He is loved as kings are loved, for their power and for their benevolence, and also for their distance.

— Louisa Thomas, ‘LeBron James: An Odyssey’, The New Yorker

For a book about time, The Odyssey is not all that concerned with it.

We don’t meet Odysseus, its namesake, until Book 5, when the nymph Calypso leads the reader to our hero who is crying on the beach. At this point Odysseus has been stuck on Calypso’s island for seven years and Hermes, with a missive from Zeus, tells the nymph to finally send him home. Though she’s trapped him there, when Calypso finds him she seems fairly fed up with Odysseus, telling him to “Stop grieving, please. You need not waste your life.” Like maybe having this miserable guy around for seven years was wearing on her.

Though Odysseus and all the story’s mortal characters are continually and persistently shown to be at the whims of the gods, none show a particular urgency when it comes to time. There are long sojourns by Odysseus and Telemachus, whose grip on time flickers and often gets waylaid by the vibe of the moment. Penelope probably has the firmest handle on time given her trick of weaving and unravelling Laertes’ burial shroud every night for the first three years of Odysseus’ absence, but there’s still a generosity reflected in her actions to time and its passing. Her work only begets more work.

Even when Odysseus finally makes it home in Book 13, it takes until Book 20 for him to launch an attack on the suitors squatting in his home, and until Book 23 to reveal himself to Penelope. He surveys the chaos befallen his wife and son, schemes with Athena, and seems to enjoy his time disguised as an older beggar wandering around Ithaca.

Time, like the characters in the The Odyssey, is only doing what it’s made to. It happens, it passes.

LeBron James announced this week he would start next season in Philadelphia, playing for the 76ers. It’s been less than a month since James informed the Lakers he would be playing for another team when the 2026-2027 season started, just 27 days as of today. In NBA time it felt like an eon.

Over the past three weeks James’ name had been linked to nearly every self-styled serious franchise, beyond the initial would-be suitors of Cleveland and Golden State. The Warriors were intriguing, but I wonder if that felt too much like trick basketball for James, a season of Harlem Globetrotter-esque play and being treated like a circus coming to town. The Cavs were the team I heard most from people who are closer to James than I am, the idea of a homecoming and being beloved for a last season, a warm bath every night. In the end James went for neither spectacle nor comfort, he went to the team where he could still compete.

James has made a career of firsts, both in optics and records, but this first feels wholly surprising. A two-year, $8 million contract, a promise and a pay cut, and for the first time, going somewhere he wasn’t needed or wanted. That reads extreme but in terms of need, the Sixers were already competitively complete and as far as want, they never showed the open desirousness of the Cavs, who’ve held off securing James Harden or Warriors, where Draymond Green took a pay cut to clear cap space.

Only in James’ first big move perhaps, when he chose Miami and made spectacle out of The Decision, did he operate from the same place of longing as now. The Heat and Pat Riley, tenting his fingers no doubt, definitely wanted James, but the drop-everything demand James made for himself came after he brought a title to Miami. Deciding to go there was out of the same urge we all have to leave home, to hear your name in somebody else’s mouth.

Picking Philadelphia stirs up some of that same vulnerability, underscored by the statement James posted to share his decision (lowercase this time, and just on Twitter):

I thought I was done when the season ended. I wasn't ready to announce it, and I knew I needed some time to really decide, but I was pretty sure I played my last game. I was honest at that last press conference when I said I needed to look at myself and deicide if I still love this game. I still truly love this game, and I have more to give.

The last few weeks have really been special. I’ve never been able to have no clue what to do and take real time to just think. I’ve had an incredible few months with all the people I love trying to figure it all out. This is my last decision. I’m not going for money. I’m not going for family. What am I really playing for at this point?

I still want to sacrifice. I still want to work. I still want to grind. I still want to compete, to win and to have a chance at the feeling of winning another championship.

I believe I can help make the Philadelphia 76ers a championship team and I am so excited to energize a new fan base and start this incredible journey one last time.

Thank you LA. Miami I’ll forever love and Northeast Ohio will always [sic] home!

What jumped out is the way James described time over the last few weeks. He paints it as a long, languid period to dwell in and think, as “real time” to stretch his legs in, to treat like a landscape and learn the contours of. If we’re counting the time before the Lakers announced James wasn’t coming back, tacking on the weeks after the team’s postseason ended on May 11th, that’s still only a few extra weeks. What’s striking is that over the span of 23 seasons, it’s probably some of the longest idle professional time James has ever had.

He presents the unknown like a gift: I’ve never been able to have no clue what to do. A testament to how much of his career — and his life with it — has been mapped out, starting at 17 on the cover of Sports Illustrated with the headline of “The Chosen One” prophetically underscoring his high schooler’s face. If anyone has earned some self-aggrandising, it’s James, but that’s not what this was. This is the rare and earnest reveal that comes, if glimpsing, from a person who can’t quite wrest themselves away from stakes but who has also freshly felt the jaws of fortune release them.

I’ve never been able to have no clue what to do. I keep coming back to it. The double-negative, the paradox. The inference there has always been a target and an arrow rocketing toward it, one set by James and the other launched by his hand, simultaneously. I blame (and thank) the great Louisa Thomas for firmly planting the idea in my head with her work this week — paralleling James’ career with each of The Odyssey’s Books — but how is that line not a colloquial translation of Odysseus himself, staring out at the sea from one waylaid beach or another, rife with grief but also, tingling underneath it, excitement? Odysseus who is fated to wander and roam, whose nature it is to strike out for the next horizon. Who has won wars, is remembered in epics, got the hero’s welcome and can’t, for the life of him, hang it up.

I’ve never been able to have no clue what to do. Here’s the hero, telling us who he is.

Urgency pressed upon time is a contemporary conceit. The concept of optimising every minute, squeezing every second for what it’s worth, a modern pitfall. It hinges on the idea that the next thing is the better thing and so, we should hurry up and get there. Even the simple practice of “being present” is now presented with steps, as if the current moment is not something we could hope to find on our own.

In The Odyssey, along with being a given, time is presented as another landscape to chart and to cross; a tactile place to gather information about. There’s an inevitability to it even as the book’s major characters watch people around them die or be killed, have their time cut short.

From an ancient Greek perspective, and living in a world ruled by mercurial gods — it made sense: time wasn’t yours to begin with. It was meted out in advance, determined from birth. Perhaps with a good deed or currying the gods’ favour you could pocket a little bit extra or else wrestle some back, but even then it wasn’t static. Wasn’t yours. Time, taken this way, both borrowed and a given.

It’s why reading the book can feel stilted in sections, not so propulsive where there isn’t a monster to fell or god to trick (with the help of another god). It’s also where translation can miss. Patience, or that bone-deep acceptance of time, doesn’t exist for us as it did Homer or his characters. To treat time as a landscape is to cease to wrestle with time as a figure, accepting it as inescapable.

I’ve never been able to have no clue what to do.

A lament and a wish.

During the Tempo-Dream game last Friday, Tempo head coach Sandy Brondello was caught on an official’s mic complaining that Angel Reese, who plays for the Dream, was a “protected species.” The comment came after Reese elbowed Nyara Sabally in the ribs, and as Sabally was being checked for injury by Tempo medical staff.

Reese was upset, Brondello issued an apology the next morning, and the WNBA announced it was suspending Brondello for one game. All things are true.

The term is, as Brondello explained, an Australian euphemism for an athlete handled with extra care who tends to get a favourable whistle. I’d never heard it before but the conceit is a through-line in pro sports, think about the “foul merchant” moniker applied to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the recent theatrics in the World Cup, of grown men writhing around on the pitch after slight contact. Think of LeBron James, in most games.

Was it heavy-handed of the league to suspend Brondello a game versus fining her? Perhaps, but it was also an easy way to set a standard going forward on how the WNBA actively protects its players. It could also be a ripple effect of recent racist messages sent to the Aces Chelsea Gray via DM. A case where the person sending the messages did end up getting fired, but where the W had no overt oversight. More truths.

Brondello, who played in the league and has a track record with the athletes in it now as an advocate and ally, doesn’t need to be a bigot for a comment she made to be interpreted as harmful by Reese. Intent versus impact, as has been pointed out astutely by The Athletic’s ‘No Offseason’ podcast, is paramount in many public-facing spaces and certainly this situation. Black women have historically borne the brunt of racial prejudice where anti-Black racism and sexism intersect, and misogynoir has unfortunately found many new ignorant footholds in the WNBA. Most recently by rightwing identity politics practitioners adopting Caitlin Clark as a paternalistic pet cause, and seemingly having no understanding that basketball is a physical sport.

All: true.

With myriad truths in play from the beginning the situation is less about which one is paramount than it is about our capacity to hold onto each truth in turn. To process and, perhaps crucially, not react. To digest. The WNBA is often criticised for its “drama”, that every issue or situation results in manifold responses, but the truth (another truth) is that the NBA has just as many issues, just as much drama. The difference is that women are treated as mirrors, men as absolutes.

I had this discussion with a friend at Summer League who had a complaint similar to what I outlined above. They wondered why it seemed like the W couldn’t just get on with itself, why the basketball couldn’t exist as-is, a standalone act. But the NBA didn’t do that either, I countered, the most recent example being just days behind us at that point, of Bam Adebayo punching Tyler Herro in the face at an AAU camp in Las Vegas. In-season, the drama was no different, team dynamics make up 70% (my guess) of what analysts talk about on any given major network show or minor pundit podcast. Basketball factors very little into the machinations of the league. Why is it possible to take Adebayo and Herro, or the rift between Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, LeBron James’ falling out with the Lakers, any number of other interpersonal tensions, at face value? Because we still don’t really question men.

Not just interrogate, but existentially press. Male athletes can treat basketball as a job, a vocation they clock in and out of. Women don’t even have the stability of basketball as a workplace — you need only look back to last summer when dildos were thrown onto the court in a move that came to be backed, in extension, by the White House. Beyond that, all of the dynamic factors of the game itself exist in a state of tension, largely impressed on athletes and the WNBA by a subset of their audience.

There’s a discomfort with physicality, of seeing women use their bodies with and for force. There’s discomfort with competitive tension and, humming just below the surface, either the paternalistic desire for protectionism (not for all, but those a particular audience deems worth protecting or “in need of it”) or the sexualisation of women in states of tension and competitive animosity. It is so, so dated that it feels like a resurfaced Bill Simmons blog to write it, but it’s there.

There’s the reality of aesthetics, women fully made up to take the floor but undermined for how these visual cues of attention to the self — lashes and nails done, foundation, eyeliner — signal a lack of dedication to the game, regardless of their efforts taking place before they set foot on the floor. The alternative draws complaints too, that women aren’t as appealing to look at bare-faced and straining, reveling in the strain of their bodies and the friction of competition.

The mirror women athletes are foisted with is the infinity sort, where looking into it reveals not just one reflection but hundreds spanning back, as far as you can see.

When truth collides with an NBA athlete it tends to stick, stand, or slough off, eventually fade. When the same happens to a WNBA athlete the truth refracts based on what the viewer thinks, wants, or wants to think. The reason the league appears to “perpetuate drama” is because the person watching and holding that opinion has a hard time taking the sport at face value. For them, there will always be something slightly performative about women playing a sport that’s baseline is men. That can change, the very real and rabid viewership and fandom of the WNBA is testament to it, but for the majority of those fans the baseline has always been women. Not who they see the game through, with each movement on or off court an opportunity for interrogation, but who they see the game for.

The growing pains for newcomer fans these past few seasons have been very visible. There are tensions with how many understand a sport and its athletes should, or should want to, interact with the wider world around them. Women’s basketball intersects more readily and naturally — by necessity and by default — with the “outside world”, where men’s has been happily siloed, enforced at the behest of its fans.

The scrutiny isn’t going anywhere unfortunately, given the socio-political climate of the U.S., the place where both leagues are rooted. The silver lining is that in the nuance of truths at play between Brondello and Reese, there was relative comfort — even in the tension. The situation evolved, but it also found a fairly balanced outcome, and quickly. In addition to her public apology, Brondello reached out to the Dream and made herself available to Reese, should she want to talk. Reese made a public statement saying she was grateful for the apology, and for the WNBA’s swift ban. From what I saw, it was largely outside, detracting voices attempting to undermine both parties actually getting back to basketball, the thing they were complaining the W and its athletes make it impossible to focus on.

The irony is that the athletes of the WNBA have very little sway in sociologically streamlining their sport, making it the only thing people focus on when they watch a game. For that, women have to be taken at face, considered complete without constant interrogation. That’s on everyone else.

I see Roven at the gate and he seems to blink me to focus. He says Summer League and All-Star, there’s always someone at the gate. I tell him it’s usually been very tall and sleepy teenagers for me who, when I ask if they’re going to either NBA event, shyly tell me they’re going to watch a friend play. Oh, I say, suddenly remembering, my first Summer League, Nick Nurse was on my flight. Which version was he, Roven asks. The one who travelled with a guitar on his back, I say. It was weeks after the title. Roven nods knowingly and shows me photos and videos on his phone from the title run. The night the Raptors won the East at home, Kyle Lowry carrying the trophy up to the concourse and outside.

It suddenly seems so long ago, rendered that way with Lowry’s retirement announcement earlier in the week, and why Roven was in town. We laugh about how, as fast as the NBA can feel and as reactive as we all are to it, the storylines for next season rear up in the distance like mountains. Their outlines already so stark against the landscape, impossible to miss.

On the plane I’m surrounded by a men’s hockey team. They aren’t impolite but there’s an erraticism to their energy; some from their age, some from the unpredictability of men in groups.

As we taxi out to the runway the sunset is haemorrhaging red, orange and pink. When we take off it only gets brighter. Lifting through then up and over the clouds, the entire sky turns orange and pink, purple where twilight tries to cling at the edges. I have a row to myself and shift over to the window seat, press my phone against the small pane. After a few minutes the hockey guy in front of me does the same.

Because we’re flying west, it doesn’t wane. The sky lightens to pale blue where it was minutes before mauve, the sun hanging at the horizon like a big, hammered bronze disc. It feels like flying through cotton candy being spun. It feels like flying through heaven.

The thing I have learned best about Summer League is you can conjure people. My first morning, wandering down to the hotel’s front desk, I think about Bobby. Less than a minute later, Bobby is there. Both of us still on east coast time, awake only with the staff trickling in and the people sitting at slot machines on the casino floor who haven’t slept yet. Neither of us is surprised.

A few days later it will be Sam. I’ll be thinking of him and how we usually sit and talk about books we’ve loved in the last year as we watch frenetic basketball, pausing for especially wild sequences or for him to point out the rookies who stood out most to him for their qualities off the floor. He’s really smart, He’s really funny, He had more questions for me than I did for him. I take Jerome’s open seat beside Will during the Raptors second game and a few minutes later Sam comes down the row, opening a spreadsheet on his phone of the books he’s read this year so we can compare notes.

It happens on the concourse as much as the media seats, it happens out in front of Thomas & Mack at dusk or down in the cool tunnels of the arenas. You can’t will it too hard. The looser the thought of someone, the more spontaneous in how they land in your head, the more likely you are to see them.

I see Tony by the entrance to Cox when, moments before, I thought It’s always so nice to run into Tony. He asks if I’m writing a recap again and it feels, for a second, too meta for Summer League. Too self-referential. I think of Noa because a Sports Business Classroom student asked if it was ok to reach out cold to people in the industry, that he’d emailed Noa, his favourite writer, and then I find her sitting with Jack and tell her. I think of how I’ve hardly seen Warren and then he’s there, resting his elbows at the end of the table to check in as a dozen messages a minute light up his phone. I think, briefly, of Kawhi Leonard as I stand at the end of the media seats in the T&M pit and talk about bands with Greg and then he is walking out from the tunnel, rounding the corner and passing behind me, murmuring, What’s up guys? as he goes by.

It’s a trick of proximity, odds and timing, like anything in Vegas I suppose, but I never feel so lucky as when it happens. A sheen of fortune and sweat glowing around me and my chosen one.

It’s just like a family reunion, Tommy Sheppard drawls to me one day on the concourse. A lot of crazy uncles, he grins.

Dan calls me and over the din of whatever section of the Wynn he’s in, and whatever section I’m in, asks if I can see Darvin Ham.

I eye the rag-tag cluster of people who’ve gathered at the casino bar with us, ostensibly looking for the after party in a club that turns out to be under renovation. I see Budenholzer, Taylor Jenkins, a smattering of media and team people.

Darvin? I say out loud, stretching to full height, I don’t—

Jerome, beside me, cuts me off. He’s there! He chirps, like we’re all in a living room. Green hat! Jerome and Dan confirm at the same time, one in each of my ears.

A feeling this year and lingering from last of statelessness, especially over the first weekend. In years past, since I first started coming, I spent the weekend running from game to practice, from scrum to any quiet area where I could do a pre-arranged phone interview, typing up transcripts and stories in the media seats or during bleary mornings in my hotel room. I spent the weekend working. At least work, for a writer, in its most tangible sense.

Now, with my work centred on SBC and teaching, the first weekend is for catching up. For meetings — some planned but most impromptu — and run-ins, for, what feels like in my antsy core, idling. So, I find myself showing up to every Raptors game to sit with colleagues and friends from Toronto, anchoring myself through them, leaning over to read their notes or watch as they film, feeling momentarily overlooked when no one from team PR asks me who I’d like to talk to postgame.

I feel like a bum about it until Jerome says that the first few years I spent working to do the kind of work I’m doing now. That mostly settles the restless part of me, though I will linger around the tunnels and at the edge of scrums when I find myself there in the week that follows. Old habits.

