is like a monk practicing curious non-attachment. When his face goes blank I get the sense he is focused on his breathing.

Kawhi also moves around the basketball court with a preternatural steadiness, a monastic balance, like a mind shaped by deep reflection. The balance is symmetrical. At almost all times Kawhi appears capable of jumping off either foot. Because basketball is about convincing your opponent to step out of the game’s rhythm, Kawhi’s immaculate balance has countless ramifications. From the chaos of a drive, he throws a pinpoint pass to an open shooter in the corner. His uniform shots have hypnotically geometric spirals. He slides around on defense like his opponent’s reflection. His most thunderous plays appear out of nowhere, both sudden and organic.

After Kawhi threw down a dunk late in the deciding game of the Eastern Conference Finals over Giannis Antetokounmpo, maybe the most astounding athlete currently playing basketball, he fell to the floor, popped back up, and ran back on defense. A few minutes later, Giannis unceremoniously blocked his next dunk attempt. Kawhi landed violently on his side, popped back up, and ran back on defense. There is an equality to how Kawhi approaches every moment of a basketball game -- regardless of score, time, stakes, or outcome – a matching dignity. In both plays, he was a basketball player who got back on defense.

His team has taken on a similar identity. Before Kawhi arrived, the Raptors were defined by playoff collapses and no-shows. This season has been different. After winning Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals, Kyle Lowry coined the term “The Kawhi Effect,” explaining it like this: “Kawhi is going to get attention all the time, no matter what.” He is talking about how multiple defenders have to focus on Kawhi even when he doesn’t have the ball, but I’m more drawn by the second half of the statement. All the time, no matter what. In Game 5, the Raptors fell behind 18-4 early in the game. No one panicked. In Game 6, they stared out of a 15-point hole midway through the third quarter. They kept chipping away. They won both games and the series. Now they’re headed to the Finals. 

The ascetic life requires a monk to give up excesses and indulgences. There is a part of the brain that lights up when we have a craving, and there is a part of the brain that lights up when we feel at peace. I love excesses and indulgence in my basketball. They are some of most thrilling and satisfying components of the game. The predominant extravagance of the past few years has been the Warriors. They obliterate hope in frenzied, monumental scoring barrages. They play with a swagger and volume distinct to their greatness. But a satisfied craving produces a greater craving. In this year’s Finals, Kawhi provides a meaningful counterpoint: present on the court, as the hissing static of the game approaches and recedes, he plays basketball into each moment.

-- Frank Basket

[thepeachbasket]

The Decline of False Dichotomies

When elite athletes put together transcendent moments, they often discuss the game slowing down for them (except for Ichiro Suzuki). In the final two games of the Eastern Conference Finals and the first game of the Finals (basically, the last three games before he broke his hand), LeBron took that a step further: the game slowed down for us as well. The end result of Al Horford stumbling a half-step behind as LeBron laid the ball in came into view the moment Horford switched onto LeBron. LeBron bullying Klay Thompson and Draymond Green at the rim was baked into the moment LeBron caught an outlet pass and started a 1-on-2 fast break. A tough pocket pass to Tristan Thompson in transition, one that, had anyone else thrown it, Thompson probably would have fumbled out of bounds, could only end with a layup and a foul shot. Perhaps most telling of all, the kind of shot good defenses want to force their opponent’s best player into taking -- a fadeaway in which LeBron is also gliding parallel to the rim, so that his proximity to the hoop is in flux in two directions  -- went in with the kind of consistency that makes it seem unpreventable; even as defenses forced LeBron to do what they wanted, the outcome felt inevitable.

Games 6 and 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals held an alarming symmetry that, as a Celtics fan, slowly registered for me like a repressed chunk of ice coming loose from the bottom of an iceberg and floating to the surface. In 2012, down 3-2 to the Celtics, LeBron took control of each moment of games 6 and 7 to effectively end the Big Three era. His grip on both games was absolute. At no point did I believe the Celtics had a shot, or even had a shot of having a shot, of winning either game. I'll never forget watching Game 6 at a bar and, as we desperately waited for something to cheer, the air never entered the room. In a way, these performances bookend a certain era of witnessing LeBron, one that is defined by the public's reception to him. Let's call it The Age of Uncertainty. In the time between then and now, the critics who chastised his 'killer instincts' and looked to poke holes in his resume, who were at a fever pitch after LeBron lost in the Finals to Dallas, have either begrudgingly faded out or transformed altogether into enlightened fans. Now there are only the raving lunatics, the Skip Baylessess of the world, howling outside the gates of the castle. The main difference between then and now is that before, I hoped LeBron would settle for jump shots. Now, his game has no holes. It's like The Simpsons episode where Homer and Lisa create a battlebot that has to go head-to-head with Professor Frink's far superior battlebot. "Okay," Homer says, "I've been studying Frink's robot. And I've discovered he has one small weak spot." In the background, Frink is tinkering with his bot. "Oh-oh!" he exclaims. "His weak spot is now his strongest point."

In Game 1 of the NBA Finals, LeBron James hit another level, playing a near perfect game, but his team still lost. That defeat highlights the grayest area in basketball: the slippage between the interpersonal and intrapersonal. Basketball might be the team sport where a player's individual talent has the most impact, but it may also be the one where the intangibles of chemistry are most essential. LeBron was like a maestro whose baton is a wizard's wand. He seemed to have accounted for the Warriors' third quarter run, for Jordan Clarkson's myriad bricks, for innumerable factors working against, and then, right at the end, he took over. But even LeBron couldn't account for the refs' multiple mistakes down the stretch, their unprecedented overturning of a charge call in the final minute and a half, George Hill's inability to hit both free throws, or JR Smith's unthinkable blunder.