We watch the first half of Norway-England in Tacos El Gordo, the whole place cheering for Norway, and the mid-way point on a screen in our rideshare, after emerging from a 7-11 to find Jonathan Mogbo in his Kings warmup gear looking lost under the blazing sun on the Strip. The last bit of the second half we watch standing at the periphery of the Harrah’s sportsbook, paying equal attention to two small dogs with a booth to themselves, cocking their heads at the floor to ceiling screens.

In a club with an indoor waterfall I work up enough nerve to go up to Jerry Stackhouse sitting in a booth, and over the thump of bass and the rush of water thank him for a legendary Raptors 905 team. He looks as puzzled as he does amused.

You have legs! Is the first thing Jason shouts at me, when we run into each other in the tunnel under T&M. A podcast is haphazardly recording beside us and none of the hosts miss a beat.

Since October, when we started our slate of NBA TV shows, we’ve only seen each other through our laptops. Am I taller or shorter than you imagined? I ask. He thinks about it. The same, he says. I tell him my fear, of people surprised I’m tall, which means I present short.

We’ve both been on a water forage, going to all the fridges we know in the arenas to find a bottle. It’s the first day and there are only cans of pop in the workrooms. Someone from the league brings us a couple bottles, looking extra dewy, and a handful of snacks. We stand there eating goldfish crackers like children, smiling at the chaotic press of teams swapping out as one game ends and the next team streams on for warmups, floor a jumble of bodies and basketballs.

CJ Miles is at most every game I manage to catch a few stolen seconds of, weaving up and down the baseline or hovering at the stanchions, cameras slung around his neck and his eyes trained on the action. He has to shift his glasses every time he brings a viewfinder up to his eyes. A few times I watch as his legs tense or a foot pivots, instinctively, when someone on the floor does the same. Old habits.

I give my Storytelling lecture in the film room of the UNLV basketball team, our students all taking notes. I’ve watched J.A. for enough years now that my emulation of how he lectures — slow, engaged, fluid in his movements — feels less outright lifted than channeled, still, there’s a thump that starts to speed up I initially take for my heartbeat, hastening. Then it’s there in double, then triple, then out of sync completely. Basketballs. There’s a team borrowing the court directly above the room we’re in for their practice, thump of dozens of dribbles reverberating through the floor.

OG Anunoby comes into the party when the DJ starts playing ‘Everyone Falls In Love’ and starts hugging everyone from Toronto. The song, a quintessential summer in Toronto track, the first you’ll hear out of rolled down windows in early-May, seems to narrow the room and all its crammed bodies to a focused few. Even Alex McKechnie is dancing. Of course I start crying.

Standing at the tall, room-width windows and pressing my palms against the glass at sunset, feeling the heat reach my hands through the glass. The first time I opened the curtains of my hotel room I was surprised that they kept opening, took me physically walking them all the way to the end of the track instead of just my arm. There is nothing in front, no other towers, only a straight shot view north to Gass Peak and, looking west, the peak of La Madre and the ancient brick red and soft tawny gradients of Calico Basin.

The mountains loom, seem to tilt back with the sharp, thin light of dawn and lean in toward the city with the hazy flush of sunset. The clouds, whether on the odd overcast day or in roiling, cotton clumps, bolt out to them like wild horses, leaving trails in their wake.

When I am late throughout the week it’s because I’ve lost track of time standing there, staring.

In Adam Silver’s presser I find myself wishing the NBA’s production team hadn’t shut the immense blackout blinds of the room in preparation for all their studio lighting. It’s 7 p.m. and the beginning of the desert’s long golden hour, where the heat lowers its hackles for the first time all day as the Strip lights up like a bonfire. From here, these covered windows, you can watch the planes come in low over the Thomas & Mack parking lot, using the stretch to line themselves up for the runway just beyond. At this hour each one glows like a heavenly body hurtling to earth.

Silver answers a question about viewership and speaks, specifically, to watch parties. How these events have flourished in past years — not just for the NBA, but across all sports. He wonders if the hunger for collective activities is a result of how reclusive we now are, his voice catching, very slightly, on the note of people living more isolated lives.

I think of the juxtaposition, celestial bodies — or planes, feigning — and our lonely mortal ones. How the biggest relief of coming in for a landing is the sense of being back in the clasp of earth and the social mantle we’ve layered over it. How marvelling at golden hour, anywhere, is to hand yourself over to the sensation of feeling so thoroughly human, and how much better it is to gawk alongside people.

I am paying attention in the presser, I promise.

At Summer League sleep is less like currency than it is a friend you haven’t seen in a long time. A person whose laugh, or lopsided smile, some other identifying trait is what you remember fondly and sharply, if the rest of them faintly.

Standing with Howard in a tunnel as Ron Artest emerges from somewhere and comes striding, smiling, over to us. Clasps Howard’s hand and asks what he’s up to. He starts to tell him about SBC, Artest stops and introduces himself to me. He asks a lot of questions about the program and listens to every answer. Howard asks what he’s been up to and he says he’s been assistant coaching a girls basketball team but, he worries, he’s not that good of an assistant because he doesn’t want to take a backseat. He asks if we’re around the next day, we are, all of us. I won’t see him again but it doesn’t matter. I can’t stop smiling.

I ask Steve if he’s felt more depleted this time around and he thinks. It’s the sun, he says. It feels like a different kind of heat, like a different kind of force. I think of all the times the heat has walloped me this week, how quickly it’s begun to broil from the inside. How a cab driver asked me if I’d gotten “hot eyes” yet, the same time I was taking a video of a Walgreen’s sign that flashed the temperature: 119°F

You’re right, I agree, it’s different.

Jerome sends me one of the most earnest texts I’ve ever gotten one morning as I’m scooping skyr yogurt into my mouth with an electrolyte packet for a spoon. Grange and I are talking about the surprising grace of Allen Graves as the news of a shooting at a Toronto street festival goes down the row and we all stop, pull the stories up, some comfort in being together as we suddenly feel incredibly far away from home.

Crammed in backseats of rideshares and cabs, in restaurant booths made for four with six or five, hands and conversation overlapping, somehow always able to connect; after so many years vibrating alongside each other in such a loud and isolative place we’ve all grown less guarded, personal and social boundaries blurring from lack of sleep and charged air but something more. The repetitions and rhythms, the forced and then chosen proximity. A sense that you had better say what you mean when the time starts ticking down for another year as soon as you land.

The plane takes off and the whole side of a Resorts World tower flashes to an LED billboard for Summer League. Bye honey, bye.

It took me longer this time to settle, to do enough concourse laps to find the rhythm of the place and myself in it, but I did. I knew it when faced with the reality of leaving, when the clock finally slipped to no more hours left to wander, linger, will one more happy run-in by letting go of any and all expectation. That’s when the people you want to see pop up, that’s when they find you.

You never want to be the first to leave or last to go, Howard says as I linger on the concourse, choking up. Laughing at myself for lamenting leaving too soon. That it’s only been a week. This place like summer camp.

The wind that rushed to me the second I stepped outside on my last exit, shimmering with heat, eager and curling all around my face, legs, whipping my hair straight up, playful. Pushed Julie, Keeks and me to the front of the arena where the silver paneling of Thomas & Mack glowed soft gold and the heat and desert turned the flagstone pink, flushed as our faces. Julie takes a photo of me with my hair whirling all around my face and my hand up against my brow, squinting back to her and Bobby, whose shown up. The two of them start laughing at the scene of us all, haggard and tired and happy in a hot windstorm. I pull my phone out to take their photo in turn, to try and pin this exact feeling.

Clouds in the distance white and peach and piled high like dessert, like promise. When I go to the airport after picking up my suitcase at the hotel the rose gold will be washed even softer and out over calico basin the sky will have turned brooding, stone grey, but here, still, stalling to the last, the gold light shimmers over everybody. Gratitude presses in on my chest, joy squalls like the grackles up in the stubborn palms that line the taxi roundabout in front of T&M, happiness is a low thrum like the apache cicadas gathering in the feathery boughs of the shoestring acacias tucked in the shade of Cox.

Trust me to take a whole week to let go, to quit chasing, to hand myself over, to wobble and bend to the desert like a heat mirage. Old habits.

I understand your frustration. After delivering a thrilling championship to Boston in 2024, the Celtics have ended each of the last two seasons not with a “Bang!” (Mike Breen’s Version), but with a series of clangs, as the signature long distance Mazzullaball shot diet came up short (and long, and off to the side). In good times, your adherence to math feels intuitive, even obvious. Three is greater than two, after all. But when the going gets tough, it feels like you sometimes neglect the fact that a made basket is worth more than a missed one, no matter how statistically likely the ball was to pass through the rim on paper.

For years I’ve defended your preference for voluminous three-point shooting and your abhorrence of the dreaded “long two.” But what about short twos, coach? I read last season that you believe driving to the rim too often creates a disadvantage on the other end when a layup is missed, so you caution against risky drives. I get it, but avoiding layups to bolster your defense seems a little bit like preventing pregnancy by wearing a condom to the grocery store. It’s not exactly where the problems are most likely to happen, you know? I respect your probabilistic tenacity, but math can’t change the past, nor can it predict the future.

Still, the result of the 2024 season quiets my inner critic. You proved that Mazzullaball can be a viable championship strategy even when (and I’ve never heard anyone say this explicitly) neither of your team’s two stars is an exceptional three-point shooter by percentage. That is no longer the case with the Celtics, of course. Once the playoffs ended, General Manager Brad Stevens traded Jaylen Brown, who attacks the rim (yuck, right?) like it owes him money, for Paul George, an excellent shooter who in his late 30s avoids the paint the way I steer clear of mosh pits at age 41. The deal perplexed both casual fans and experienced analysts, but I can imagine you rubbing your hands together maniacally, visions of high-upside, low risk offensive possessions dancing in your head in anticipation of the arrival of Podcast P in Beantown.

I’m sad to see Brown decamp for Philadelphia, especially after he led a “gap year” Celtics squad that muscled its way to an unexpected fifty-six regular season wins. His explosiveness and canny midrange game prevented opponents from simply staking out a missile defense system style of defense at the three point line, not to mention the off-court work he did in the community. I didn’t love his Twitch streams, but something about me is, I’m an elder millennial and I’ve never loved any Twitch stream.

Despite the season’s unfortunate conclusion at the hands of the 76ers and Joel Embiid, healthy enough to make an impact for the length of time it takes a comet to streak across the night sky, the season was successful in exciting and unexpected ways. Pundits have asked whether the Celtics should have traded Jaylen before the year began in pursuit of a higher draft pick. The same pundits who talk about tanking like it’s the parasite cyclospora said this. Of course the answer is no. Thanks to a versatile roster and your relentlessness, the Celtics won a whole bunch of basketball games, the thing the media begs teams to do despite the colossal incentives to behave otherwise at times. That is an achievement on its own!

In that spirit, I would like to invite you to celebrate your “stupid” Coach of the Year award while also enjoying your summer off. I get that it was not your ultimate goal. And I know you’re not a guy who likes to “chill.” So here are just a few suggestions for high-intensity, low-relaxation ways to commemorate your accomplishment, Mazzulla-style.

• 24-hour The Town marathon in the Mugar Omni Theater at the Museum of Science (almost too obvious).

• Go into one of those “rage rooms” where you can break stuff with a bat, and diligently reassemble whatever the person before you broke.

• Find the nearest five-alarm fire. Meditate within its boundaries until you are carried away by concerned firefighters.

• Allow a billionaire to hunt you for sport, knowing from the beginning that you plan to flip the script and hunt him (or her, I guess?) back.

• David Blaine/The Bible crossover stunt where you live inside a whale for a week.

• Build a trebuchet by hand. Use it to launch yourself into a wicked deep ball pit.

• Convince a shark to let you ride it through rhetoric, bribery, or blackmail.

Even if it’s not through one of these avenues, I hope you give yourself a little time to take in the magnitude of your accomplishment as you prepare once again for your attempt to achieve the sport’s highest goal. I truly believe that thanks in part to your strategy and intensity, the Celtics will be as successful as possible in the coming season, no matter what the numbers say.

The second thing I think is, how uncharacteristic of Adebayo. A person whose calm, steady nature has been essential to the Heat in ups as much as downs, a nature that includes altruism as impulse in the wider world. What and how much it takes to push a person like that, to that.

The third thing I think, leading up to 24-hours after I found out, and have run through my own initial Summer League emotional warmup of mixed nerves, professional interrogation (am I doing enough, who do I need to see, what do I want to come away with, is it fine if I don’t know), and slipping into the rhythms of the place, is how parallel everybody’s insecurity is, in this contained ecosystem and beyond.

If there’s a through-line I’m beginning to tug on for this summer’s NBA transactions, which are really interpersonal dynamics couched in “business”, it’s the primer notes for insecurity.

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It showed up in the way he talked with and about the teammates he became a veteran for — Pascal Siakam, Fred VanVleet, OG Anunoby — calling them “beloved,” being open and demonstrative about his pride in them. It showed up physically too, that team was so quick with touch: quick touches subbing in or out, lingering embraces, playful bops and nudges, arms around each other’s shoulders in huddles, the really big hug. Touch was — I was going to say currency, picturing that team as their own small country, but they were a culture unto themselves, and touch was their language.

There was much made about Lowry’s mercurial nature on arrival in Toronto, his hardheadness up to then framed as a coaching nightmare and locker room killer. He was challenging, can be still, anyone around the team will confirm that and Bobby Webster said as much in his introduction yesterday, but as the seasons stacked in Toronto there was a shift. Some of it was maturation, in his personal life and in the changing dynamics of the team, but the softness that emerged welled up from inside him. It seemed not the other side of the coin to his stubbornness, but a glow that got revealed in all those pummelling and polishing seasons competing and losing and getting better in increments. The shine of the whole coin.

Where did that come from?

That was the essence of the question. Structurally difficult, maybe too much for a retirement presser. But then I am kicking myself a little for not asking, having been on the other side of Lowry’s thoughtfulness and candor, his surprise answers, like in a postgame presser leading up to the 2021 trade deadline where he answered media questions for an hour or more over Zoom (it was deep pandemic, and the Raptors Tampa season) because the consensus was he’d be getting traded (he didn’t, but he did leave Toronto that summer).

Kyle Lowry is my favourite Raptor, my favourite basketball player. In some roundabout way he’s probably the reason why I leaned into writing about basketball at all, having perked up to the teams led by him and DeMar DeRozan, my dormant fandom stretching awake. I know the same is true for other Toronto basketball careers with that duo and those seasons, but the softness Lowry hit along with his stride was so instructive to me. How an athlete could be so tenacious, fearless, a menace, maddening, and still — soft. Tender. Make the conscious choice to dwell there, yield to softness again and again, finding nothing about that mode lessening to competitive instinct. God, I was hooked.

The piece below was the first I wrote when I moved Basketball Feelings to Substack seven years ago, August 2019. Lowry was the only person it made sense to start with. Lowry (number seven) was also the numerical reason I made the big change this past fall (year seven) to turn Basketball Feelings from weekly newsletter to digital magazine.

It’s a snapshot of Lowry at a time I was sure Toronto was going to lose him, in the summer after the team won the title. Like looking at a photo, the details carry back and forward in time — the electrifying title-defence season as close in memory as yesterday’s press conference — flattening it for a minute.

Work changes, we lose places and people, we take detours we never imagined and still, it can all come back in a rush through a gesture, a word, a glimpse. Suddenly hard truths soften, the fact of something deepens. How do you mark the end of a career still going in the memory of millions? Seasons in a blink, finished and immediate. All gone. All there.

It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.
— Toni Morrison

Lake water’s like silk and your fingers, shears. Slicing through it with the sun dipping past the hilled tree line, the depth of the water where I’m keeping my body still warm. Evening so still the tiny speaker sitting on the dock⁠ — twenty, thirty, forty feet back and growing⁠ — is as loud as stereo, water bugs skimming out in the wake of my breath. Muscles moving easy, bones clicking when I stretch them smooth past where they’d normally reach. The whole of my skeleton coming loose with the clarity and new-green smell of fresh water made fresher from northern thunderstorms all night and runoff over limestone, marble, moss, lichen covered quartz rock, slate and sandstone — Canadian Shield, the ancient core of the continent.

The limitless feeling of dashing your body again and again into lake water, breaking the surface and hanging a few seconds suspended, snagged at the lowest point of your own velocity before your body catches in the technicality of woozy gravity. Opening your eyes underneath with no burn, cascades of tiny bubbles rising in a veil around your head as your body goes loose and slowly coasts to the surface, browning arms already treading out of habit. A big loon, ten feet away, dives under and you picture its sleek black body cutting underneath you, clean down to the rock shelf, then past that, where even through the clear, sunlit water you can’t see, too dark and too deep.

Kyle Lowry can be silk or the shears depending on the minute, the quarter, the game, the season. Lowry can be the big loon watching from way out, so far you wonder if it’s a smudge on your vision and when you finally see the head turn and place it for living it dives under, gone. Lowry can be the storm that rolls into a clear blue sky without a trace of weather, drenching your dazed ass on the dock, can be the embers that shoot up out of a bonfire the second you tune slightly out to skitter down your cutoffs and brand your butt.

Though I shouldn’t be, like I ought to be used to it by now, the amnesia affect Lowry has on a lot of people surprises me every time. This near self-erasure, where his actions, what he’s given us — a championship — exist about as long as most people’s last medium-good memory. Then, when Lowry pops up a little bit later to reiterate a point that’s long been proven, underscored into oblivion, like he did in Las Vegas with USA Basketball yesterday saying that this Raptors team would still run it back, out come not only the cartoony, thumb jerking cross-body “get a load of this guy” gestures, but outright hostility at the suggestion.