How do you reckon with the distance between performance and result, this friction between journey and destination? It complicates a conversation that had been flattened into a reductive binary by the mythos of Michael Jordan. Rather than start at the result and work backward, viewing everything that happened through that singular lens, LeBron's achievements in the shadow of failure requires a more nuanced way of discussing not just greatness but also what we are hoping for when we tune in to watch in the first place.

In art, unlike sports, the immediacy of success is no guarantor of surviving the brutal appraisals of history. Moby Dick was a commercial failure in its own time. The Baha Men won a Grammy for “Who Let The Dogs Out.” Our ability to evaluate the merits of what we just witnessed is, to put it kindly, faulty. The way an event unfolds and the impression it leaves on us should be more foundational to our understanding of it than how it ends. Anyone who watched Game 1 of the Finals had to have been moved by watching LeBron close in on basketball singularity, like the first artificial intelligence to realize it is smarter than the smartest human. Moments like these pry open the discourse to make room for what it felt like to witness virtuosity in real time. Being able to celebrate experiences like that is crucial to being a fan, and no one plays a more essential role in this paradigm shift than LeBron James. The experience of watching LeBron, in his 33rd year on this earth, play the best basketball I have ever seen, is something to celebrate not despite the result, but completely outside of it.

--Frank Basket

[thepeachbasket]

The Fragile Present

Sports is about the joy of the body, and the creative possibilities implicit in that joy. The risk of chasing bodyjoy is to confront the inevitable frailty of the human form. Occasionally -- once every two or three years, it seems -- this risk manifests in the most gruesome way possible.

The injury Gordon Hayward suffered last night (and I would recommend not watching it) cast a pall over what had started as a festive opening to the season. It felt insane that a basketball game could continue after it, that the physical trauma of the moment wouldn’t remain as central to the event as it did in the mind of anyone who saw it.

It can feel important to remind ourselves in such moments that there are things bigger than sports. But this was sports. For better or worse, sports is not pure escapism, but the way that escapism responds to how reality encroaches on our attempts to escape it.

It is also the case that this kind of horror underscores how frail the imagination can feel when it comes into conflict with reality. Ever since he signed this summer, basketball fans, NBA analysts, the Celtics’ coaches and players, and Hayward himself have imagined the possibilities of what he could accomplish in his exciting new situation. The erasure of those possibilities also erases the creative momentum they engendered, and replaces them with a certain kind of stomach-churning fear and dread that can only accompany watching someone else suffer.

What must happen, I believe -- and what always happens, I believe -- is for the extinguished imaginative acts to be replaced by new gestures of the imagination, gestures which might be a little grayer, or grittier, or just sadder, but which may also have a certain strand of resilience scratched into their DNA. I must assume this will be hardest for Hayward to muster, making our own willingness to again entertain possibility in the face of the dangers inherent in it all the more necessary. I hope everyone who tuned in last night is doing okay today.

-- Frank Basket

[thepeachbasket]

Russell Westbrook is Our Reigning MVP

Everything in the NBA right now happens under the umbrella of the Warriors. Their dominance can feel like an assault on the concept of competition. They went 16-1 in the playoffs; not even LeBron was immune. Without the pretense of competition, every action on a basketball court is rendered meaningless. This is the dilemma that hovers over the NBA season that is set to tip off tomorrow night.

Russell Westbrook is the perfect foil to the existential crisis the Warriors’ dominance threatens. His game already resembles a rugged survivor in a dystopian wasteland. An asteroid is his spirit animal. Last season, in a hopeless situation, Russ raged in the face of the absurd. Faced with a limited roster, Westbrook decided to do more of everything. Right from the outset, he played like a primal scream. We waited for him to stop and catch his breath, but he never did.

Westbrook’s game will always be about spectacle. His speed, especially in the open court, and his power can distort basketball skills in occasionally jarring ways. But while MVP cases are usually built through team success or personal improvement, Westbrook’s was marked by the burden he carried. In averaging a triple-double with an historically high usage rate, Westbrook became a myth about the power of absolute will. His highlights were surreal and his numbers were gaudy, but his combination of high usage and low efficiency made it easy for his critics to dismiss him. So his MVP candidacy was experiential. The joy of watching him play was in the microcosm and macrocosm of the spectacle, of gasping at each new brutal and ornate dunk while simultaneously wondering how long he could keep up his relentless form.

The answer appeared to be: forever. To that end, the way his season ended was fitting. Westbrook somehow amplified his performance in the playoffs, playing more minutes and doing more with them. In the brief moments he stepped off the court, his team hemorrhaged an ultimately insurmountable amount of points. His loss was inevitable, but he played like a man possessed by angry angels or scary drugs. He never submitted. His loss was our win. That may be the most we can ask for this season.

Everything in the NBA happens (it bears repeating) under the umbrella of the Warriors, so it can be easy to forget that we live in a world where Russell Westbrook is reigning MVP. But that is the reason why it is important not to. Just as Surrealism and Dadaism were artistic movements in reaction to the idea that a civilized, rational world could still produce the horrors of mechanized war, #WestbrookSurrealism is an attempt to disorder the logic of the times. His MVP coronation may be a weird blip in NBA history, but it represents the kind of willful desire that reason, common sense, and the inescapable future have no bearing over. When the inevitability of this season begins to register as futility, it will be high time to tune into Westbrook’s frequency.