The thing about this Toronto team, this Toronto team exactly, is it always had an expiration date. Even before Kawhi Leonard came along on what felt like a grift where your heart was the price but got handed back to you at the end of everything, the Raptors were working toward their own end. DeRozan was the first piece to go, then Valanciunas, and after that the more subtle threads that kept the whole thing tied together — C.J. Miles, Delon Wright, Jakob Poeltl. In a lot of ways Lowry is the last piece of a championship team pre-Championship title.

In the past five years the Raptors have had 37 playoff wins, putting them third after Golden State and Cleveland, tied with San Antonio. They rank the same for playoff games played, except for that they are not tied with the Spurs. They’ve been consistently getting there. In a league where winning is closer to everything every year, in Toronto it has been the getting there that’s counted. That’s what people don’t grasp who aren’t from here. Climbing the ladder, every season, up and up, or sometimes half as high, but the ache of what it takes to do it. Lowry’s been there for every rung.

The nature of invisible work is that it’s hand over hand. One step quietly to the next. While Lowry has his flares, his outright immolating bursts, what he has been to the team for longer is the quiet, hard work. It is what makes him fallible when put up against the superhero next-gen players like Giannis Antetokounmpo, that his flares come with burnout. But when Lowry disappears, and this is the paradox, it seems he takes his whole entire record with him. He’s got to start anew each time, proving himself to people who have let their memory unspool but forgotten how to trace it back to what is true.

“Close your eyes and swim toward the sun.”

I did as Steph said, twenty years, twenty summers, of knowing someone and you get used to it. We were swimming out from the dock into the wide neck of one lake where it empties into the head of another, the sun nestled exactly between the shoulders of land on either side. Both of us did a slow front crawl.

The feeling of being weightless with someone who knows you like that. Knows your whole body and what it’s been through, how your mind has submerged itself in all of it. You are already weightless with that kind of person on land but in water your outlines stretch and distort, ripple into the other, you take in some of them with the lake water you swallow on every stroke, you merge.

Lowry’s work has been clarifying. Not for him, clearly, but for all it has done to put Toronto up high in the light. All the deluges the franchise has ever faced have first fallen on his back before they could run clear again. Expectation and blame in, hope and pride out, our igneous rock.

He shouldered a team he hardly wanted, then grew into it, leaning hard and heavy, eventually learning to share the load alongside DeRozan and JV, then learning to share, generously, minutes with players he must have had to reconcile he was actively shaping to replace himself with. Pascal Siakam, Fred VanVleet (Lowry in midwestern miniature), OG Anunoby, Norman Powell, a bench to become a core that was a lot like improved upon déjà vu. Him at first rubbing wrong against Serge Ibaka’s hidden grain, something invisible under the sheen of Serge’s later fluidity, a fluidity Lowry proved a better vessel for getting Ibaka into precise placement to detonate whatever looked to dam them up. He let Marc Gasol in after the requisite one time of Marc standing awkwardly by as the team ran through its impromptu aerobic home court introduction, figuring out the best shots to feed him even in the games Gasol looked entirely too full already. Danny Green gave Lowry a chance to hang back and not throw his body so entirely toward the poised shoulders of oncoming charges, though he didn’t always take it.

And Kawhi, well, if I have to be very honest (and I do here, you know that) watching what Lowry did with Leonard, how he opened to him this entire microcosm he’d built, an underdog’s Xanadu that had silently, secretly, inched its way to near-legitimacy, how he handed that over without so much as a second-thought curling palm or reflexive pull-away, I was proud.

Lowry, who for so long was painted a stubborn teammate, if a teammate at all. Who had a hard time distributing the ball let alone due credit, who made all those beautiful, bullish runs right down the middle into the paint when he ought to have just saved himself another big date with a waxed floor and flipped it out to anybody open in the wings, waiting. Lowry who sometimes carried the team too far out into a current that took them under rather than regrouping, who was passed on over and over because he played somewhere a little more north than the broadcast rights could go, who saw, I’m sure, how this city will run a dark horse to death but showed up in those silks anyway.

Nights are as deep. Stars hardly waiting to knock you over the head. Swaths of the Milky Way scattered through all the recognizable constellations like road salt and planets bursting through solid and steady. Across the lake there are dots of other bonfires doing delayed call and return crack and pop to your own. There are nights here in winter when wolves can be heard howling over the lake ice cracking. Deep splits way down, the boom of their breaking apart thrumming up the channel like artillery. But in the summer the wolves travel farther north, up through Algonquin, leaving the lake to the loons and hissing packs of otters lurking in the cedars overhanging the cliffed banks, the wooded hills to deer and occasional cow moose and their alien calves, tall as baby birches and just as jiggly.

Night swims are dark. Nights when you have to light a bonfire to orient yourself to land once you come up out of the water mirroring the overhead patch of galaxy, exactly. Nights like that I’ve laid on my back at the surface and looked, upside-down, for the seam where the water meets the sky and not been able to find it. There’s a seizing in your body when your brain can’t quite make sense of what your eyes are sending back to it. Your breath catches and you don’t realize how long you’ve been holding it until the sound of it, usually amplified in yours ears half submerged in water, is gone.

Picture the last person you imagined being touched by, if it was deft or fumbling, hesitant or scorched with want. Water only touches you one way. The way you need it to, the way you are expecting. Enveloping, completely, touch to the point where you lose awareness of your body within it.

Even over the accusations of brooding for too long, not long enough, for being too sensitive, for needing to get over the franchise trading his best friend away at a timeline more adjacent to the tendencies of fandom than his own feelings on it — which he always kept respectfully private — Lowry took one look at Leonard and saw the clearest, best, and possibly last road to the top and handed him his franchise.

I’d been trying to describe the smell of the lake in the exact hour the sun starts to swing heavier down to the horizon, very badly, all weekend. At one point snorting back full sinuses worth of water when I hovered too close to the surface and huffed.

Cracking open a whole watermelon on the kitchen counter the evening I got home from up north, the smell of it lifting — sweet, green, wet — hit me so hard I got dizzy. It wasn’t perfect, but the right signals were there, the kind of sensory hit that places you explicitly, inexplicably.

Being able to name all the notes made it seem like something that could be assigned to memory versus what it was: etherial, immediate, desire that’s better for going unnamed until you get it in person again and your whole body shorts out.

All things have seasons. Lives or basketball teams or the players that make that specific one up. Whether or not this is the last season for Kyle Lowry and the Raptors, it is 100% the last of the one we’ve all been looking at, maybe taking for granted, that did the dirty work and got to kiss the sky for a second, battered and bloodied, missing parts of their teeth, thumbs bent like lightning bolts, grinning.

It is the last of this long iteration of all the different Lowrys Toronto has been lucky to have, and this one comes back to us a champion. To take that for granted, to look for reasons to contradict, to split hairs, even to let yourself lazily slip for a second into Toronto indifference is like letting the momentum of a moment that grabs you by both sides of your face and forces you, gently, to watch your luck lit up like when fireworks accidentally go off all at once, pass you by.

“Its father has the form of a lion, and its mother that of an ant. Its father eats flesh, but its mother grains. If then they engender the ant-lion, they engender a thing of two natures, such that it cannot eat flesh because of the nature of its mother, nor grains because of the nature of its father. It perishes, therefore, because it has no nutriment.”

Thirteen months ago in Indianapolis, James Dolan wanted to fire Tom Thibodeau. Didn’t seem the best time to rock the boat. The Knicks were coming off consecutive seasons winning 50-plus games and a playoff series; the only other Knick coaches to do so were Red Holzman and Pat Riley. The owner had promised the fans to stop meddling when he hired Phil Jackson. Maybe he even believed it.

A lotta people didn’t think Thibs should be fired. Most people, really, including a majority of Knick fans, Jalen Brunson and Leon Rose. But not all animals are equal. When Dolan’s desires conflict with the world around him, he’s less of a salmon swimming against the current and more a megalodon completely re-directing it. The Knicks’ season ended on a Saturday. Tuesday, Thibs was gone.

James Dolan is a walking contradiction. You may have known him when he was young: the kind of rich kid who threw giant pool parties where 80% of the people there weren’t their friends. They just wanted to swim. Money can’t buy love, but it usually knows a guy who knows a guy who can rustle up a reasonable facsimile thereof. There are worse fates in this world than quid pro quo.

Money means power, power means isolation and pretty soon, you get yourself paranoid. The people Dolan thinks really oughta be on their feet in Madison Square Garden chanting “JA-MES DO-LAN!” *clap* *clap* *clap clap clap* are the same people whose love he craves. The people he spoke to when he first held the Larry O’Brien Trophy, pumping his fist and yelling, “Hey, New York! I’m sorry it took so long!” He wants to be loved.

Loved by people like the 60-year-old Knicks fan who emailed Dolan in 2015 begging him to sell the Knicks in the midst of seven straight losing seasons, who Dolan emailed back to call an alcoholic and tell him to root for the Nets. The people directly impacted by an election where House Representative Max Rose told TMZ — in as light and joshing a manner as one can — that Dolan should sell the Knicks, after which Dolan called on his fellow fatcat friends to donate money to the opposing candidate. They did. He won.

The people who, a month ago, stood in the sun for hours and hours and hours and hours before NYC’s first NBA Finals game in 27 years, thrown for all sorts of logistical loops so some other unliked rich kid could flank Dolan in a bulletproof suite, looking down over people they act like they’ve no need for yet clearly also can’t live without. People who came night after year after decade, when the Knicks were an abomination, hoping Toby Knight or Kenny Walker or Michael Sweetney might be who Brunson turned out to be. The people priced out of the Mecca soon as the team’s any good.

After the mayor and NYPD decided safety applied to the general public, too, and kept certain safety precautions in place for Game 4, Dolan called them “party-poopers.” That night, shortly after the most miraculous win in franchise history pulled them within one win of the title, a 17-year-old was beaten into a coma outside the Garden.

Three months ago in Atlanta, the Knicks were down 2-1 to the Hawks. Unless they won at least three of four games, their best chance at a title since 1994 would go poof in the first round. Doubts that now look quaint had some teeth in ‘em then. Plus Dolan went on NY sports radio in December, an event rare as the Big Bang, and said the Knicks “should get to the Finals, and we should win the Finals.” If they got bumped off early, heads would roll and bodies would soon be in motion. Whispers would grow louder. Mike Brown? Too nice. Jalen Brunson? Too short. Karl-Anthony Towns? Too much. OG Anunoby? Too brittle. Mikal Bridges? Too soft. Josh Hart? Too erratic. Mitchell Robinson? Too limited.

The myrmecoleon is an oddity among oddities, a creature whose definition requires its un-doing. Some binaries are false. How many sides does a coin have, jostling in your pocket? Two. Spinning on a table? How do you count the sides on a sphere?

Mike Brown probably isn’t the best basketball coach on Earth. He didn’t need to be. He didn’t even need to be the best Mike Brown he’s ever been; the one in Sacramento a few years ago might’ve been. The Knicks needed Brown to be the best coach for this group at this point in their journey. That meant putting aspects of the self aside. Finding his way as coach while his players were finding theirs as a unit. Sometimes it meant not fixing what wasn’t broken, like early in the season when he resurrected some of Thibodeau’s discarded defensive principles. Brown had to be Mike Brown, not be Mike Brown, and also add a dash of Thibs here and there.

Mitchell Robinson is impossible. Impossible to keep off the offensive glass. Jordan-esque, in that everybody in the building knows what he’s gonna do, everyone on the other team has been practicing for it and strategizing about it, and it doesn’t even matter. Impossible to imagine someone shooting 29% from the foul line in the playoffs closing out the biggest games of the season. And ultimately impossible to keep — Robinson signed a three-year deal with Boston this week.

Josh Hart is a physiological contrariety, both the heart of the team and its appendix. When times are good he’s chemical X, a rich, mysterious substance who makes everyone’s life better in plural and uniquely personal ways. When times get tough, Hart’s inability to consistently knock down 3s gets the blame first, and itchy fingers wanna remove him from the starting lineup. The last two games of the Finals, he made 5 of his 10 three-point tries. How does a shooter who can’t make a shot start making them? By continuing to do something he can’t but knows he can. By reconciling both selves.

How can Mikal Bridges be “soft” when he never missed a game in college, or the NBA? The idea that Bridges ironman run had become a detriment, that he didn’t play as aggressively as he should because he cares too much about the streak, was fermenting if not metastasizing in some minds after the Knicks dropped two to the Hawks. Bridges shot just 3-of-10 in Game 2 against Atlanta, collecting all of one rebound, then missed his only three shots in Game 4, going scoreless while again grabbing one lonely board. Then, the same player went a month without missing a shot. “Strong” and “soft” aren’t antonyms.

When the Knicks signed OG Anunoby the summer after trading for him, the numbers were large — he signed the biggest contract in franchise history. But it was his dwindling number of games played over his last few years in Toronto that gave pause. This was someone who’d never played more than 74 games in a season, fewer than 50 each of the two years prior. The greatest ability is availability? Nah-uh. It’s being available, 6-foot-8, with high hopes, hops and an open lane to the cup.

Karl-Anthony Towns doesn’t live or act or sound or play like some think he should. What elegant symmetry, then, that the decision that sparked the Knicks ascension unto godhood was giving KAT the ball and letting him be himself. Turns out that self’s a 7-foot two-way point center more interested in diming dudes up than knocking threes down, and plenty good at either. For two months, the congenitally foul-prone Towns defended brilliantly, switching effectively while protecting the paint, all with nary a reach-in or bite on a pump fake to be found.

The Knicks won 15 of the next 16 games by a record margin of victory after centering their offense around their center. For more than a decade, KAT kerfluffled fans and front offices. Is it irony, then, that clarity came only after giving the wheel to the source of that confusion?

Jalen Brunson is small, and not fast. No hops. Civilian wingspan. Victor Wembanyama is mountainous, yet fluid. The hops are a bit gratuitous when you’re 7-foot-5, but they’re there. His wingspan is measured in acreage. Wembanyama is a demi-god. Brunson is merely a man. One who didn’t run from his flaws, but sharpened them into weapons.

Small means a low center of gravity, quicker stops and starts, shiftiness. Brunson’s turned his poor vertical into an evolutionary advantage: in an ecosystem where everyone can and does hop and fly and zip around all the time, headfakes, stutter-steps and step-throughs are the little man’s utility belt. 45 points in the Finals clincher? Maybe Brunson is Batman.

He can’t alter his wingspan. You don’t need to when you lead the league in charges drawn. Brunson doesn’t have the physical tools to stop people, so he evolved to become an elite stopper and turnover-maker by making his physique the tool, turning a weakness into a strength. The god left the battle telling his followers he should’ve won. The man departed as Finals MVP.

A lifetime living with PTSD means keeping things at a distance is so engrained it’s not second nature: it’s first, second, fifth. Sometimes that’s helpful. Sometimes it isn’t. If it runs amok, I isolate and disconnect and maybe don’t even recognize it.

When there aren’t words for something you experience, metaphor’s a natural mother tongue. I’ve covered the Knicks for 13 years. For the first seven, they were atrocious. It was heaven. How do you keep interested writing about loss after loss after loss for a team that at best will win 25 games? And don’t have a first-round pick? Or cap space? Or talent? How do you keep readers reading about a team that goes 17-65 twice in five years? That has five lottery picks in six years combine for one All-Star selection as Knicks? Four of whom don’t make it to their rookie extension? How much is there to say about a team with no hope? I don’t know. I have learned there are a million ways to reflect what’s left unsaid.

When the Knicks were losing, the feelings around the team and the fans were familiar, the pain analogous. Precedent is prophylactic when you hurt enough. Distance kept me comfortable when I was alone, dovetailed nicely with my writing life.

With a little over two minutes in Game 5 of the Finals and the Knicks up one, I burst into tears. I wasn’t sad, and they weren’t tears of joy; the outcome was nowhere near settled. What was this feeling? This was something new. Finding no clarity within, I looked for a parallel without.

The Knicks were winning the game. They were winning the championship. That wasn’t a snowball in hell or a dark horse or a betting favorite. It wasn’t a thought, it was, new and boundless and ineffable, like their play all postseason. There was no time for distance, no space to contain the emotion, no context to compare it against.

In “Averroes’ Search,” Jorge Luis Borges tells the story of a philosopher who tries to answer a seemingly impossible question. At the very end he thinks of the answer, after which he and the entire universe instantly cease to exist. Borges said his goal with the story was “to narrate the process of failure, the process of defeat.”

In the final moments before the impossible happened, Wembanyama missed a three. Anunoby grabbed the rebound. The clock reached zero. Since then I’ve written a couple dozen pages of notes and over 10,000 words on what just happened. I still can’t say what I’m feeling. In a good way.

One thing that sucks about PTSD is while it’s an illness, something we treat and work to recover from, getting better often makes things worse, at least initially. It’s common for a positive breakthrough to be followed by a sudden, steep crash that spirals into a conviction one has failed. No.

When you heal, you stop relying on defense mechanisms that you needed at some point but have outgrown. You lay down your armor, only then realizing how heavy it is, how much it’d hurt to walk around in. The next time you’re tested, the defense you’re used to relying on is gone. You’re newly vulnerable, likely to get hurt. It takes time and reps before you get used to what being healthy feels like.

When the Knicks won Game 1 in San Antonio, something in me tightened, some spiral of anxiety. After they won Game 2, it was ten times worse. Game 3, the only Finals game they lost, was the only game I felt any kind of peace after. Even after the Hand of OG win in Game 4, all the Spurs had to do was win Game 5 at home. Imagine the pressure on the Knicks then, knowing Game 6 at home would either end with a celebration for the ages or a flight back to Texas for Game 7. Everything pointed to them closing the series out, but for some people blue skies are red flags.

The Knicks help me connect with people while feeling safe. One day at a time, I try to get used to it. The Knicks are NBA champs. One day at a time, I try to get used to it. Somewhere under the sky, a lion and an ant are making it work. One day at a time.

I remember sitting in the media riser seats at the south end of Thomas & Mack with Blake and Wolstat, my first night there, and feeling the ground under my chair vibrate. At first, I thought it was just reverb of the crowd and their excitement over Williamson’s thundering dunks and the promise, every time the ball hit his hands, of more. But then the vibration intensified, shifted to shaking. I wondered out loud whether there were people under our section, shaking the risers, picturing the chute of a tunnel and an impatient marching band waiting for halftime.

Now I know there is no such tunnel at that end of T&M, and that the seats I pictured as temporary risers are actually poured concrete, but the idea of an earthquake was so far out of my brain’s calculus, I had no reference point for how one felt. Instead, it took people beginning to stream up the aisles toward the exits — Californians, for sure, with plenty of seismic muscle memory — and the jumbotron and speaker stack above centre court slowly swaying like a pendulum for me to clue in.

The other big news of that Summer League was Kawhi Leonard.

The Raptors had just won their first title, I’d barely made a curve in the brim of the ‘Champions’ hat I’d packed for Vegas, and the news cycle was dominated with whether or not Leonard would stay in Toronto. Kawhi Watch was an all-consuming matter in the city. I went on the same morning shows I did during the Raptors playoff run but now, rather than talk about the team’s chances of winning, I talked about the chances of the central figure of that title staying. The former had been based in tangible metrics with emotional flourish thrown in, the latter was all deduction, like reading tea leaves to people looking for some, any, sign of a person’s mental calculus. His decision.

And that was the framing. The decision. In a league where becoming your own outward brand is considered just as crucial to success as on-court performance, Leonard has always been a clandestine figure. He’s not on social media beyond business, doesn’t say much in interviews, and is just generally quiet. I once stood next to him in an empty postgame tunnel, just the two of us for a solid minute, before looking up and realising the person in a giant sweater was him. How was anyone supposed to know which way he was leaning, or what would factor into his decision, knowing as little as we did?

There were fans firing up flight path scanners, cross-referencing private jet serial numbers with incoming and outgoing air traffic. A plea disguised as a lifelong offer should he stay, called Kawhi & Dine, went out from Toronto restaurants, with decals posted on the doors of establishments where Leonard could eat on the house if he stayed. It was only a few weeks but the feeling of waiting on that decision, plus the sustained euphoria in the city from winning the title, made it all feel like a hazy middle-time.

At Summer League I fielded the question every time I met someone new and they asked where I was from. It being my first time there, it happened a lot. When I inevitably ran into those same people again on the concourse, or in the gyms and media room, even out in the casinos after the games, they’d ask for an update. Had I seen Masai Ujiri in the chute (the real chute) of T&M, having clandestine conversations in the literal shadows? Did I think Leonard was going to show up and sit courtside for the Raptors first few games, or show up at all? What did I think was taking so long?

Once, I mentioned that Nick Nurse had been on my flight, annoyingly asking for help stowing his guitar. The response was so enthusiastic I worried whether it would be reported, and then whether it would land in the pro or con column of endlessly tallying factors all adding up to the decision. I felt a bit like a celebrity known for one contextually immediate but ultimately useless thing.

Like everyone, I hoped Leonard would choose to stay and run it back with a team that was very good — and proved to be very good the next season, up until the pandemic brought the world and league to a halt. As someone who tends to overanalyse most of their own decisions, I thought that the time it was taking for Leonard to make his mind up spoke to a lot of factors in play (which we now know included everything from a request for an ownership stake in the Toronto Maple Leafs to $10 million per year in additional sponsorship income). But ultimately, I thought he would leave, and not for any more concrete reason than it’s what Toronto fans are used to of superstar-calibre athletes.

Leonard is coming back to Toronto next season. The deal was formalized close to the start of free agency, nearly seven years to the day he made up his mind to leave the city. Leading up to the final announcement felt strange, a deja vu of waiting on Leonard but with the stakes shifted. Even the language of this decision had changed: Leonard was “open” to Toronto, he was “comfortable” with the city and the team. All the pining and urgency there the first time was gone.

Still, I find myself trepidatious. For the basketball practicalities, how Leonard will fare in Darko Rajaković’s up-tempo, high-touch system. How Scottie Barnes will operate as navigator and distributor for him (I can’t help think of Kyle Lowry’s perfect if initially begrudging fit alongside Leonard, his aptitude of the floor and second-sight ability to manage it); whether Leonard will maintain the sort of social and physical distance from his new teammates that he kept with the Clippers.

I also find myself wary of the nostalgia.

Around the league, as free agency looms, some of the biggest and closely tracked moves harken back to the same era as Leonard’s decision — back to 2019. The possibility of LeBron James and Steph Curry playing together germinated with the two over the course of Team USA’s run in the Paris Olympics, but a big two of them in Golden State, plus Draymond Green and Anthony Davis, feels like a funhouse mirror version of the Warriors that went back-to-back against Cleveland. So does James going back to Cleveland, the other destination reportedly on the table.

After what’s looked like the most enjoyable and restful season away from the NBA, Ben Simmons floated the idea of returning to the Sixers. The last franchise Simmons played for were the Clippers, where he was teammates with Leonard. Judging from his social media, Simmons has spent the better part of this year fishing, swimming, and out on the open ocean around his native Melbourne (and the Bahamas, now the Red Sea). For a person who seemed stuck in a Sisyphean loop of development, perennially primed for a comeback season, and who appeared, mostly, uncomfortable with his vocation, it was almost a relief when Simmons stepped away. Not because of what cruder framing posits, that Simmons was always a bust, but because it feels good to see a person make a decision that has them happy.

The very first time Simmons was named to an NBA All-Star team, it’s worth noting, was 2019.

Nostalgia is central to fandom. One of the components of building a winning team is for that team to also be likeable, root-for-able. Whether that’s because they’re interesting, fun, or scratch a nostalgic itch are all viable means to that end, but nostalgia is the easiest and quickest route.

If a team can make a fan remember an exciting run, an intense shot or sequence, the way it felt to celebrate a win or a title, it can capitalise on the resulting goodwill (and probably, also, capitalise in a material way). Bad decisions get muted, losses fuzzed out. Really competitive teams in the prime of their runs don’t rely on nostalgia at all, they don’t need to, but let a couple struggling seasons slip by and it can be a useful way to stall, buy time before deciding on a teardown and the requisite years (and fan patience) those take.

Maybe this is all just harkening back to thinking of what life and the world felt like pre-Covid. Nostalgia for years that got ripped away and feel blipped out in the retrospect of memory; a way to get time back.

The most interesting twist of how nostalgia-focused this free agency period feels, so far, is how much of it is player-driven — and largely by the old guard. It’s a new twist on autonomy as the superstars who can still demand it age, with the ability of these players to tap into their own nostalgia and wield in service of their sentimental whims over long-term competitive benefit. Beyond Leonard (who said he’s open to retiring a Raptor, which, we’ll see), the other moves seem short-term. For, I’d go so far to say, fun.

James hasn’t put a hard cap on how many seasons he has left but it does certainly feel like he’s tapering his career to a close. The realistic physical runway of a Golden State group of him, Curry, Green, Davis et al. is short. A glory speedrun with no real (spoken, at least) hard stakes. They’re not going to be terrible, people will want to watch them, and they’ll all probably have a good time. If he goes to Cleveland it’s a homecoming, a chance to bask in free, easy love for a season. And maybe returning to a franchise wholly freed from The Process would actually take the pressure and expectation off Simmons, for the first time in his career.

As slow as I am to come around on Leonard back in Toronto, and I will, the nostalgia in play doesn’t feel detrimental. The Raptors have moved on; even the most painful parts of that change, as the team gradually lost core components like a rocket lifting to space, now have the buffer of multiple seasons. Less a team looking to Leonard to shape its way forward, the proof of his past doesn’t feel all that hefty or limiting in its weight to be up front again. It’s been long enough that some fans won’t even remember what those dragged out weeks seven Julys ago felt like, the emotional lurch as the dust settled. They get to shed their second-hand nostalgia for brand new optimism, and we all get to witness the rarity of a star come back.

Most of the videos are taken at a bridge called Passerelle Richerand, where Avenue Richerand and the Rue de Marseille intersect with the canal. I recognise it for two distinct diamond cut-outs, one half painted red and the other white, mounted at either end of the bridge. That bridge, plus the Passerelle Alibert and the Passerelle Bichat, about a block away in either direction, aren’t the only bridges that span the aboveground portion of the canal, but they are the only two that boast any height. The others are traffic bridges, stout and cement, street-level.

What sticks out to me, beyond how many people I know in Paris at the moment, is how crowded these bridges are. Not for their promise of proximity to relief: the motor bridges, even the cement ledges of the canals, offer quicker access to the cool plunge of water in a city that is broiling. They’re crowded because even in crisis, beyond seeking relief, people want a bit of a thrill. Some levity in their escape. To leap or let go and feel their pulse ratchet for a few seconds, to shout their triumphs before they clamp their mouths shut against the questionably clean water rushing up to them.

Beyond the infrastructure crucial to their deliverance, they want some fun.

In Victor Wembanyama’s last year of basketball before he declared for the NBA Draft, he had offers from Real Madrid, Barcelona, Paris Basket, Australia’s NBL and the NBA’s G League for their now defunct Ignite team, among others. Wembanyama chose to play instead for Metropolitans 92, a Paris team part of the LNB Élite — the highest level of the French basketball system.

Bouna Ndiaye, Wembanyama’s agent, said at the time that he wanted Wembanyama to stay grounded in his preparation for the NBA. That in order to develop the young phenom’s body for the long, hoped-for career there, “everything has to be built the proper way.” Wembanyama, then 18, had his own doctor, orthopedist, and weight trainer, and the Metropolitans brought on a former head coach for France’s national team to help develop him in addition to their own coaching staff.

Wembanyama’s mind, as Ndiaye saw it, was ready for the next level. It was his body that had to be methodically prepared. He wasn’t wrong, there had never been an athlete quite like Wembanyama, with his size, strength and mobility all in one. Athletes who mirrored him in stature might not have had his bounce or quickness, or they were more — how to put this kindly — willowy, not so physically strong.

It was a meticulous, necessary preparation, not only considering the average NBA career is still five seasons, but because of his aforementioned combination of physical and competitive attributes. Wembanyama was intense, even then, and his physical abilities could’ve proved a powder keg to his competitive nature. Explosive, yes, but of a finite quality. You don’t get to blow something up twice.

The canal Saint-Martin was ordered built by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 and took 23 years to complete. It was largely funded by a new tax on wine. Gaspard de Chabrol, prefect of Paris at the time, proposed building the canal to bring fresh water to the growing city and to combat diseases like cholera. It was also used for transport. Barges hauled food, building materials, and once, the Éléphant de la Bastille, a colossal elephant statue dreamed up by Napoleon to replace the fallen Bastille fortress.

The canal stretches 4.5 kilometres, with 2 kilometres now running underground — covered over in the mid-19th century to create broad, public boulevards. Every decade or so the canal is drained and dredged, with past finds including artillery shells from World War I, gold coins, a human skull, 56 cars and innumerable bike share bicycles. The waterway’s 20 some-odd species of fish are relocated for the cleaning.

Picture the 18-year-old Wembanyama, playing for Metropolitans at the behest of his agent and in service to his body and hoped-for long and successful career arc, but also playing for them because they were closest to home.

Wembanyama grew up in Le Chesnay, a small municipality to the west of Paris most famous for being the site of Napoleon’s last battle, after his defeat at Waterloo and subsequent retreat. The village is picturesque to a North American eye in that the buildings are clustered together in bright European blocks that are a mix of village homes, newer low rise apartment buildings, small shopping centres broken up by rows of tidy hedges, lots of trees, and traffic roundabouts, but all of it is decidedly suburban. It’s also low. The tallest building is the vaulting single tower of the Saint-Antoine-de-Padoue church.

I wonder what it felt like to Wembanyma to walk or bike around the sidewalks of Le Chesnay, from home to school and back, passing a Pizza Hut and neo-Gothic church. His own height climbing in unruly bursts while the town around him stayed short; his perspective surging over the rooftops by the time he was 15. His ambition, too.

We all outgrow the places we’re from, wanting to know what’s beyond them. Wembanyama’s version was more literal than most.

Most professional sports warp our perception of age.

The NBA Draft happened earlier this week and in it, Yaxel Lendeborg, who’s 24, went 11th to the Warriors. In the second round John Tonje, another 24-year-old, went to the Jazz. They were the oldest players in the draft. Most draftees are between 19 and 21, the youngest this year was Cameron Boozer, still 18. He was picked 3rd. Immediately after the draft Warriors GM Mike Dunleavy Jr. fielded questions about Lendeborg’s age, told media he wasn’t worried “because he’s not 38.”

With age, the NBA has very few sweet spots. If players don’t hit their stride by their third year in the league (sometimes sophomore) the rumbles of them being a “bust” begin. Generally, and not considering conditions like the competitive stage of the team they’re on, the development capacities (coaches with patience, trainers with a plan, teammates to learn good habits from) of that team, the competitive ladder of the league, which positions and play-styles are on trend — the list goes on — the sweet spot is between the 3rd and 7th season of a player’s career. Maybe stretching to 8th.

For reference, here are the 2016 NBA Draft results — Ben Simmons went 1st overall, Jaylen Brown 3rd, and Pascal Siakam 27th (Simmons and Brown were both 19 when they were drafted, Siakam was 22). To look at that list is to feel simultaneously aged and haunted. There is no place a decade feels more counted, down to the minute, than the NBA.

All to say another term associated with age in the NBA — mature — is ambiguous from the beginning. Mature in comparison to what? For a new draftee, interviewed moments after being drafted, they might be called mature because they remembered to look at the person asking them questions, took a beat before they answered, and gave a response with a personal detail. Maturity can look like curiosity, confidence, consideration — traits we think of in relation to time passing, developing over time. Maturity can also be a rookie keeping their locker clean.

Maturity in the physical sense is an entirely other qualifier, and usually it lines up with that aforementioned, pretty singular “sweet spot” in a player’s career.

Much was made of Wembanyama’s maturity all season, most of it in relation to how he coped with carrying a team a year or two ahead of its competitive trajectory. His physical maturity, the impressive result of everything being “built the proper way” as his agent stressed and many people laboured over. His mental maturity, showcased with his impromptu chess matches in the park and time spent at a monastery last summer. His emotional maturity, too. All of it so celebrated, I think, because it seemed like he (and we along with him) had figured out a way to hasten maturation along with the expedited aging process of the league. To breeze past the volatile ups-and-downs that come with the accelerationist bent of hyper-speed competition while being young. To skip, perhaps, the messy part.

In the 1960s, with pretty much all of Paris’ freight traffic being overland, the canal was nearly filled in and paved over with a highway. It was budget constraints that stopped the project from going ahead, the city couldn’t afford it. It wasn’t until 1993 that the canal, along with a few others in the city, were designated historic sites.

Wembanyama, Dylan Harper, Stephon Castle, Carter Bryant, Julian Champagnie, Devin Vassell — they’re all so young. Of the Spurs 22 man roster, just six are over the age of 30, and only one over 35 (Kelly Olynyk turned 35 on April 19th, the first day of San Antonio’s postseason). Their youth and its associated inexperience did not become a detriment until they began losing consistently, which took until the NBA Finals. In the Conference Finals, when they dropped two in a row against the Thunder, it was still an anomaly.

The stakelessness of inexperience is a true thing. Of a person, or in this case a team, overachieving or achieving differently than is the prototypic way. Not knowing limits because they haven’t yet been delivered by pain or loss and underscored further by doubt. When there are limits, but they aren’t yours yet. Instead they drift, float out past where they can touch you. The suspension of disbelief.

But stakelessness can’t last. Whether the limits find you or you impose them on yourself by achieving the thing you didn’t know you weren’t supposed to, lines are drawn. It’s impossible to say, in retrospect, how long the Spurs stakelessness might have lasted but in terms of a Finals matchup, they couldn‘t have asked for one worse.

The Knicks pragmatism, their shrewd, unfussed way of working a basketball game down to its base components brought the breathless, dreamy, impulsive quality of San Antonio’s playoff run to a dead stop. There were times the Knicks were like the adults flipping the lights on in the Spurs theatre of make-believe, their larger-than-life shadow puppets thrown up on the wall suddenly vanished. There were other times they were the stone-faced collections officer there to get their due, nothing personal.

Up until that point every opponent had, at least a little, played along. Some, like the Wolves, seemed to outright marvel at how far the Spurs had come, the way they blitzed and played beyond themselves. Others, like the Thunder, grew taciturn at their inability to enforce some limits. The Knicks were just going to work.

The Spurs reverted to their inexperience, the youthful qualities of frustration, impatience, poor communication under pressure and trying to either physically muscle the game back or shoot their way ahead, because they are a young team. Not because they had fundamentally forgotten their identity — they don’t really have one, not yet. Wembanyama reverted to the bullying, physical limitations he could impose on other players with his body: the jabbing elbow at eye level, how little effort it takes to torque and fold another person in half, erratic lunges around the paint. There is physical mastery and psychic mastery, the very best learn to use them in tandem.

When Bouna Ndiaye talked about slowly building Wembanyama up, he meant into his career. Not that they would hit a point and the work would be finished, the building done. Think of the everyday maintenance of being a person, how at times so meticulous and incredibly dull. Besides, for Wembanyama, that was only four years ago.

The word triumph, from the Old French triumphe, came from Roman antiquity. Triumphs were military parades, part spectacle and part propaganda to reinforce Rome’s conquering might and superiority over other nations. The processions, giant parades that took over the city, became so extravagant they were eventually only reserved for emperors and could last for days.