-- Frank Basket

[thepeachbasket]

On the Limitations of Our Binary System

The Calvinists who violently descended on this continent in the 17th Century—derisively called Puritans—created a culture we are still dealing with now. That culture includes a certain way of thinking about and experiencing the living world. The world to them was full of shadows of the divine, brimming with evidentiary material. Their conception of history was typological. Events in the Old Testament existed not only as events in and of themselves, but as types—resemblances prefiguring the life of Christ. As such, they couldn't help but view the world around them—with all its unexplained mysteries—anagogically. Everything around them might be evidence of something about the world to come.

They worried, quite rightly, over the problems inherent in their hermeneutics. They prohibited any life-like artistic rendering of the human form. They checked their grief as much as possible. In these ways, they tried to remain faithful to nature's text. They tried to keep from spiraling out of control. Meaning, after all, is subjective. Words are shorthand for whatever is going on in our hearts. If you start playing fast-and-loose with words, you will get lost.

Seeing as we now live in the shadow of the considerable influence of these folks, it feels reasonable to me to assume that we possess at least a little of their considerable anxieties. These anxieties show up all over the place, but since I'm obsessed with basketball, that's where I notice it. As the 2016-17 NBA season tapered off towards its seemingly inevitable ending, you may have noticed an interpretive pattern emerging. One after another, readers of the NBA's ongoing historical text began to consider LeBron James.

These considerations tend to work typologically. We look for things in the historical text that prefigure the life of LeBron. For example, Magic's combination of size, strength, speed, and court-vision is no longer simply an occurrence from a previous age; rather, it becomes the rehearsal of a promise typified in the person of LeBron. And when we watch LeBron, we don't see him so much as we see the way his shadow extends beyond him, stretching out a little, making a little longer stride, looking a little like—but no—could it be?—Giannis?

Our fervor for comparing LeBron to Jordan is a product of this habit of mind as well, obviously. Like the Puritans and like pretty much every other human being over the course of human history, we believe a little—maybe reluctantly, maybe not—that we are living in exceptional times. We keep wondering when LeBron will catch Jordan. One moment, he has no chance of getting there; the next moment, he's just one remarkable series away. I love these conversations; I love the way they make me consider history. On the other hand, these conversations also concern me. Instead of filling our lives with meaning, the way we think about history starts to make the present feel invisible. We watch each game of The NBA Finals with the wrong questions in our head. We are thinking, "What does this mean?" when we should be thinking, "How do I feel?"

Ultimately, I think the problem is that we view the world in ways that are far too binary. In the context of sports, we spend too much time thinking about winning and losing, rather than the interstitial spaces between them. After all, the game itself happens outside of winning and losing. There is only a winner and a loser when it is over. The story of the game is almost entirely something else. Your life is not just whatever it gets called after you're dead. There was a whole life there! There was so much nuance. Jokes made you laugh without your ever understanding them. You fell in love ever so briefly with people you never really knew. The experience of life contains infinite texture just waiting for poetic explication. We owe ourselves more anagogical generosity.

Right now, as we gather ourselves up waiting for the 2017-18 NBA season, a cloud of inevitability hangs over the future. The whole narrative that KD's decision has forever ruined competitive balance is a compelling one, I know, I know. Nevertheless, the divine shadows cast ahead of us by history are not subject to our interpretations of them. Wonderfully, if we can learn anything by looking at history, it is that one mystery reveals only another one. While it is happening, it's anybody's game.

-- The Buzzard   

[thepeachbasket]

The Man Who Ruined Basketball

Last summer, in the midst of an unprepared nation preoccupied with the cultural phenomenon of female Ghostbusters, Kevin Durant's 4th of July power grab put a foot on the scale, robbing the NBA of its greatest match-up in recent years. Durant's shrewd career decision was a Shakespearian tragedy we forgot about in the wake of other more perilous Shakespearian tragedies, but now, in the early days of June, Cav fans are left dreaming up trades to try and match the unnatural amount of talent hoarded in Golden State. Even Finals Lebron, the most ferocious, other-worldly version of Lebron, cannot contain The Warriors, while Durant, baptized, Bar Mitzvahed, and graduated from his earlier incantation, shines like a Savior, flying past the past, looking taller, more aggressive, and majestic, in his new easy job. After a long, heartbreaking playoffs that left many great players sidelined along the way, one prays that the Basketball Gods will empower Kyrie, Shump, Thompson, and Love, and make the 2017 Finals a battle, because Durant rigged the future, and we've got no choice but to watch.

--Lunatic Johnson

[thepeachbasket]

The End of Ascendance

Kevin Durant returned to action this week, just in time for the playoffs, after missing close to six weeks with a knee injury. For someone who has been the best basketball player in the world not named LeBron for much of his adult life, it’s strange how little I’ve thought about him in his absence. Usually a fog hangs over the proceedings until a player of his stature returns and order is restored, or bad news forces us to accept a new, blander balance.

There’s a certain type of ultra-talented but unlucky team that hits a distinct ceiling they eventually must concede to. The Pacers of just a few years ago had an exciting assortment of talent, but LeBron’s Heat squad flattened their will over the course of consecutive Conference Finals. The Pacers junked the team that had been built around Paul George. It’s not hard to imagine a similar fate for the current incarnation of the Clippers, a very good team that occasionally dabbles in greatness, but never at the right time or for the necessary duration. These are two modern examples. Every generation probably has their own.

For a long time, I thought the Thunder were in that category. Five years of untimely injuries, a shallow bench, and an untrustworthy cohesion between their two stars had solidified the sense that the roster as constructed had reached the ceiling. In last year’s playoffs when they got blown out in the first game of the Semifinals by a Spurs team that had just won 65 games, the script appeared to have returned with only minor revisions. What happened next was like the Wild West. As Michael Jordan says, the ceiling is the roof.

The Thunder tore down the Spurs infrastructure, then won three of the first four games against the best regular season team of all time. From Game 2 of the Semifinals through Game 4 of the Conference Finals was an absolute wildfire. Steven Adams came into his own as the prototype of the perfect complementary big man, modern NBA edition. Humanoid meteor Russell Westbrook screamed through space at his unique frequency. Andre Roberson went on an actual shooting streak. Dion Waiters played his heart out. Near the center of it all was Durant.

I mean that almost literally. Basketball is a game of arcs. The ball moves in them. Players orbit the center of action. Russell Westbrook creates centrifugal source like the Tasmanian Devil. Steph Curry creates devastating vortexes with sudden unpredictable electricity. If you look back on the highlights from last season’s Conference Finals, you'll see both on fearless display.

Durant sometimes looks like someone who is reluctant to force his way to the center of things, a player who tried to give himself the nickname The Servant now hovering at the periphery, waiting to see how a play unfolds. But it's the small things -- crashing the boards for a quick put-back, sprinting baseline while the defense is still getting set -- that start to nudge a basketball game in one direction over another. On multiple occasions what I thought was Ibaka stopping another fluid and deadly Warriors fastbreak with balletically timed verticality was Durant. Where usually he might have settled for a leaning-back jumper, suddenly Durant was hunting his shot, finishing in the lane with Space Jam reach. In the Warriors series especially, Durant turned from an elegant elusive creature from a nature documentary into something coming from the mysterious deep, dislodged by tectonic plates. It’s possible he played poorly at times over those couple weeks last spring, but I know what I remember I saw. Of course, a miracle of shooting perpetrated by Klay Thompson stole the series out from under the Thunder in the final minutes of Game 6. The rest is history. Durant is in a Warriors jersey now, with no promise that we’ll ever see that version of him again.

Before he got injured this season, Durant was having one of the most efficient seasons of his career. He fit in beautifully as a cog in the Warriors swarming defense, and as another weapon in their relentless, opponent-deflating, totally suave fast breaks. When LeBron was on the Heat, he was a brilliant athlete, the best player in the world, but what he did in the Finals last year (and the year before) shook basketball on its foundation. Asked to do more, LeBron showed sides of his greatness we had never seen in conjunction with each other. I know that when I look back on Durant, the first thing I will see won’t be him in the 2012 Finals, or during his MVP season, or him in a Warriors jersey. It’s going to be when what I thought of Durant was crushed underfoot by what Durant was, a couple weeks in the spring of 2016.

-- Frank Basket

[thepeachbasket]

The Pint Gawd

It’s hard to know what to make of the Celtics. They are perennial plucky oddballs and regular-season overachievers.  Outside of their lone All-Star, their best players’ elite skills are all intangibles that don’t get quantified by conventional statistics. Their timeline is an optical illusion: cover one eye and their future is in the playoffs; cover only the other eye and it’s in the lottery.

No one on the roster characterizes these contradictions more substantially than Isaiah Thomas. All season two conversations about him have coexisted: some NBA analysts still insist that, as Isaiah continues to lead the league in fourth quarter scoring, he deserves to be considered in the MVP race, while advanced statistics scribes argue that he hurts his team when he’s on the floor. As common wisdom dictates, two things can be true, but I would argue that neither has to matter. From where I’m sitting, this has been the season of the Pint Gawd, and whatever happens in the playoffs can’t change that.

==

Every discussion of Isaiah starts with his height, though of course it’s how his size has informed how he goes to work that matters. A lifetime of being undersized has created a style that is undeniable, magnetic fun. He dribbles with the signature springiness of being just a bit closer to the ground. His best moments involve freezing players with the fluency of his handle: 

When opposing big men collapse on his drives, Isaiah plows right into their chests, forcing them onto their heels. Their awkward angles to his kinetic motion often render them unable to swat his shot, though just as often Isaiah needs to contort himself midair to find anything resembling an opportunity. All he needs is a small fissure of sunlight to do his damage. There are so many ways it can go wrong and only a few it can go right. His best shots touch glass well outside the square and find the net through improbable angles, the layup artist moonlighting as a wizard. As he admitted earlier in the season, sometimes he’s not looking.

His game, especially in the fourth, where he has been deemed king, seems to conflate ‘carpe diem’ with a specific brand of controlled recklessness. He puts up shots from a range, and with an impunity, that would give coaches of lesser players migraines. Again, all he needs is the smallest gap to make it so. It all sort of explains the perpetual smirk buried only a fraction of a layer deep on his face at almost all times. He knows he’s getting away with something. He’s reveling in all of it, a lucky daredevil. His success clarifies his second expression -- think the ecstatic athlete’s cry of “Let’s go,” but as an emoji -- even more keenly.

==

I saw firsthand the experience of both Isaiahs. In late December, I made a pilgrimage to the Garden for a game against the Heat, an overachieving but undermanned squad that on this night was missing its star point guard. Miami’s backcourt got open shots all night, and, up until the final few minutes, made most of them. Their guards got free not because Isaiah was guarding them, but because of the complex switching and hedging that the Celtics defense had to maintain to keep Isaiah’s man from taking advantage of the height mismatch.