Napoleon borrowed a lot from the Romans, including their triumphs. His Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile and du Carrousel, the Vendôme Column, redesigning the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene in a Neoclassical style. The Éléphant de la Bastille he’d imagined cast in bronze only stayed a statue made from plaster, eventually crumbling and with so many holes it became infested with rats and torn down. If demure by comparison his civil projects, like wide streets fit for parades, bridges named after his battles, and practical canals, are the most used and by that metric, the most successful.

Dropping from the Passerelle Richerand into the canal Saint-Martin, I doubt anyone is thinking of its origins as part of a civil engineering triomphe set in motion by Napoleon, completed four years after he died, exiled far away on Saint Helena. Likely, they are anticipating the cold brace a split-second away. But hanging from the ledge, or psyching oneself up to jump or to let go, the whooping leap out into the air, maybe a backflip — we still love our processionals as bookends. Precursors and parades.

The Spurs took the origins of triumph to heart, the pomp and verve. So many times in their postgames after lost games players, or coach Mitch Johnson, would say they were relying too much on their talents. At first, I wasn’t squaring what they meant but now I understand: their spectacle. It could take them to the edge, but it was never going to carry them beyond. To the cool relief at the very end, or the quiet submersion and surreal suspension of the body stilled, the last victory won.

That was when the trade machinations around Antetokounmpo, though they’ve been grinding away for seasons, reached a new frequency in their strain. It was also the thick of winter. If you’re averse to either — the endless discussion around trading Antetokounmpo, the winter — my apologies, but there’s a catharsis to both being over.

For days there’s been one persistent sound. It starts guttural; low, nagging complaint from the belly of a beast. From there it moves into churning grumbles, tapering to silence or else climbs, pitch gaining tonal strain. If the strain gets too frantic, too tight, there’s an easing off, seconds later it begins again. Cars, many of them, struggling in the snow that’s been dumped on the city. Spinning wheels, stuck.

Toronto gets snow and most drivers are used to it. Still, there is a muscle memory that must be coaxed back to life for drivers in the city and it usually comes with the first big snowfall. The sound of that reawakening is revving.

Relentless revving.

All the windows in my apartment face onto one of the city’s main roads where it begins to climb steadily uphill, and where another of the city’s big streets intersects it, dead-ending and spilling its traffic. One morning this week, after a night of straight snowfall, I made coffee and idled at the window while it brewed, watching the early morning traffic creep cautiously along.

There’d been no overnight plough, the road was the same colour as the sidewalks, as the boulevards, as the thick blanket weighing on the trees: white, all white. Most every driver kept it cool — after all there is no rush to get to work with the baked-in excuse of a snow day — but sure enough, pouring my coffee, I heard my first rev of the morning. Back over at the window to watch a small silver sedan make a swaying fishtail forward a dozen feet before sliding backward and punching the gas. The wheels spun but the car didn’t go anywhere. That churn, that strain, somehow extra futile in an extra muffled world.

Eventually, if you’ve got a situation like mine, you learn to tune the sound out. Either that or you leave the house. I suppose the same goes for the NBA Trade Deadline.

The revving of the NBA’s trade machine, its strain this time of year, I try my best to shift my attention which only works so long as I’m not asked about it and that only lasts as long as between podcasts, shows and idle conversations at games. Not a winning strategy, but the best I can do.

I don’t like trades for their own sake. The monetary machinations of front offices, the win/lose dichotomy of trades, pretty dull to me. The proprietary language placed on athletes, assigning people a wholly arbitrary going rate (X for X player, future picks, or worst of all — cash considerations) or that shuttling people’s lives around is such a gleeful prospect to some, that part has always felt gross. Trades centred on individual experience, that part I enjoy and when I’ve spoken with athletes about it, yield the most interesting takeaways. Careers that suddenly blossomed or rekindled, new perspectives for athletes, more recognition and appreciation for them from new fanbases, those things feel great. To some degree, I can admit that is me finding the silver lining of trades in order to exist in the same ecosystem that demands them.

Huge stars, the people fans and media alike most want to be traded at deadline time, are the least likely to be moved. When and if they do it’s in the summer, and then, they tend to move themselves. So it’s been unusual to witness the rev and churn of this trade season centre around big stars — Giannis Antetokounmpo, Ja Morant, Anthony Davis — to the extent that I wonder if last winter’s Luka Doncic-Anthony Davis swap warped everybody’s brains to a degree we haven’t recovered from yet.

It’s possible players haven’t either.

A kind of steady phenomena in the NBA has been the correspondence between perceived stardom and safety. That athletes who achieve a certain level of star power are removed from the steady, banal churn of trade talk and its related stresses. That it’s possible to become too big to be traded.

When Doncic was traded to the Lakers the two-way mirror gained with that tier of stardom shattered. Players at that level suddenly and wholly exposed.

“If he can get traded then anybody's up for grabs,” Kevin Durant said.

“I'm scared,” Anthony Edwards chuckled. “Tim [Connelly], if you're gonna trade me let me know dawg. When Luka got traded anybody is able to get traded at that point.”

“I think nobody is safe in the league, it seems like,” Nikola Jokic said.

“Luka being a guy that everybody has claimed is untouchable, and untradeable, and the NBA shows you again. You just can't predict it, you know, it's a business. They're always having a conversation about you, so don't think you're safe at any point,” that was Devin Booker.

It was Antetokounmpo who gave one of the longest answers when asked for his reaction to the trade. An answer that ranged from shock to rattling off, by heart, Doncic’s career-best stats and accolades then circled back to himself, his own efforts, and finally, to what rang like a future-proofing appeal:

But at the same time, it goes both ways. You cannot have a double standard here… When a player believes that he can go to a different team and he believes he can have a chance to win a championship, we cannot crucify the person and say that he's not loyal and he didn't do the right thing and he let everybody down. Because history has shown you, you have to do what is best for you and your family. You have to do what's best/most important to win.

That was nearly a year ago and the rev around Antetokounmpo, the entire NBA ecosystem spinning its wheels to smoke, hasn’t let up. As if his public-facing realisation — that effort didn’t guarantee infallibility, that dedication didn’t mean a fan base wouldn’t turn on you — corresponded with our own.

Since then, he’s veered from cryptic to rebuffing, has said demanding a trade is not in his nature while reserving the caveat that human nature (“Now, if in six, seven months, I change my mind, I think that’s human too, you’re allowed to make any decision you want”) is sometimes about changing your mind.

Not to draw too stark a comparison, but the other stars who’ve had their names swirling in trade discussions have been mum or miserable when asked about the prospect.

Morant gave short, strained answers in Berlin this week to questions of his future with the Grizzlies. Hunched over, arms crossed, eyes faraway, his body language — compared to an upright and direct Jaren Jackson Jr. who followed him on the podium — said everything he didn’t. Trae Young said some subdued goodbyes as the game he was traded in the middle of wound down and left the floor, quietly as he could, before the final buzzer. Davis has been out, injured, perhaps generously spared from interrogation, but if past behaviour is the best predictor of future action then if asked, I’m sure he’d make a light joke while still looking a little bit hurt.

There is of course no good or normal way to discuss your own trade. The most rote response to lean on is “It’s a business” and that’s because framing it that way, saying those words as a murmured prayer, takes the sting out. How else to comprehend and translate, in the moment, on a podium or in a locker room, that your future plans will abruptly and knowingly to those you’ve entrusted with them, evaporate? How else to explain the feeling of having no control?

I think we’re accustomed to the quiet of an athlete’s response to the prospect of being traded. To a person being clipped, short, and subdued in the face of that uncertainty. Telling us, It’s a business, so we can all — them and us — move on.

Not so Antetokounmpo, who since the Doncic trade has been spinning his wheels.

It’s not that what he’s saying is so unfamiliar (loyalty and effort are recurring themes in the NBA) or radical (people do have the right to change their minds; that people are changeable is pretty much the only sure thing in our world, geopolitical and beyond, right now) it’s that he keeps saying it that marks him as querulous. It’s also why he keeps getting asked. His open-endedness a recurring invitation, his truisms a chicken-or-egg for the NBA trade set: What comes first, his agent asking for a trade or Antetokounmpo saying he would never ask for one, himself, outright?

Still, it does seem like the Doncic trade knocked something loose in Antetokounmpo.

Maybe he’s aware of all the fodder he’s shovelling into the trade machine, has seen there is no safety in stardom but some measure of power to feeding the insatiable hunger for information about his rarified class. There is also Antetokounmpo’s duality, a trait that’s flashed unguarded and often for us throughout his career, a trait that tends to trained, coaxed or forced out of athletes at this level. A trait without which we wouldn’t be walking so many circles around this question.

Can trades live in the body, like muscle memory? If so, is Antetokounmpo’s fixation preemptive, borne out of the fear of not having felt that particular quality of hurt yet? Is that a fear we’d even allow our stars — to get out ahead of rejection, to worry it and work it; lead us in the opposite direction for an elaborate emotional pump fake?

It could just be a new sense of urgency, that the league is moving on without him. If it’s a new recognition of susceptibility, that his stature and gravity as a star will, in some trade situation or as an eventuality, wane, then that’s a mortal wrench we all face — whether in world-lapsing pause or heavy duty instrument wielded, on desperate occasion, to jam up the machinery.

It’s snowing again.

Coming home in it I go slow, careful through the deep tracts cut by the sidewalk ploughs that only sort of shift the snow around rather than clear it away. I make it into my lobby with a neighbour I haven’t met yet, both of us busy with the process of recalibrating after coming in from weather. We step into the elevator and let out simultaneous big sighs, look at each other and laugh for how blanketed in snow we are. Her glasses fogging.

It’s like déjà vu, I say.

I thought we were past it, she smiles.

Well, what can you do? I offer, reflexively.

She laughs, a big friendly burst. Absolutely nothing, my dear!

This is the other option, I’m quickly and kindly reminded of. Resignation, acceptance. How often this goes against the core rhetoric of what we tell athletes it takes. Not only to be great but to exist at all, to secure their very continuity.

The biggest fear, in bad weather or situation, is always the false one — that you’ll be stuck forever. That’s when we get frantic, panic. Make bargains and bets. Anything for a stay to the endless spinning of wheels.

Achilles almost, almost, breaks with tradition when he first refuses the Achaean commanders come to fetch him to fight the Trojans, telling them,

My mother Thetis tells me that there are two ways in which I may meet my end. If I stay here and fight, I shall not return alive but my name will live for ever: whereas if I go home my name will die, but it will be long ere death shall take me.

At this point in the story Achilles leans toward the latter fate that his mom foresaw for him: dying old with a name that will eventually fade from history. He isn’t particularly bothered by the prospect, even as the commanders beg and plead and promise him riches Achilles sticks to his conviction. Wealth can be plundered, horses and cattle stolen or traded away, he says, “but a man’s life breath cannot come back again… once it slips through a man’s clenched teeth.” The guy’s got the truth of it sorted out.

I’ve never been convinced, or particularly compelled by, the perspective of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as villain. I think the way he plays, the distinct gravitational pulls of his body — to performance, conviction (“selling it”), weak points in the defensive angles of an opponent, the ball — capitalise on an uncanny ability to be a split-second ahead, to point out what then seems obvious. I think people find it annoying, to be shown what they believe to be flawless or strong and in one sinuous sequence have that belief broken. To have a person do it in a way that looks so easy, unhurried, and to have the reaction of the person who has pulled the wool from their eyes be none at all or maybe, a smirk.

But annoyance doesn’t add up to villainy. What it does show is that we are, mostly, spoiled. We want an athlete like Gilgeous-Alexander, after a while, to take the bait. To accept the pre-constructed role we’ve fixed to so many before him, players who make things look so easy as to make rooting against them difficult. There is no obvious hitch in their game to latch onto, no loose thread to worry, the eye has to work a little harder in sequences without a major snag to tell us where to look.

What it also shows is we tend to believe what we hear. Especially when we begin to hear it all the time.

In the end, it isn’t the Achaean commanders or King Agamemnon that convince Achilles to fight, nor is it the promise of eternal glory or the lure of an immortalised name. What draws Achilles into the fray and ultimately, his death, is the killing of his lifelong companion, Patroclus.

At face value, The Iliad is considered a war epic. People think of the Trojan Horse, the sack and subsequent fall of Troy (none of which take place in the story), or they think of Achilles picking off most of the Trojan army, maybe the gods’ wrath and interventions on either side of the opposing armies. But The Iliad, when it is not about waiting, is about a loss so enormous that its resulting grief threatens the mortal and divine world.

People get hung up on the opening lines,

Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

specifically, all that rage, and believe Achilles came to it on his own. That his bloodlust, or spoiling for war, didn’t exist in relation to anything else. He was a great warrior, and warriors fight.

The Iliad is a love story. Whether romantic or platonic, a heady mix of the two, or a way of relating we have no comparable reference for in our contemporary culture, the rage it opens with is in reaction to loss. Not the loss of honour, stature, a single fight or any particular battle, but personal loss. Achilles feels the loss of Patroclus so deeply that he shakes the floor of the sea with his sobs, lays with Patroclus’ corpse, and asks for their ashes to be mixed together when he dies. His rage is so white hot that eventually it’s Zeus and Zeus only, father of all the gods, that has to step in when the fighting becomes too much, with all the gods getting involved on both sides.

There are plenty of other themes in the story — pride, fate, mortal impermanence, politics — but glory, to me, isn’t one. Before Patroclus puts on Achilles armour, rushes the gates of Troy, and is killed by Hector, there was a solid 10 years of sitting around. Achilles may have refused to fight knowing that killing just one man would seal his fate, but there is some level of petulance, indulgence definitely, in the way Homer tells him. What is memorable in the story and why it’s survived so long, through so many centuries of just oral recounting until it was eventually written down, then centuries on after that, are the interpersonal dynamics. The petty intrigues of the gods, the frustration between the Mycenaeans and Achilles, the oscillating assurance and panic of the Trojans (a real, “We’re good, are we good?”), and the relationship at the core between Patroclus and Achilles. Zeroing in on the machinations and mess. Homer, plainly, knew how to hook an audience.

Kleos, an oft-cited theme in the story and a Greek word typically translated to “renown”, is derived from the word kluein, which simply means “hear”. That makes the most sense to me. Rather than glory, the story is about remembrance. In order to be carried forward, epics had to be memorised, and to be memorised they had to be spoken. The concept of having your memory rewritten, or snuffed out due to lack of glory, didn’t exist the same way it’s framed now. In its original form, Achilles wasn’t written down, nothing of the story was. He and the rest of it had to be spoken. They had to be talking about you for you to exist.

Is NBA discourse the modern form that most closely resembles the oral epic?

When the Spurs beat the Thunder in what were seven gruelling, gutsy, exquisite games between them, the talk so quickly shifted over to the next series. It kind of felt like something created on an Etch A Sketch, drawn up and shaken off, a faint imprint where it had all happened. Talk was what gave the series strength, the retellings of each game down to the quarter. Every game was alive, still, until the next one rolled around (every game the best one until the next one rolled around, too).

And then it was over, there was nothing more to talk about.

What I heard (and read) mostly had to do with what the Thunder would do with their summer. How would they draft and were they going to bring the roster cost down? Was Lu Dort getting sent to the Lakers? Were they prepared to go all-in on Isaiah Hartenstein? What was essentially the postscript of a season the team was still feeling in their bodies, in aching muscles, bruised and broken bones, became the pressing story. Secreted information (sources close to, insiders say) spoken in short bursts as the basketball faded from memory. The basketball that days earlier had everyone too wound up to sleep and chattering all through the off-day between one game and the next, stirring memory to sudden visualisation.

The Thunder were forgotten as the villains, too. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — in name, in memory — ceased to conjure up the kind of vitriol that came with just the mention of his initials. There was a new villain, and a new team of darlings to rapidly turn against. At first I wondered if that was the worst fate an NBA team, an athlete, could face: not losing, but being forgotten. Having your name cease being the one at the tip of every fan’s tongue, whether they loved or loathed you.

Wasn’t that a kind of contemporary erasure, akin to an epic poem jumbled and broken-telephoned to time until nothing coherent was left? To not have your name on the back of a jersey be one furrowed at by someone following behind, trying to place you? To not even be a guy remembered when Remembering Some Guys?

But then, like Homer asks the Muse to sing of Achilles, I watched a clip of Max Kellerman saying if Shai Gilgeous-Alexander had been replaced with Jalen Brunson, the Thunder would’ve beaten the Spurs. The result this time was my rage, but there was his name, not gone anywhere, capable of conjuring and perplexing, capable of dominion in conversation that need not concern him at all.

In Greek mythology, they had muses. They were the embodiments and patrons of speech, each with their own specialty like science, philosophy, history, music, etc. They were the ones getting names into the world.

If they need to be talking about you for you to exist, well the ancient Greeks only had nine muses, our modern NBA discourse has about 1,000 to spare. We’re all talk. So sing, Max Kellerman.

Not “The lights were brighter than expected” Allen, whose honest answer after another abrupt Cavs season turned into a meme (that he’s a fan of, a relief). But the Allen who has built two computers and a soil humidity reader to know when to water his plants (“It was an easy weekend project,” Allen said of the invention), the Allen who was so delighted to be given a shirt with a picture of him on it holding his cats that he wore it to the postgame podium, the Allen who tries to find a bookstore in every city of a road game run.

I also think of the Allen who sat and chatted with me on court after shootaround several seasons ago, impossibly long legs stretched out in front of him or, adjusting to consider a question I asked, and folding one leg over the other, ankle resting on opposite knee. I think of the different recordings I have of Allen from interviews, his chuckle scattered through each of them along with a “nice to meet/see/talk to you.”

I’m aware, sometimes, where my versions overlap. Where the Allen of my fandom intersects with the Allen of my work. Watching from media row during Game 6 of Cavs-Raptors these playoffs I felt my earliest, protective fandom of Allen — Summer League Brooklyn Nets Allen — eclipse the present, supposed-to-be-impartial version of me with a media credential around my neck. Ok easy, easy, that version of me murmured, concerned, eliciting a few chuckles from the colleagues around me. I know this present version of Allen, strong and physically capable enough to contest Scottie Barnes thundering right toward him as the last, lone barrier to the basket is not the Allen whose legs and presence combined to embody the world “wobbly” in Vegas eight years ago, but my worry is the same.

Maybe the best metaphor for fandom when working around the sport you are a fan of is a sidecar. There are friends who’d claim they detached theirs long ago and have no sidekick version of themselves hunkered down and along for the ride. But I’ve watched those same people struggle to pick their jaws off the floor after an incredible shot, or lose their composure when an athlete teases them or asks how they are. It’s fandom, I think, that many of the best use as a lens for their photographic memories. To recall obscure stats for years, to write so vividly about a team or player or sequence as to instantly conjure it up in a reader’s mind; to level criticism that interrogates an issue at a meaningful level — it all come from a place of care. Good analysis doesn’t come from fandom, but it certainly draws from it.

When we talk about fandom we mostly mean and picture it to be a one-way street. Beaming from fan to player and/or team. Players might be aware of it at scale (the deafening swell of cheers in an arena, looking out at a sea of people watching a championship parade) but overlap less with the individual level. What’s more, we don’t expect players to be fans. I think that’s why it always seems surprising when, as the playoffs narrow, athletes whose teams have been eliminated react to the same big games, comebacks and shots. There’s such a regularity in it and, I don’t doubt, a relief. To be a fan for once.

Watching the Knicks progress through the postseason, listening to their pressers and how they talked about each other, I thought Oh, they’re fans. There were the usual prescriptive observations when describing a teammate’s effort and ability, but edging into their voices more often than not was a glimmering hint of awe or note of disbelief. Fandom’s frequencies.

Listening to the Cavs, I heard none of that.

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These Knicks are a working team. They revel in it, from the fine tinkering to the head-down slogs. Jalen Brunson told Ernie Johnson on stage last night that “for some reason I feel like the game, for us, starts 30 minutes later than it’s supposed to,” not because they’ve been slow to compete, but because there is something they clearly savour in the chase and its increments. They won each of their four games the exact same way.

Besides Brunson, there is no one who’s lived with that dutiful, almost doting relationship to the work than Anunoby.

Enjoy — ‘Exits’ resumes Wednesday!

At first, you don’t see him. Like the rest of the 19,812 people in the Garden, or the 23.2 million viewers watching elsewhere, you’re following the ball. Jalen Brunson takes one jabbing step forward before Victor Wembanyama and De’Aaron Fox rush to converge on him, and then he uses the momentum from springing back to jump and lightly launch the ball on a rainbow arc toward the basket. There are a few milliseconds where nobody on the floor appears to move or react and then, as they reflexively all fall in toward the basket, OG Anunoby is there.

It’s hard to track even in replay because Anunoby is moving so fast there isn’t a point you can pause the tape and his body won’t be blurred. All the regular metaphors don’t work. He’s not an arrow, nor a missile (easy, warmonger), maybe the closest is a diving bird of prey, but then we can’t know for sure if a raptor factors in faith with its instincts.

In about five strides, starting from the end of the scorer’s table where he inbounded to Brunson, Anunoby catches up with the ball. By then Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper are also jumping after him, so that three long arms are tangling toward pebbled orange leather. Anunoby is not first because he’s fast, or because he didn’t hesitate to start his thundering run toward the rim, or because he’s stronger or more athletic. They’re all factors, but the main reason is that each component — the long stride, knowing when to lift from the floor, the ability to soften touch just enough to tip a ball rather than swat it with momentum’s full force — is reflexive. Practiced alone or in sequence hundreds of times. In games, in actual practice, in his head, stakes varying but stakes not really a factor. He did it all not knowing whether Castle or Harper would throw him off course with their bodies, or whether the ball might bounce wide. He did it because Anunoby’s career arc that led to, well, that arc, has been one of effort, willingness and the ability to take himself out of any given moment as its main actor, even if he is. Benevolence, you could say (Karl-Anthony Towns did: “The right hand of god, can’t spell god without OG”), but mostly, very mortal work.

OG Anunoby didn’t officially play in the AAU tournament where he was discovered and recruited by Indiana University. He was on the floor grabbing steals, sprinting up and down the court, dunking, hitting threes, and of course, tipping the ball, but his name wasn’t listed in any of the Atlanta tournament’s programs. Tom Crean, Indiana’s then-coach, was posted at the baseline with his assistants to watch a couple other highly touted prospects and found themselves instead captivated by Anunoby. They flipped through the tournament’s compiled player guides and found no record of him.

Anunoby had initially been scratched because of a broken wrist that ended his junior year at Jefferson City early, so his name wasn’t in any of the tournament material. Crean tracked him down through the tournament’s director and invited Anunoby to campus, then recruited him.

There is the sense with much of the NBA draft and scouting pipeline that beyond the more highly touted names, you have to go searching. Not only for talent, but for fit, style, skill, all weighed against a young athlete’s health and longevity, prospects must be “future-proofed.” Even the very best at this kind of scouting get it wrong, and the very best also acknowledge how much luck and timing play a part. When you really start to consider the conditions necessary for a person to get drafted, and then land on a team that will have a complementary development program or a plan for that person at all, it becomes even more of a wonder who makes it and who sticks around in the league.

Anunoby wound up being drafted by the Toronto Raptors because he was coming off a devastating ACL injury that ended his sophomore year at Indiana after 16 games. Masai Ujiri, then the Raptors President, admitted it, saying on draft night that “If he doesn’t have that injury, I don’t think we have a shot.” Anunoby had slipped to 23rd.

Even if the Raptors weren’t expecting Anunoby, they were ready for him. A group that had doggedly lost in only the most wrenching ways for seasons, even before the three sequential postseason defeats that coined the term “LeBronto”, the locker room Anunoby joined had a particularly honed hard-nosed ethos with the bone-deep understanding of what it means to chip away. The Raptors were pests. For an athlete who used to call his high school coaches relentlessly to let him into the gym, and then call the middle school coaches when the high school coaches stopped answering, the fit felt like home.

The Raptors’ style was all ugly intangibles, cumulative play that pushed high-touch, share-the-ball offense that while not blistering, was as relentless as the defense that sparked it. All of it backed by high-IQ decision-making, driven by floor savant Kyle Lowry.

There is perhaps more elegance in the way the 2025-2026 NBA Finals Knicks are playing — have evolved throughout the postseason to play — but there is also a familiar DNA coursing through the team. Jalen Brunson is the engine and the ballast, Karl-Anthony Towns the wily big able to shift opponents around him at whim; Mikal Bridges the ace shooter, and Josh Hart the Swiss Army knife skillset deploying what’s needed beyond the boxscore. If trying to mirror this Knicks team with that Raptors group, then Anunoby is the player he was comp’d to in his own draft’s scouting: Kawhi Leonard. And yet, he’s more.

In his rookie season, Anunoby started his first NBA game on November 14th because Norman Powell suffered a hip injury that had him out for four games. A month later, Anunoby led all starter rookies in offensive and defensive rating, had the best turnover-to-assist ratio for a non-guard position, and held the third highest true shooting percentage.

“Sometimes, as a young player, you think too much and you try to get everything right. But when he comes in, he just plays,” Raptors coach Dwane Casey said at the time. “That young man is doing a good job.”

Anunoby cut his professional teeth on basketball that required repetition, work for the sake of the work. Those Raptors also had the kind of self-awareness that only comes after suffering big losses together, the sort of knocks that force the ego out of you. The team had plenty on the court, then lost DeMar DeRozan, and just before his second season began in Toronto, Anunoby’s father, his namesake, died. Anunoby was away from the team twice that fall, for a memorial for his father in Jefferson City and then for his burial in Nigeria.

As in life, lows — and loss — can bring clarity. There was a deep level of care and regard for each other within that Raptors group. It only crystallized as the season continued. The saying “play for each other” is leaned on a lot in basketball, but with how changeable NBA rosters are teams don’t consistently do it; unlikelier still that when watching, you can actually see it happening. Anunoby also missed Toronto’s championship run with what felt like the flukiest appendicitis timing on earth; there’s a sensation watching him win for, play for his Knicks teammates now that it’s that past version of Anunoby merging with the present one, finally unleashing the moves and motivation he had to put on ice in 2019.

Of course, that’s oversimplifying it. As The Athletic’s senior Raptors writer Eric Koreen laid out, Anunoby has come this far, improved to this point, because he works steadily on what needs improvement until he fixes it. It sounds simple, but it’s a rare and mercurial trait. It’s common for a player to add one skill to their utility belt at a time – a passable three-point shot, or getting better playing through contact – and be finished for a while. Anunoby has worked with the same quiet persistence on his entire toolkit, and has flashed one or more of those sharpened and polished improvements in each game of this series.

Going all the way back to his ghostly appearance in that AAU game, where he was a presence without a name, Anunoby has always been good at unsettling his defensive mark. He’ll hang out in the corner, lulling opponents to think the defense is set, only to pop in and deflect the ball, or suddenly be behind them, a brick wall of a screen they turn right into. He’s been menacing Stephon Castle, De’Aaron Fox, even Victor Wembanyama the same way. But Anunoby’s also guarded every NBA superstar with the cool unflappability on display now.

It’s been beautiful to see so many more people get acquainted with Anunoby’s nonplussed demeanour, a trait that’s either a long-running bit or goes back to Anunoby Sr., who told his children to choose their words precisely and that “if you have to talk, you should say something that doesn’t take away from the conversation, but enriches it.”

There’s so little space given to one of the most common emotional phenomena felt as a fan, which is when a favorite leaves you. Whether the departure is drawn out or abrupt, amicable or acrimonious, the only constant is the recognition that it’s all part of the NBA’s larger machine. A churning system. A system that, in its speed and mechanisation, enforces the idea that you are not supposed to care so much about what happens to a person whose footwork you memorised like steps to a dance.

Perhaps that’s the silver lining in losing a favorite player to a trade, that when they go on to bigger things, on much larger stages, you see flashes that take you back in your own fandom. Still, it’s disingenuous to Anunoby to suggest that what he’s showing in this series is somehow out of nowhere, or wholly unexpected. It’s just as false to point to the draft, or development, as ways to get the same result in a new form.

NBA arcs aren’t replicable, as much as GMs and scouts pine for that to be true. There are beautiful, fleeting moments where an athlete’s past lines up with the present to flash a clear view back to potential as it unfolded, but that clarity is all in retrospect.

The chain of events that led Anunoby to what could be his second title and first played-in Finals run are so individually keyed to his development: the physical setbacks, the group he grew with in Toronto, patience he had playing behind Pascal Siakam, then Kawhi Leonard; arriving in New York and to some degree starting again — then again with Mike Brown. His competitive profile is just as tied to his lived experience, his family and upbringing, the dual confidence and necessity to be of service to others instilled in him by his father and mom, a Nigerian national track athlete, who he lost at just a year old.

It’s the singularity that makes him — any athlete’s arc that traces these unique-as-fingerprint highs — so special, that makes watching it happen all the more astonishing. It’s only going to happen once.

You might not be able to list them all, but there will be times when their names come to you unbidden. More likely you’ll drive by a street or school named after one of them. There’s an A.Y. Jackson secondary school in Toronto, another in Ottawa; a Lawren Harris park in Toronto and a Lismer Hall at a west end Toronto high school, after Arthur Lismer.

The name everyone knows and remembers is Tom Thomson, though he wasn’t ever officially part of the group. He preceded them, was pals with them, influenced them, but died three years before the group formally got underway (his mysterious death, probably, the only thing that piqued interest when also learning about him in high school).

In the way of foisted on culture you likely weren’t interested in them, and wouldn’t find their work all that compelling, until you found it again for yourself later in life. For one, they painted scenery taken largely for granted. It was the tertiary stuff of car trips, the sparse world that whizzed by between cities, or between city to more remote destination. It was bland rocks, unkempt trees, snow covered woods. There were no people, no animals, there was only horizon, maybe a mountain.

I remember having physical reactions to Group of Seven paintings on museum trips as a kid and teenager. My limbs would get heavy, my eyelids would droop, I would start to yawn. It’s funny to think now that the paintings triggered the same drowsy feeling in me as a long car trip, that those guys got it so right my brain and body didn’t know the difference. Seeing the muted greens and browns of fall, the austere white, pale purple and blues of winter scenes, even the living greens of spring and summer, each rendered so perfectly on cavas as to seem instantly familiar, my “relax” response was Pavlovian.

I can’t say what finally flipped the switch for me on the group’s work. What caused it to shift from backdrop, as in glancing scenery, to wrenching focus. Paintings, sometimes on canvases no bigger than a laptop, that require close and peering study for how the clouds seem to lift, or water ripples, or splotches of red, orange and yellow merge to make a tree in fall’s full thrall. They are all deceptive in how seemingly simple, and there is none so deceptive as the paintings of David Milne.

Milne was himself an outlier to the group. Not in the way Thomson was, because Milne came up working alongside the group, passing in the same social circles. Milne, who you’ve probably never heard of, was called one of the three greatest North American painters of his generation by the American titan of art critics, Clement Greenberg (Greenberg was the first to champion a relatively unknown Jackson Pollock).

Milne’s work is sparse, his main influences were impressionist painters, especially Claude Monet, but Milne took the dreamy, colour infused and light-laden sensibility of impressionist painting and tailored it to an austere finish. With him there are no watery pastel dreamscapes, no scenery you can practically breathe in. Colour, when it comes, is either in rationed accent or an entire palette and still, restrained. There is no one else who painted like Milne and, up close with his canvases, that unfamiliarity pulses through.

The brain likes references, comparisons to draw from. Safe tethers we can trace back from what we’re seeing or experiencing as new. When I stood in front of Back of Clarke’s House this past January, on a trip Greg and I took to McMichael Gallery on a -30°C day, I didn’t understand how I was supposed to even look at the painting.

It’s small — 12” x 15” — like much of Milne’s work, but each hair of every brush stroke is discernible. Some hairs of said brush still there under a thin layer of paint. At first, the colours, like the lines, seem rough. Guessed at. It also, how do I put this, felt dry. Like it imposed on me no richness, no lushness, seemed to narrow my cells to parched focus. A bit like a dry sauna, I found myself breathing through the first minute or so, determined to either normalize or settle into whatever new state the work offered.

All of Milne’s work is like this. There is nothing particularly easy about looking at it, which is, you could argue, the point of visual art. He will occasionally offer reprieve, usually in his interior scenes, but close study is always required.

If you consider Detroit too closely, in the tangle and culmination of their season, there is only confusion.

Why did a team that looked so confident, so in control all season, suddenly come apart when pressed? Why did a team that looked as if the will to win was always there, quietly humming below the surface, suddenly seem to lose their engine when it came time to really rev it to full potential?

It wasn’t despondency. We’ve seen that these playoffs but not with the Pistons. There was clear confusion when the Magic stretched them to five games, winning the first, then third and forth. It was like we could glimpse behind the eyes of Cade Cunningham, Jalen Duren, see the brief blink of blankness as they were faced with a possibility they couldn’t adjust for because they hadn’t planned for it. Because it was never supposed to happen.

Detroit went on to win three straight and secure the series but the fact of those wins felt only like relief, not like proof stored and converted into momentum. Perhaps they were tired. Perhaps they were getting their postseason legs under them. After all they’d only made it to the first round a year ago, and it only took the Knicks six games to finish them.

When the semifinals started there was a feeling like a clean slate, but feigned. Like a canvas gessoed over, the darker marks of effort still visible under light. Everyone wanted to believe the real Detroit was here now, ready to push past the Cavs, a team less desperate than the Magic had been.

For two games, yes. The Pistons offence looked like itself — muscly dunks, light floaters, snug threes from the corner pocket. Still, flashes of that old vacancy. Missteps in transition, getting snagged in obvious screens, Cunningham and Duren looking at each other to check who was going to lead. Up by 10 felt flimsy, jumpy.

Game 3, back in Cleveland. Cunningham still the only player to score 20 points or more in each of his postseason games. Throughout most of the first quarter a scrim of leftover smoke from the Cavs introductions hung in the air, crowd rendered to an impressionistic blur. Clarity, cloudy.

It took about 15 minutes of game time for it to get away from the Pistons. The series, but at that point it seemed like only the game. Detroit chased, Ausar Thompson made good on his own fumbling mistakes, turnovers turned into big blocks at the other end. But Cleveland started to strip away the facade, reveal in broad strokes what the Magic had already hinted at: the quiet control Detroit led with all season wasn’t one gear, but the only one.

In basketball, like art, there’a a fear of losing control. Of doing too much. What is the vision? is a phrase used in art crits and in team building. To stick close to the vision is the goal, to pair down to the core meaning or make up. Excess can be gaudy, frivolous, expensive. Excess can ruin the work.

But the cooler side, for both, can’t be the only side. Good art often starts with mess; messy attempts made before what turns out to be the last one or else an environment where materials merge, paint stains, time blurs and the result is better for it. Basketball is the same. Knuckle down too tight and the game, sensitive and slippery, mercurial and reactive, will flee. Reading the energy of a game is the first part, learning to follow it, preempt it, react and respond, the part that takes years. It’s only the guise of control that the very best have. Shedding the fear of losing control is only possible when you admit you have none to begin with.

Pistons coach J.B. Bickerstaff was asked after his team was eliminated whether he was disappointed with them. He was adamant. He said disappointment wasn’t a word he’d ever associate with his group. To hear the word “disappointment” is to immediately think of its forerunner, expectation. Hearing Bickerstaff, I felt caught out. There is nothing wrong with expectation as a handy outline, something to keep a loose hold on, but I’d placed rigid, exceptional expectations on Detroit precisely because they appeared so measured, self-contained and disciplined. That there was no danger of them ever losing control.