Isaiah dropped 52 that night (only Larry Bird and Kevin McHale have scored more in a Celtics uniform), including this fiery diamond to put the game away:

 The Celtics needed every single point. The sets they ran on offense were pretty uninspired -- a problem, I believe, mainly of personnel -- and they struggled to even get adequate shots up when Isaiah Thomas was on the bench. All night, Isaiah masked the bad smell of the Celtics’ offense, like an air freshener or one of those tubs you place over the grimy tub that’s already there. His presence on the court may also have helped the Heat stick around until the final minute. Two things can be true.

But I keep turning back to the way the mood changed the moment the fourth quarter started. Electricity radiated out from the smallest man on the court and rewired our brains together. By the time that last long, long bomb splashed through, strangers were yelling joy into each others faces. I grabbed my dad’s shoulder and shook it in disbelief, the way one does when one finds his good fortune at maximum saturation.

This is why it has been the season of the Pint Gawd. Just like the experience of watching Westbrook this season has been less about wins and losses and more about watching a mortal punch the sun in the face, with Isaiah it was never about how it ends. It’s about how we got here. Part of it is narrative – watching the little guy go up against behemoths and come out victorious is existentially pleasing and has been for as long as stories have been told. But, more essentially, it’s about the insistence with which he performs his role. It translates as part obligation, part addiction that the moment things break down for the Celtics on offense, Isaiah is already looping around or doubling back in search of the rock, to begin pounding away with it again in his certain springy way. There’s no megalomania to it; I think he’s addicted to it the way it can be addicting to be Mario in a videogame. But it’s also like he’s made a promise to a good friend, and so, when Kelly Olynyk picks up his dribble 25 feet from the basket, Isaiah sighs and returns for the ball, his old good friend he promised to get where it needed to go. All too often it does.

Isaiah has a vision for himself and it’s mostly come true this season. I don’t think he ever cared about convincing us of his vision’s veracity, but here we are, having been let in. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, and, when you look back on 2016-17, I hope you remember and say it in your most obnoxiously Boston accent: he’s the Pint Gawd.

-- Frank Basket

[thepeachbasket]

It Is Bullshit

Until recently, I had always felt that sports were in some way a reflection of ourselves. Because they are often male-dominated, and because they cater to money, and specifically to those with the most of it, sports leagues have always trended conservative. So: a distorted reflection to be sure, but one that might provide meaningful clarity. The NFL’s decision to suspend Ray Rice for only two games after he knocked his wife unconscious, for example, is an indictment of how we as a society respond to abusive relationships.

The NBA, for the past few years at least, has reflected back to me a society I want to see myself in. Players have used their platforms to speak out against the police murder of unarmed black men. The first openly gay professional athlete played in the NBA. Most importantly, Adam Silver pulled the NBA All-Star Game out of Charlotte because of their highly discriminatory HB2 Bill. While other leagues were making token gestures toward supporting just causes, the NBA, an industry unto itself, was making an economic statement. Money talks. It was a big deal.

At the time, the decision felt in line with the larger trajectory of the United States. Outrage over police shootings was getting amplified, Bernie Sanders’s rhetoric was reaching a fever pitch, the White House was decked out in rainbow colors. The NBA felt like a microcosm of a society slowly bending towards justice. This was months ago, when we were all younger.

Since the election, it has been easy to feel like if the NBA were to make another progressive statement with their wallets it would in defiance of the laws around it, a final bulwark in the storm. I went so far as to claim, in an article I wrote a couple weeks after the election, that “the gray truth is sports are not a reflection of ourselves.” On top of being melodramatic, it was hasty.

Since the election, some of the most revered coaches in the NBA have not held back their criticism. Gregg Popovich, considered by many to be the best NBA coach of all time, immediately spoke up, ripping “the disgusting tenor and tone and all the comments that have been xenophobic, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, and I live in that country where half the country ignored all that to elect someone. That’s the scariest part of the whole thing to me.” He ended this particular diatribe (he’s had a few and they are all gems) with the beautifully succinct: “We are Rome.”

Warriors coach Steve Kerr has also not held back, most recently by speaking out against the wildly racist immigration ban: “I’m completely against what’s happening. I think it’s shocking and a horrible idea” (this holds extra weight because Kerr’s father was killed by the Islamic Jihad Organization while working in Beirut).

Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy pulled no punches either: “we’re getting back to the days of putting the Japanese in relocation camps and Hitler registering the Jews.”

Probably the most cathartic response came from Raptors point guard Kyle Lowry, who called the ban “Bullshit” multiple times, and refused to amend his response for reporters because “That’s how I feel about it.”

One of the interesting parts of this type of dissent is how unequipped the current administration is to respond to it with their usual insults. The current GOP indulges in dangerous delusions about masculinity. To them, liberals are whiny and soft, while they are tough and rugged frontiersmen. Because NBA athletes and coaches are elite at something traditionally masculine, that gross and lazy binary doesn’t apply. It’s easier to, say, make fun of Chuck Schumer for crying than to perform the wild linguistic backflips required to call Popovich a loser (he is better at coaching than anyone in the White House will ever be at anything worthwhile).

So perhaps the NBA is protected by its bubble; the very things that constrain its progressive tendencies are the things that protect it from rebuke. I don’t know. What I do know is it feels so good to see public figures say what we are all feeling with a directness that our elected officials for the most part have been shamefully unwilling to. I know too that while the majority of my twitter feed continues to necessarily transition from basketball to politics, it feels good when the two intersect, and strengthens my resolve.

– Frank Basket

[thepeachbasket]

Just Get Buckets

[thepeachbasket]

Hey, Peach Basket. How do you feel about D'Angelo Russell?