Detroit is a team that’s so often (and so antiquatedly) associated with a history of roughness, or flying off the handle, and within that lies the notion that the franchise lacks the gravitas required to get especially far. It’s hard, and unfair because of that history, to then say what a team like Detroit needs is to loosen up. It’s a double standard, even a funhouse mirror of double standards, on display. Bickerstaff saying disappointment has never been a word or feeling he’s fixed to this team means, at least, that internally the Pistons have more freedom than we’ve, as observers and critics, given them credit for. The message to me: relax.

It’s Milne’s water scenes that offer the biggest reward for close and lingering inspection.

His Bishop’s Pond series, or Brown Hillside Reflected. Each toys with the horizon, placing it slightly north or south of centre. In them, there’s a jumble of forest. Trees clumped together so densely the shoreline is mostly dark shadow to suggest the dearth of light through canopy, or else have been blanched of tonality, turned ghostly. The eye struggles on shore for a while, furrowing around what should be the trunks of trees, trying to pierce through for a firm sense of the landscape beyond. It’s only when your vision finally tires, relaxes and slips down to the watery inversion below, that you see the subject clearly rendered for the first time.

There, some relief. In the play of reflection on water, and the impression of water — cool, calm, soft — the shape of the work is revealed. Whether deeper, vibrant hues, or order to the jumble of “real life” in its echo. In Brown Hillside Reflected, especially, I have an easier time with the entire painting when I limit my gaze only to the rendered reflection.

In the spectral version of the hill, the flat, clean impression, it’s possible to take the whole of the horizon on. The vision is simplified. There is the base and the summit, there are the largest of the trees along the way, now comforting markers. In very little, technically, there comes a wash of potential, quiet promise.

The coldest week of the year is consistently in January and it’s usually below 0°F for multiple days at a time. Sometimes schools close, sometimes they don’t, there’s not really a temperature threshold or any rhyme or reason to that. If you’ve never experienced being outside in the cold below 0°F, it permeates your bones. It gets up your nose and between your teeth and makes you wonder if it will ever be warm again. Walking to the bar or the grocery store or the bus is an endeavor that requires many layers and a certain amount of determined grit. This thing is important, I must suffer through. Some people describe Minnesotans as a hearty bunch. Personally, I think the cold makes us brittle. Hardened, but liable to break under heavy tension.

The Timberwolves were inconsistent all season. As an inconsistent team does, they went on win streaks, and they went on losing streaks. Their longest losing streak was a five game stretch in January, from the 16th-25th. I don’t want to draw too much of a conclusion from the timing of this stretch. It would be unfair to players to say that they lost because of any one thing. But this five game stretch fell in between the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal immigration enforcement agents. It was also the coldest week of 2026 so far, and one of the coldest in the past decade.

Many have blamed the Timberwolves inconsistency on not having a traditional point guard. Some have pointed to injuries, including Donte DiVincenzo’s season-ending achilles injury, and others (especially on social media) have opined on a lack of drive and will. I hesitate to blame the players’ perceived laziness for team issues. These are athletes competing at the highest possible level in their field. They have trainers and dieticians and a schedule I would crumble under immediately. A lazy NBA player, to me, is an oxymoron.

That, however, does not excuse or explain the fact the Timberwolves are a self-described emotional team. Chris Finch has been up front about it, Tim Connelly in the front office has been up front about it, and the players have been up front about it. What being “emotional” in this context means remains pretty undefined, but I think they are pointing out that these players have feelings that affect their gameplay without having to own up to the cause of those feelings.

This approach makes sense. It’s not a healthy media environment for players to express emotions off the court in any meaningful way. If you say a tidbit in a presser or on social media that reveals any part of your personality, it’s clipped, cut, captioned and exploited on 100 different sports aggregation accounts.

It cannot feel good to be an NBA player (or really any famous person) as a human being right now. Fame is a gun, says modern philosopher and poet Addison Rae. It’s dangerous and photogenic and powerful and desirable to people who don’t understand how it works. And lots of famous people point their fame blind. I think of the lowercase c conservative mindset of Paul McCartney that partly led to the end of The Beatles. The protest songs John Lennon wanted to make were too political for him.

We’ve come a long way (derogatory) since the social justice jerseys in the 2020 NBA Bubble. The backlash to politics in sports has swung us so far in the opposite direction since the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020, that no player on the Timberwolves gave a direct statement about the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. Other players in the league did, Chris Finch gave a statement, and the team postponed their Sunday game the day after Renee Good was killed. The stadium crew also did a moment of silence before that game vs. the Warriors. But Anthony Edwards went on the record pretending not to know what happened because he’s “not in tune with everything.”

I just don’t think the Wolves stood a chance after staying silent through this moment. After all, how can you claim to represent a city you don’t even bother to pretend to care about?

Minnesota is very much still healing after Operation Metro Surge. Minneapolis and St. Paul are small cities cosplaying as large ones. We all know each other (or at least the degrees of separation are very minimal) and we all recognized the exact sidewalks and neighborhoods where Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed. I will never forget Greg Bovino using the bathroom at the Speedway near my apartment and the pepper spraying of protestors in the eyes steps from a park I like to hoop around at.

But the way we saw neighbors stepping up for one another was built on the framework of injustices past. This was the same city and state that protested in the middle of a pandemic after the murder of George Floyd.

What happened here was awful, but it tapped into the basic instincts of neighborly love and recognizing human beings as worthy of life and dignity. It was one of the most life affirming things I’ve ever witnessed as a lifelong Minnesotan. The joke is, “A Minnesotan will point you in any direction besides their house” as a signifier of our brittle nature. But the minute pressure was put on us, we snapped free of the brittleness into a community that cared for each other. The same thing happened this winter in a way that was so primal and so necessary during a moment where the rich and powerful are decrying empathy at any chance they get.

On one hand, I don’t blame individual Timberwolves players for not speaking out. There’s no current precedent that would suggest it’s a good idea nor in their favor politically or financially. There was just an entire article in The Atlantic about how Adam Silver won’t be interviewed, at all. Not about sensitive issues, just in general. Why should we expect any different from the players in his league? These men are inaccessible by design. Swiftly cut off from the outside world because how can you make massive profits on a product when the product doesn’t appeal to everyone?

The Spurs making the Finals feels particularly triumphant to me partly because Victor Wembanyama was one of the only players to go on the record in January, saying he was “horrified” by the shootings. His outspoken compassion and emotions endear me to him in a way that scares me for his future. I hope he is well prepared and has lots of support in his personal life.

The bitter cold in Minnesota was the least of our worries that week in January. People were out in the streets protesting in weather that freezes the snot inside your nose. Personally, as someone who works in local media, the five losses in a row for the Timberwolves barely registered on my pain scale. I don’t remember really caring about them at that point. It was a season of discontent for me, the inconsistency was apparent from the very first time I watched them this season. But in my eyes, the losing streak was a harbinger of the flippant surrender we saw in their final game against the San Antonio Spurs. My sister made us stay til the end of the game in the arena to “sit in the shame.” The shame was palpable.

Maybe the emotions the Wolves felt in the back half of this season were disappointment and sadness. Maybe the emotion they felt was relief. We’ll never know. Silence is golden. Silence is marketable. Silence is not enough.

Dan Woike: Hmmmm, I think I went into the year thinking there would be some awkwardness as the team tried to marry whatever was left of the LeBron era and whatever was starting with Luka Dončić. Maybe there’d be tension. And because of injuries, it was never about that. It was more about time and patience…and then when it seemed like they finally figured it out, all their pets heads started falling off. Do they have movies in Canada. Is that a reference you get?

KH: Is it Pet Sematary?

DW: Dumb and Dumber

KH: Trying to think who is like the evil baby who comes back from the dead

Jim Carey went to my high school!

So that sort of counts

DW: It’s not like it wasn’t dramatic at times. The Lakers are obviously moving in a clear direction and LeBron James is obviously not the future. But it’s all built out of common sense. Like, he’s gonna be 42! It’s Luka’s team — but LeBron just happens to still be really really good. It’s an incredible conundrum that they haven’t really solved.

KH: What was the most challenging part for you?

DW: Personally?

Or covering them?

KH: I suppose either in covering them, or continual roadblocks you noticed. Frictions?

You can’t say injuries

DW: How many times can you write that LeBron James is awesome without it being repetitive?

KH: True. Or write in new ways about LeBron, period.

DW: He’s old. He’s great... He’s great for how old he is.

There’s not a lot of art in that.

I’m not sure we’ve had a pro athlete written about/discussed on TV more than LeBron James.

You just have kinda accept that you’re not gonna cover a ton of new ground with LeBron. Like, he’s not going to express some secret that he’s been holding onto for 23 years about his pregame routine or anything.

KH: See I would have that hope, being around a team day to day

“I’ll be the one to crack the code” etc

And to be fair you guys have a pretty good rapport, you crack jokes

He shows you his phone

DW: With other guys you get it — with him, at this stage, it’s simpler. We talk about him being a dad. We talk about golf. He’s spent 23 years talking about basketball.

I try to avoid it.

KH: I wonder when the last time was he got a question about basketball that surprised him?

You should ask him that on Media Day

DW: I’m not sure what about basketball still stimulates him that way other than competition. He’s done everything, seen everything, played against everyone.

KH: Honestly that’s the most succinct I’ve heard anybody put it

Also succinct argument to him just saying see ya next season

DW: “Just to see if I can” seems like the motivation more than anything else

KH: I do sometimes fantasize about different personas LeBron would adopt just to switch it up

Like when people came back from summer vacation a goth

Trying to think what that could be in basketball

DW: I was friends with a girl in high school named Jenny. She was a year older than me, we both went to college out of state and she told me her name was “Jen” now.

Or Jenna

Can’t remember

KH: Yeah like that, but whatever the playing equivalent is of going from Jenny to Jen

DW: Like what if LeBron dedicated his entire summer to playing like Sam Merrill?

KH: Or Psycho T

My dream.

DW: He kinda did that this year with the third option stuff.

KH: I did actually appreciate his grumpiness this year.

I was just talking about this with Louisa [Thomas]

It was refreshing.

DW: He can be a wonderful grump.

KH: Because she said Wembanyama doesn’t bullshit, how Kobe and LeBron and Jordan did.

And how that’s probably what’s going to make people dislike him before they dislike him for basketball reasons.

(I think people will stop liking him because he’s smart, but that’s a depressing tangent)

But LeBron isn’t bullshitting anymore. It’s really fun.

DW: I was talking about this before or after Game 7, about how most great NBA players have some level of performance in their personas.

One that came to mind who felt truly authentic — Allen Iverson. Everyone else has a little storytelling in them. Wemby included.

KH: Ok let me begrudgingly steer this gently back to the Lakers — You said the direction is Luka, but I don’t really think it’s so clear?

DW: How so?

KH: In as much as a person can be a direction, and by extension, Luka can be… stop and go.

DW: The only way to get the best out of Luka is to put the players around Luka that hide his weaknesses and maximize his strengths. They are 100 percent going to try and do that.

KH: But with Luka you also need to convince him to stay interested.

I kind of parallel him with Narcissus at this point? Like if you put towels over the mirrors you’re probably good.

This sort of even looks like him:

DW: Basketball all seems too easy to him sometimes — it’s why the coaches invent games and stuff to keep him stimulated.

KH: I saw some of those murals in Pompeii, they are insane.

DW: I like that this is you steering us back to the Lakers.

KH: I was going to say I don’t want to infantilise him but also his brattiness is pretty childish, so.

I can always use mythology to get back to basketball. The Lakers especially.

DW: There’s some of that — but I think some people around him have seen him mature since the trade. He was really disciplined about his diet and workouts last summer. He entered this offseason already adopting the same. We’ll see if he sticks with it, but the care factor about that stuff seems higher.

KH: Yes we all saw the Men’s Health cover.

You can loosen up a bit, you’re on the record but we’re still riffing. That was a real Dan on the radio take.

DW: When he hurt his hamstring, people were worried he’d gain weight. And he was cover Luka when he got back.

I mean, people mature at different stages. It wasn’t like Jokic was a body guy his entire career.

KH: I do find it such a bummer everyone polices his weight.

DW: I exercised like 15 total times in my 20s.

KH: True, same. Staying awake til 4am five nights of the week kept me pretty fit.

What do you feel like JJ Redick learned this season?

DW: He was like 5 percent less psychotically intense, which was progress.

KH: Still don’t love how he handles pressers.

I think there was a bit of humbling. Do you think that’s fair to say?

DW: He’s addicted to it though. Like he went to Duke and everyone hated him whenever he went and he kinda liked it — even if he’s spent a lot of time on working on his psyche since.

KH: I think he really hates losing, and they lost in some pretty boneheaded ways.

DW: I think JJ has a supreme confidence in himself but it still open minded enough to listen to others. But I don’t know if “humbled” is the word. I think he knows he can coach.

KH: He would never admit to being humbled. It’s like when someone drives by you and splashes you with a dirty puddle.

DW: There is a thing about wanting it so bad though that you squeeze the life out of it. It’s a tough balance to strike.

KH: You are objectively humbled, even if you still try and walk it off.

DW: I am not humbled

lol

Oh, the puddle victim.

KH: Were you humbled when Denzel sat beside you?

DW: I talked to him like we were old friends!

KH: I know I was so jealous

All I would’ve done would have been talk to him about Gladiator 2.

DW: I’ve got a great story about that for the next time I see you.

KH: Excellent.

Do you think G-Wiz is going to win his lawsuit against Jaxson Hayes?

DW: At the risk of being deposed, no comment.

KH: Do you think it’s ever possible for the Lakers to exist in the present totally, and to be taken at face value in the present tense?

Because I think no

Because of the gravity, the pomp and production, the Lakers as like, ethos, or legend, or lifestyle, versus the actual team as it stands on any given night

If it was a New Yorker cartoon it would be two cavemen doing allegory of the cave, but they’re both in Lakers gear and the shadow on the wall has a Lakers hat on

And then outside the cave, the Lakers girls are dancing.

DW: Great question — I’ll respond in a sec (Editor’s note: Dan went to vote)

I think the Lakers past and futures are tied for better or worse. They can always get a star because they always got stars. They will always win titles because they always one titles. That’s a strange place to be in and makes little victories harder to enjoy.

This sounds fully insane but: I have never felt as good as I did on May 2, 2026, when the Philadelphia 76ers, led by Joel Embiid, came back from being down 3-1 to eliminate the Boston Celtics in a Game 7 at TD Garden. I bowed down on the living room floor in my Tyrese Maxey jersey, the carpet cradling my face, absorbing my tears as a current of thought emanated from my brain, leapt all synapses, landed in every cell of my body.

They became the team I always knew they could be, but could never allow myself to believe they would.

I was crying for Embiid — previously 0-3 in career game sevens and also 22 days out from emergency surgery — but also exorcising the delusional hope, justifiable hope, anger, anguish, resentment, and self-loathing that comes with being a Sixers fan. I cried for Markelle Fultz, Michael Carter-Williams, Jimmy Butler, that cursed Tobias Harris-over-me extension, James Harden, hell, even Ben Simmons. Deep down, I was crying about Practice. My tears were for Embiid’s right navicular bone, left orbital, left meniscus, left ring finger, right meniscus, right thumb, right orbital, frozen Bell’s palsy face, and ruptured appendix.

I started 2025-26 saying, “There’s no way it could be worse than last year.” When our rookie V.J. Edgecombe scored 34 points in his NBA debut in a road win over Boston, I knew great things were possible. I waited years for Paul George to become Playoff P, and come May, here he was — a perfect, well-rested post-ketamine/shrooms/ayahuasca/whatever suspension 36-year-old with beautiful, limited production that could still make a middle-age woman swoon. It was pure pleasure (pure pleasure-in-pain pleasure, the best kind) to watch these vets hoop with the young guys.

I was not shocked that this Sixers team beat Boston; I always knew they could do it. I was not shocked that they were brutally swept by the Knicks immediately after; I always knew they could do it.

“I know we lost… but for me, this was a success,” Embiid, referring to his left knee, said after the Knicks series. “I really thought I was done.”

Embiid, a native of Cameroon, speaks three languages — Basaa, French, and English, the latter of which he learned only after he moved to the United States to pursue a career in basketball at the age of sixteen. He had only begun playing basketball one year earlier. I think about all the translation — of languages and customs — he must do every day, especially in front of American media who seem to insist on wilfully misunderstanding him.

Embiid’s story is often presented as a fairy-tale: he moves to America, wins a high school state championship, does one year at Kansas, gets drafted at #3 into the NBA. But what about the entire life he lived before leaving home, before leaving behind his brother Arthur, who he never saw again? Who died suddenly while Embiid was sitting out his first two full NBA seasons recovering from two foot surgeries? Embiid’s career is defined as much by a never-ending, beyond-words, deeply personal grief — one that almost caused him to return to Cameroon before ever playing NBA basketball.

“There has always been something lonely in Embiid, something he can’t quite explain,” writes Dotun Akintoye in his definitive profile of Embiid. “One of his most vivid childhood memories is of visiting France on a family vacation around the age of 12. But while everyone left to go sightseeing, Joel stubbornly holed up in his aunt’s apartment, playing video games. His parents left him out of subsequent family trips to France, bringing just his two siblings.”

I love a melancholic NBA head case (complimentary); they are endlessly, deeply human and relatable to me. But while it’s easy to love Embiid and other players, it is truly embarrassing that I continue to support the Sixers franchise.