Basketball calls for personality. The game is zoomed-in on only 10 people, in a compact space, without the depersonalizing safety gear more violent sports demand. In the NBA, self-expression is at its most engaging. Ambitious hair styles, signature kicks, bold tattoos of sometimes mysterious import – the NBA feels more open than any other professional league in America. Our favorite players’ celebrations, facial expressions, and hot mic quotes get endlessly passed around NBA Twitter. Personas stretch off the court as well, where NBA players have experimented with wild – occasionally corny, sometimes transcendent – postgame podium attire. All of this gets fed through our understanding of each athlete through how they play the game. (For instance, Westbrook is a weather event. His exploratory postgame style, his curt sound bites, his primal growls after a dunk, all are processed through the unrelenting way he balls.) What a player does when the scoreboard is ticking makes the rest of it matter, provides an essential referent that imprints its character on everything else.

In this triangulation between playing style, oncourt persona, and offcourt personality, D’Angelo fails on two counts. It’s not just because of his issue last year with Nick Young – though both men walk away from that looking particularly gross – it’s everything else as well. He swore in a summer league post-game interview like a kid who just learned to swear. He mimes injecting ice into his veins after big shots, which, to me, is pretty eye-rolling inducing.

But I don’t know, and never will, and so don’t need to. The gray truth is sports are not a reflection of ourselves. From all the contextual clues we gather we glean a personality, where really there is a rough shape of a personality, with key elements magnified so as to completely obscure other elements. What we think is a person is the distortion of a person. Russell is probably all those obnoxious things and more, of course more, unknowably more. What matters, what’s left after tide goes out, is a few decisions between whistles.

In time, I think Dangelo will have that covered. Click anywhere in this long highlight reel and you’ll see variations on the same themes.

D’Angelo is relentless pushing the ball into open space. He makes his teammates more alive to the action on the court. He moves fluidly in and out of open space with the ball on a short leash, eager for opportunity. Check out all the ways he can break an opponent down. He isn’t afraid to shoot in big moments, and always thinks it’s going in.

But it is his passing that is most captivating. He sees the court with imagination and a heightened awareness of the avenues defenders are blind to. Like all the great passers, he has no tell as to where the ball is headed, needs only a small space, and is impeccably accurate. Because he is tall for a point guard, he forces opponents to make tough decisions and exploits those decisions in sometimes astounding ways. He can display a sort of intoxicating creativity. The game seems to slow down for him even as he speeds it up. The ball leaves him with a deftness that feels like a conspiracy between man and rock. It’s worth watching, and worth celebrating.

So who knows why I said all that stuff in the beginning.

Tl;DR : Kid seems like he has some growing up to do, who knows, give him the rock and let him do his thing.

– Frank Basket

[thepeachbasket]

Klay Tablets

Part of what makes the Warriors backcourt tandem of Klay and Curry so satisfying is the way they complement each other even as they pursue the same goal. The desired result is the same, but the philosophies they enact radically diverge. Steph is a genius of spectacle, an artist convinced an always bigger canvas is needed to capture his ambition. He seeks out impossibilities and makes them so, and tacks on as much flair as he can in the process. Klay is like a mathematician whose great life's work is resolving a single, unsolvable equation. Extraneous figures are reduced. A singular answers waits at the end.

What this means for the experience of watching Steph is pretty clear. He translates his art into a type of awe unique to him, one that constantly asks us to readdress both scope and the markers that delineate plausibility. Klay’s results are harder to parse.

Last season, Klay dropped 37 points in a quarter. On Monday, he dropped 60 points in 29 minutes. He took just 11 dribbles, and touched the ball for 90 seconds total. These are unholy statistical blips. They don’t fit on a continuum with other basketball figures. When Klay goes off likes he did on Monday, it doesn’t feel like he’s adding to a rich mosaic. Steph’s alien displays ask us to acknowledge the complexities of life beyond reductive binaries. Klay’s theorem aims to reassess our understanding of the actual elements that strap us to this world.

There is no such thing as a perfect game, but in a perfect game not a single dribble would occur. Klay dribbled 11 times to get 60 points. He held the ball for 90 seconds total. These bear repeating. He let fly from beyond the arc with the same flick of the wrist each time the way our handwriting betrays us by being uniquely ours. His spare dribbles created space for the same perfect flick of the wrist. He caught the ball on the move in transition and laid it in without the ball making a noise. He moved with purpose without the ball. When it found him, he was already squaring up or laying it in.  Almost all of basketball happens away from the ball. Klay has nearly flawless shooting mechanics. The other night, he was perfect at all the other stuff too. Golden State may have become a basketball mecca. This week was a periodic reminder: no one has gets closer to paradise than Klay.

-- Frank Basket

[thepeachbasket]

Hi, first of all your post on the season's opener between SAS and GSW was excellent. Can you comment on the following: based on the current state of affairs at OKC, Kings and Pelicans is it too ridiculous to suggest, or more importantly is it conceivable, that OKC should make a move for Big Boogie or Anthony Davis?

Hi, Anonymous. 

Your question as I see it has two parts. First is whether OKC should make a trade for Boogie or AD. The answer to that question is: of course they should. We don’t need to dwell on that. I mean, you always have to consider what you’re giving up, but all things being equal, you want to have players like Boogie and AD on your team.

The more interesting question—as I’m sure you know—is whether OKC could pull off a trade for either of these guys. Let’s look at this in greater depth.

We’ll start with Anthony Davis. No, OKC can’t trade for Anthony Davis. The Pelicans aren’t trading Anthony Davis. He’s incredibly great and impossibly young. He’s locked up through the 20-21 season. I count at least 20 teams in the NBA I think would happily give up their ENTIRE roster if it meant getting Anthony Davis. He’s not going anywhere for a while.

That brings us to Boogie. 

I just spent a bunch of time on the trade machine, and due to the “poison pill” nature of Steven Adams’ contract (because Adams is still on his rookie deal and his salary will jump so much next year, his value in trades is an average of this year and all subsequent years, and difficult to trade under normal circumstances because of matching salary rules for capped-out teams) I can’t seem to make a trade work. And while on talent alone a trade involving something like Boogie for Adams + Domantas Sabonis makes some sense, the Kings are loaded with big guys and literally don’t have any good guards. So they probably want guards, and I’m not sure Cam Payne and Victor Oladipo really move the needle. 

But I do think we’re moving towards a reality in which the Kings have to trade Boogie. We’re nearing the tipping point where the fact that his contract expires at the end of next season is going to begin significantly lowering his value in trades. Boogie’s been stuck in a shit situation for long enough that it’s hard to imagine that he won’t want to test the waters in free agency. And if he’s available, teams are going to come calling. Houston, Boston, LA, Chicago (I just got really excited thinking about Butler + Gibson for Boogie)—tons of teams will want to make an offer. 

Something else to consider: should the Thunder really be going in this direction? Their best player is Russell Westbrook, a guard with an Iversonian hold on the way his team plays basketball. When Iverson made it to The Finals, it was because Philly surrounded him with dudes who would rebound and play defense and not give a shit about shooting. I think that’s where OKC should be heading, and it’s why guys like Adams and Andre Roberson are so important for them. I honestly don’t know what I’d do if I was Sam Presti. 

[thepeachbasket]

This was the world, and they, of course, were the people

Friends, things are not great out there. Look around you: so much hate, so much negativity. So sue me if I arrived at opening day of the 2016/17 NBA season with my heart in my hand, sad puppy eyes, and a nervousness in my soul I could almost feel in my teeth. I’ll admit I had been persuaded—against so much of what I sense is true about the nature of the universe and, in particular, basketball—that this season’s most salient narrative was a foregone conclusion. The Warriors were about to roll through the league like a concrete drum roller with searing, individual flare, flattening into nondescript similarity the world around it while basking in its own gorgeous (but also maybe a little fluorescent? maybe a little sick?) glow.

Instead, my upstairs neighbor brought down some spicy salami to eat (mind-altering, perspective-changing salami), and between the spice and the Spurs...I mean, how do you talk about what the Spurs did? In four quarters, they scored 31, 33, 33, and 32 points respectively. The term “clinic” doesn’t do it justice. They imposed their will, let’s say? They got whatever they wanted? These are the tried-and-true ways we have of talking about dominant performances in sports, but even the word “dominant” feels ridiculous and wrong just now. The Spurs gloried in craftsmanship; they built a machine, and they looked it over, and it looked good, and they plugged it in, and they listened to it hum. They did not feel any sinful pride when they looked at what they had made. They just felt like themselves.

And sure, it’s reactionary and ridiculous to start worrying about the Warriors now, but on the other hand: SHEESH. What jumps out at you about the Spurs these days is the overwhelming sense that they are everywhere. Kawhi, yes, of course, but Jonathan Simmons, too, is now everywhere. Patty Mills is somehow also everywhere. Dewayne freaking Dedmon is freaking everywhere. LaMarcus Aldridge—surrounded by whispers like he’s working to unlock the hatch in the first season of LOST, but maintaining a level head anyway—is EV-REE-HWAIR.

I know—don’t @ me—this is about to be the stupidest take ever, but is there a point at which the accumulation of great players starts to have diminishing returns? Like, is it possible we’re about to learn that the difference between Andrew Bogut and Zaza Pachulia is more significant for this particular Warriors team than the difference between Harrison Barnes and Kevin Durant? Like, how great can you even be? The Warriors lost nine games last season. That number is so small that, stylistically, I had to type it out just now instead of using the numeral. They were great. And also the Cavs were great. The Spurs and Thunder? They were also great. Last night, the Warriors looked a little lean; they needed more guys; they were relying on a little too much Pat McCaw, a little too much Ian Clark, a little too much David West. It’s just one game, but also, nah, it’s not, but it is, but it’s not.

It’s true that most of the time this stuff comes down to Kawhi vs. KD, Steph vs. Kyrie, LeBron vs. Pierce, etc. Sure. Sure. You’re right. Sometimes it comes down to Tayshaun and Sheed being able to handle Kobe and Shaq. Sometimes nobody’s got an answer for Mike. Sometimes Hakeem baseline dreamshakes you to two titles in a row. Sometimes Magic makes the hook over McHale, and Bird misses the 3 from the corner at the buzzer. Sometimes Russell just wants it a little more than Wilt. Yeah. Yeah. But sometimes Jonathan Simmons is +33 and Ian Clark is -29 and that’s kinda the story. Sometimes too many things matter and you wake up in a cold sweat wondering if you made the right decisions. Actually, that happens all the time. And anyway, there’s no reversing them. Life’s variables are like the stars in the sky. You can count them, but not in this lifetime, my friend.

—The Buzzard

[thepeachbasket]

The Team That Was No Fun

I’m so American that my family tree has been traced all the way back to 17th-century step-off onto New England soil. Still, I wasn’t just unenthusiastic about this summer’s version of Team USA: I found myself actively rooting against them. Then, not watching at all. They schooled the globe regardless.

It’s a sign of the times -- it’s not just me, I’m pretty sure -- that frustrations mounted from home over Team USA and their relatively clumsy strategy. There is not a team in the NBA who would prefer the sullen jab-steps of Carmelo Anthony over the screaming intellect of Draymond Green. And would ya look who was in America’s starting lineup, breaking down isolations on the wing like it’s 2004.

Coupling Anthony with Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving in the starting five is also a move that an actual NBA team would maybe avoid, if given the chance. It appeared to be a surprise to snarling Coach K that leads would only build once the two-way thoroughness of Green and Paul George and even DeAndre Jordan would be united together. It wasn’t a surprise to us, though, well-aware of the new shapes that plus-minus can take when 100% -- not 50% -- of the game is fought for.

Which: am I upset at the undefeated, rout-administering, gold-clinching Team USA for not playing good defense? Am I also upset at them for not bounce-passing properly or not hiking their shorts up high enough?

Yes to the first; no to the second. Team USA only earns mystique not by winning the gold, but by actively pushing state-of-the-art basketball forward to a new place. Yup, it’s a big ask. Then again, folks all over the Olympics were busting up world records. In basketball we are all-but asked to blubber thanks that Team USA has forfeited summer vacation.

The timing is bizarre because at this very moment the NBA -- two-thirds American -- is playing the smartest, toughest, most beautiful basketball in its history. A big part of this is the league’s revelatory upgrades in defense. Is it not true that total points have stuck still while, also, three-point marksmen are more exponentially deadly than ever before? Freed from the competitive-balance restraints of the draft and salary cap, Team USA has still managed to go years without an innovation at the same time basketball has discovered ways to rapidly reinvent itself.

All of which to say: I am excited for Gregg Popovich to sit at the end of that bench. (Why, again, was a lifelong college coach named the best choice to lead professionals?) Despite that All-American, Air Force background, Popovich himself has reinvented the game out of his own distrust of American players. Even Duncan is from the Caribbean.

In the build to Tokyo in 2020, Popovich might teach us that the players with the best names are a different group from the players who build the best team.

-- Miles Wray

[thepeachbasket]

The Answer

[thepeachbasket]

The Hall and The Answer

On Friday night I went to the Basketball Hall of Fame induction ceremony.  Basketball legends like Shaquille O’Neal, Yao Ming, and Sheryl Swoopes were getting inducted. I was there for Iverson. I was not alone.

As the event unfolded, a formula emerged. Each inductee offered up their backstory and thanked a long list of everyone who had ever been there for them and sacrificed for them. The event was formal, the standing ovations polite and frequent. The power of each inductee started onstage and moved outward, and if you were on that inductee’s frequency, you got swept up in it. If not, you just waited politely for their speech to finish.

In the lead-up to Iverson’s speech, that flow got completely reversed. Before Ahmad Rashad, the night’s host, even said A.I.’s name, he used the word swagger, a word forever signifying Iverson’s basketball persona and style, and the hall leapt to its feet in the kind of ovation that happens when the lights dim before a concert that’s about to start. Whoops and shouts echoed through the hall. No one would sit down. Rashad had to shout over the roar to regain control.

 Once he was onstage, Iverson struggled to get through his opening remarks. His voiced cracked and his eyes watered. “Take your time honey,” someone shouted in the back. This is how the stage-to-audience flow had been flipped. The audience, as an almost single entity, needed him to know why we were here. More than once, an M-V-P chant broke out.

The beginning of Iverson’s speech sat on the teleprompter for most of his 30+ minute speech. When the teleprompter operator did move the speech around, it was in complete futility. Iverson thanked a ton of friends by nickname alone. He said “I love you so much” and “Hands down the greatest” over and over. He shared inside jokes but didn’t explain them. He rambled. He thanked a bunch of rappers and musicians, including every musician who had been his intro music throughout his career. He thanked each of his kids individually with sweet and adorable nicknames and an insane amount of love cracking his voice. A timer next to the teleprompter ticked to zero. Later it turned red and blared the words WRAP NOW.

It’s not that Iverson went off-script. It was always going to be this way. This was everything about Iverson that we’ve come to love and defend. In an event that called for a publicly constructed self, he looked like a man who couldn’t imagine another option than being exactly Allen Iverson, no matter how messy. The frenzy of the crowd kept the room taut with a sort of electricity that made my stomach feel like I was on a rollercoaster, and shouts and hollering continued unabated for the length of Iverson’s time onstage. We had to let him know.

Being an Iverson fan has always meant being an Iverson defender. No one is more aware of that than the man himself. He reminded his fans that the next time someone tried to debate his merits, three simple words would suffice to win the argument: Hall of Fame.

“Now you can say, 'Well look, my man is solidified,’ ” he told us, to raucous applause.

WRAP NOW became WRAP NOW!!! Iverson didn’t appear to be aware of the screen’s existence.

A little over half an hour into his speech, Iverson informed us he had saved the most important person for last. “I’m not sure I can get through this,” he admitted, before thanking Tawanna, the mother of his five children. In better words, he told her she was a Hall of Famer. It was a fitting way to end his moment.

But he was not done. Clearly off-the-cuff, Iverson decided to offer one more thank-you: to his fake friends, for letting him understand what a true friend looks like. It was pure Answer – spontaneous, defiant, charismatic, authentic, fearless, sure to attract as much criticism as praise. Like his speech, it was perfect because it was imperfect. Another M-V-P chant broke out. Our man is solidified.

-- Frank Basket