Every other night I watch Jared McCain, Julian Champagnie, and Isaiah Joe — three talented young players that Philly let go for basically nothing — play not-insignificant roles in a landmark Western Conference Finals. (Don’t get me started on Mikal Bridges and Landry Shamet.) An emblematic fact: before the 2023 All-Star break, the Sixers waived Champagnie to make space in the roster for Mac McClung to compete in the Dunk Contest.

But none of that matters anymore. Those of us who have been Trusting the Process for twelve years understand that era is definitively over. In fact, The Process is a shitty nickname that refers to a shitty tanking strategy that will only be remembered as a decade-long collection of fuck up upon fuck up upon fuck up. We should retire that name; Embiid — and fans — always deserved better.

The future of the Sixers has little to do with either Embiid or Paul George even though, crucially, their bloated salaries will dictate what moves Philly can make in the offseason. Embiid’s three-year, $192.9 million contract begins next season and George is guaranteed $54+ million for the next two seasons. What comes next should only be dictated by Maxey, Edgecombe, and building a deeper bench of role players.

V.J. Edgecombe cried on Draft Night, explaining that in the Bahamas his family lived off a generator for nine years. His break from home manifests as fearlessness and tenacity that feel absolutely electric — fucking scintillating — paired with Maxey’s speed, smiles, and athleticism.

What is Maxey’s ceiling? Can we get him to never again have a game where he only puts up 12 shots? He is The Franchise, a nickname bestowed upon him by Embiid, so can he stop deferring to Embiid on offense? Can we keep Kelly Oubre, so oddly settled and likeable, in Philly? More importantly, can we keep Quentin Grimes?

What if Embiid medically retires and becomes the Sixers Chief Officer of Vibes and DX Chops? What if Embiid becomes the NBA’s first part-time player? What if Nick Nurse distinguishes himself as a coach in any meaningful way, good or bad? What if Paul George takes a pay cut and makes it his job to mentor Edgecombe into the best two-way player in the league? What if the next GM can find the imagination and creativity required to keep the team moving forward, rather than spinning its wheels with a rotating cast of spare parts?

What if the Maxey-era Sixers could proceed lightly, blithely even, into a winning future?

My life, inextricable from my Philadelphia fandom, is in many ways defined by “What if?” questions. It’s just what happens to immigrants and their kids. But the pain, the unknowable, are what make our yearning rich. Our memories of heartbreak, linked with ecstatic possibility, remain forever. The wanting is the point.

And this year’s wanting was — Champagne! — exquisite.

If you never got to experience this bar yourself, I feel for you. Even though there is probably one like it in the place where you live, it was special. On the edge of “Toronto’s Times Square” (a neighbourhood exactly as unpleasant as that name makes it sound), it was a strange, dank portal to another dimension. One thing I liked was that its first and second floors had basically no narrative continuity. Downstairs was dark and humid, with a cramped circular front room and a fishtank hanging over the bar, while upstairs was lit oppressively bright and fluorescent as a church basement, crammed with wood tables and overstuffed leather couches and low, stacked bookshelves on the window side. The only thing that connected one half to the other was the fact that they lived in the same building. Sometimes that’s really all you need.

The Imperial was important to a lot of people for a lot of reasons; for me, it was that I went there nearly every week with my friends after seeing a movie at the Cineplex to talk about what we’d seen, and then our lives. These conversations were so load-bearing in my life that I used them as the scaffolding for a memoir. In there, I wrote: It is a privilege to have your life witnessed like this, with such care and attention. To have the scattered points of you arranged into a line.

Art, of course, does this too, as does the newsletter Basketball Feelings; that’s why we’re here. Someone takes the scattered points and leads you down the path between them. Someone excavates the meaning and holds it up to the light.

Last June, the Raptors announced they were firing Masai Ujiri, and the news made me more upset than I was comfortable articulating. I am on the record as someone who doesn’t always take well to big changes in the franchise; I need, often, to be dragged along. Demar DeRozan had once been my favourite Raptor, the one who recharged my love for the franchise. But even I had eventually been forced to admit the necessity of his trade, even if it hurt my heart.

But the Masai firing felt different to me. Yes, again, money, and yes, again, a reset. But from the second they announced it, I couldn’t help but feel there was something essentially Canadian — in the worst sense — about the way they cut him loose. It was bizarrely close to free agency, with a terse, tight smile of a press release, plus insider gossip that felt nastier, more pointed. They were saying Masai was expensive, but also that he was “larger-than-life,” “like a celebrity.” We were unceremoniously cutting ties with the man who had singlehandedly steered the franchise from Primo Pasta to the chip — a man whose salary was arguably commensurate with the work he’d done — because something about him was rubbing the noxious monopolists who now controlled the franchise the wrong way. I remembered what the Raptors were like before Masai. Didn’t we all? It really, really bothered me. But also, I didn’t really have the time to think about it. I filed it away.

Around when the Raptors fired Masai, I was still married to my partner of ten years, but our marriage was ending. All you need to know for the purposes of this story is that we loved each other but weren’t happy, and though we were working as hard as we could to stay together, it was becoming increasingly clear that what we needed was release. Still, we were leaving it all out on the floor, and had been for months. Every single day, in the kitchen or on the couch or the therapist’s office, we would have one of the hardest and saddest conversations of our whole lives, one where we learned something completely new about ourselves and each other. We were tracing the through line; digging into the thing we’d spent ten years building together and holding its core up to the light. It was revelatory and astonishing, repetitious and grindingly hard, an experience I would neither trade for the world nor wish on my worst enemy.

Those days, most afternoons, I would bike 40 minutes downtown to the palliative care ward where my 98-year-old grandmother was also dying. She had been a preternaturally healthy person for almost all her life, including the portion where she had helped raise me, and her decline, now in its fifth year, had been heavy and hard. At some point that year, her caregiving had become a contact sport — I still dream sometimes about the ten-point turn of getting her into bed. Every day, overwhelmed by sadness and boredom, I watched her breathe and clutch the blankets, coaxed her through meals of thickened juice and painkillers, eavesdropped on the other patients and their families, wrote their stories in my head. Then I’d bike back home.

A whole summer passed in this relentless loop: mortality, privilege, plenitude, loss, ego, anger, grief. Rich, lush field of intimacy; vibrating proximity to the other world; boredom’s near-psychedelic richness; plain fear you can’t extinguish or dismiss. These things were daily, never-ending, and I could not extract any kind of greater meaning from them other than that they happened to everyone, all the time.

That was bothering me too. I was used to making something out of it. In the past, when I taught, I would always tell students that repetition wasn’t just a device you could use to help navigate the reading a poem or a novel. I thought the recognition of it was an essential tool for any artist. If you are noticing the same images or themes or moments over and over again in your own life, I’d say, they may be pointing you towards something worth writing about. Now, I wondered if I had been lacquering the grainy texture of real life with a thick layer of poetic license. Sometimes there is no greater lesson. It all just keeps happening, over and over.

You wait so long to find out what happens, and then you do. At the end of the summer, all at once, my grandmother died, and my marriage was over, and suddenly I was on the other side. An apartment dropped into my lap, and by the time the regular NBA season began, I was watching the Raptors’ opener on my new TV while allen-keying together a dinner table from Facebook Marketplace.

I wanted to feel happy to be watching the Raptors again. In a time when so much in my life felt untethered and weightless, I wanted to feel anchored by the familiarity of the franchise I had followed, in various capacities, since I was a child. I wanted to feel linked to the broader through line they indicated, plugged in and grounded by something greater than just my own life. But it was an away game in Atlanta, and I felt unmoved. They won by 20 points that night, but I didn’t even know until the next day; around halftime, I had switched to something else.

The last time I went to the Imperial Pub was on a Friday in fall, a few weeks after the NBA season’s beginning, on a date with a stranger. When I got there it was full. I found him in the back room, watching a packed audience swaying back and forth to a live jazz band. We milled around for a while, waiting for a seat at the bar. There were old people and young people and unhoused people from around the neighbourhood; there were students and regulars and couples coming in from the movies, from sports games. There was the low-lit fishtank and the sticky bar.

He told me he’d only lived in Toronto for a few years; during the pandemic, amid an emergency, he’d sought asylum here. I asked about the differences between Toronto and his hometown, and he said he was struck and saddened by how little we seemed to value places like the bar we were in right now — neighbourhood institutions with real, meaningful history. In the city where he grew up, they built monuments to stray animals, travelled for hours just to see another neighbourhood’s famous street vendor. People did this naturally, unprompted; it was just what made sense. After all, these were the things that made life worth living, that made a city worth living in. Waving his hand around the bar, he said: A place like this is a tree. It takes decades to grow roots. You can’t just cut this down and expect something else will replace it right away.

When I used to write about the Raptors more, I found myself coming back to the same handful of themes on repeat: haunting, echo, memory. The uncanny way the city’s institutions mirrored its infrastructure; the way the people in charge of Toronto seemed averse to preserving the things that make it special. Again and again, writing about the team and how they made me feel, I found myself arriving at the same conclusion: Change is inevitable, yes, but you need to protect the things that matter and mourn them when they go. If you refuse to tangle with the difficulty of transition, to give yourself over to the confusion and frustration and sadness — and, yes, relief — that attend a major loss, it will leach into your life in other ways. A person, or a place, or a franchise, that refuses to mark its losses with the respect they deserve is haunted, hosed, doomed to do nothing but repeat repeat repeat.

The year kept moving. Life bloomed, receded, bloomed. Things were astonishing, incomprehensible; I walked the dog with my ex, talked to my grandmother every day, fell in love. I was proud of how I faced most of the things I did not want to face.

Except the Raptors. I was still miffed about the Masai thing, and also maybe afraid to learn I’d lost my connection to them entirely. Or maybe I felt too raw to tolerate the disappointment of watching them lose, too vulnerable and thin-skinned not to care about an unpleasant year. Whatever it was, I paid the least direct attention to their regular season that I had in many years. I glanced at box scores and tweets, but almost every time I tuned in to a game I’d bail before the end. Their season felt depressing and grindy. There wasn’t a new, gathering energy to get swept up in; just a totally average year, with little spikes of excitement at sporadic, disconnected intervals. They won against teams they were better than and lost against the ones who were better than them. They had moments of inspiration and long stretches of tedium. I found things to fill the hole that was left in my consciousness. Every morning, instead of their highlights, I made coffee with the NBA Top 10 in the background, letting it soothe me the way a lullaby soothes a child. In idle moments I’d Google “wemby highlights” and let myself be carried. Maybe this was just how I watched basketball now.

For a long time, I did not think the Raptors would make the playoffs. When they did, Katie asked me to write this piece. In one sense, that’s kind of the only thing you need to know about their vibe this year: that it made complete, intuitive sense to plan the season’s obituary while they were still fighting to keep it alive. I said yes, and then I worried. This format begs for structure, some kind of closure. I wondered what I was even going to say. Did I even like my favourite team anymore?

The answer, of course, was waiting for me in the game itself. The first few games of the series I had to force myself to watch with a second screen to distract me, avoiding eye contact, feeling nothing but a dull pang when they lost. But around Game 3, the score was close, and the thing started to lift off the ground, and for the first time in over a year I felt it: the flicker of sentiment I associate particularly with this team, with my lifelong experience of loving them in different ways. A glimmer of true hope, not attached to any broader logical structure but the moment that contains it. Like the first day of warm spring weather in March, when it doesn’t matter that you know there is more cold ahead. In that moment, there’s enough hope that you can actually inhabit the present, anchored to the moment and unattached to the stretch of time that came before or lies ahead.

I kept feeling that way for the next three games — through the ups and downs, the weird offensive hiccups and the gnarly physicality of the defense. In moments of pleasurable or frustrating closeness, I remembered what it felt like to love the Raptors: when they take a turn for the worse it feels inevitable, and when they manage to flip the switch and give you something beautiful, you feel like you are gasping fresh air after years spent underground. Each time, good or bad, you feel certain that this is the way it’s always been, and this is how it’ll be forever. A feeling as ahistorical as it is rich with history.

By the time Game 6 hit OT, I was standing in the doorway that separates my kitchen from my living room, and then I was bent over, white-knuckling the back of my couch. I was yelling so loud I heard someone downstairs laughing at me. I could not help it. My phone buzzed and pinged with texts I was not answering. I couldn’t look, I couldn’t look away. And then the moment. Do I need to even tell you how that felt? The bounce, the sea of fans at Jurassic Park, everyone vibrating. I was plugged in again, tuned to the frequency, completely in.

Who can remember what happened after that? Or more accurately, who cares? For as long as I’ve been alive, the Raptors have not even made the playoffs, forget making it past the first round. To get there at all is still a gift. The Raptors have already won a championship in my lifetime — and they did it not long ago, after an endless loop of loss. Maybe they will do it again someday. I hope they can, though I suspect the franchise — once again, like the city it represents — will need to put real stock in valuing its assets and acknowledging its mistakes.

In the meantime, that bounce keeps pulsing in my mind. It was repetition the way a poem uses it; a sign that there is something worth paying attention to here, even if it’s meaningfully different from the last time you met it. A supernatural, uncanny echo; stopped time. It failed to signify some grand resurgence, failed to orient the team in an uncertain, light-grim future. It still probably meant something, and we don’t know what it is yet. Maybe we won’t get to until next year, or at all. Sometimes there is just the feeling, then the feeling, then the feeling, and what connects them is that you have felt them all. No more, no less than that.

Ducking under dripping trees, slipping awning to awning; leaping over puddles gathering at a curb’s slope down into intersections, toes pointed, suddenly nimble as dancers.

All crowding into the bus, stacking our bags, fastening our umbrellas, extending the orbit of awareness around ourselves to double-wide because we’re dripping wet. There are the winters here, which we get through individually, together. Each of us with our heavy blues, our wavering resolve, our heads bent into the snow and wind; the darkness which at some point begins to seep and seems to go on forever.

In the spring though, in the rain, an opening. No one remembers how to dress so we pick layers to shed, nobody knows how to hold themselves. There’s no bracing, not in the same fierce way as winter. The air is so green, so heady, even in the downpours we want to keep our heads up and eyes open, our lungs hauling deep. Excruciatingly considerate, made aware again, ducking for the lilac bunches heavy with rain and bowing their blooms over the sidewalk, solicitous and soaking. The fogged windows on the bus offer up a blank canvas for fingertips to run, scrawl sloppy hearts and initials. Everyone breathing, everyone steaming, everyone drawing everyone else down into their lungs.

How hopeful, how bourgeoning, how ready to give it all another try as the evenings lengthen in their light and possibility.

There’s always been a disconnect for me to basketball and this time of year. Where it falls in the NBA season. There, it’s supposed to be cumulative, a closing. Where I’m watching from life is taking up its tender loop, once again. Green and absolute. There is nothing of those qualities in playoff basketball.

There is hardness, accumulation, wear — softness perhaps but only in loss, only at the lowest point. Softness in expulsion, softness in a season effectively ended. A closing blow delivered by the more erudite hand.

In NBA basketball, in spring, the bodies are hanging on by a thread. In NBA basketball the resolve is sharpened to a knife’s point. Blunted and honed, worn and whet, over and over in necessary repetition. The goal of playoff basketball is to improve by the round, evolve every game. The best teams do it in ways so obvious even the most discerning eye will widen, watching.

They are more fleet, they shift and shimmy their bodies around the floor as birds do in murmuration. A thrum of recognition going from one player to another, a vibration. Muscles picking up electricity, invisible string pulling from one person to the next. Communication sharpens, new shorthands develop. Teams getting very good don’t need to speak much at all. The intimacy of it — a look, rolled eye, grimace or twinge of lip — like a long marriage, but accomplished in weeks and under the brightest of lights.

At the individual level, if everyone stays healthy, bodies begin to thrum with an ichor of capability. Everything looks easy. Shots made handily but on the way up for the teardrop the person kicks their legs back, mid-air, to also draw the foul. Sluicing through the thick of bodies in the paint, no resistance — but also no softness. The ease comes from intensification. The body has learned what it can withstand.

Last season we saw it with the Thunder. The exuberance and wide eyes went out of them with each trip to the centre line, each time their bodies tensed waiting for the ball to be heaved, the game to begin. This season we’re seeing it with the Spurs. The baby fat of their competitive drive, their exuberance, their wonder at watching themselves beat opponents any which way — whittling down. Growing toned and honed and sharp. Growing up.

Both teams haven’t lost their greener qualities altogether. In some ways (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s cool resolve, Victor Wembanyama’s brash certainty) those traits are the baseline for how each team has formed their respective identities. But this is what playoff basketball demands. At least, what we’re told time and again it does.

Leaving the birthday party I step out into the rain. Monsoon quality. It reminds me of the spring rains in Hong Kong that crash down in waves, sky split open. Water that goes in flapping, visible sheets with the gusts of wind through the streets. Or in Halifax, where we really cut our teeth on rain and weather, experiencing a dozen variants of it on any given day.

I look back. Rachel holds the last third of the sheet cake, its five fat icing balloons cut down to two and a half. Go, go! She shouts. Tell me what you get! She means the bookstore around the corner, where she knows I’m going to make a detour on my way home. How I’ll keep everything dry its own future challenge. Filling my hands with a small stack of books proves to be no problem.

Walking up Strachan toward the park I suddenly remember Meli, whose apartment used to be in the same stretch of brick townhouses. I’ve remembered her here before, maybe exactly the same spot, whether coasting on my bike in summer twilight or cutting up on foot, but always in a soft glitch of memory. Guard down.

The thing about living so long, growing up, in a city that gets as small as Toronto is that memories begin to bump up against each other whether you want them to or not. The thing about growing up anywhere and the privilege of so many memories is you get better at handling them gently, even the errant ones, or the ones you’d rather not revisit, instead of shoving them roughly off. You can look at those past versions of yourself with a degree of empathy you didn’t used to be capable of.

I think of how Meli found me at a house party once we both wound up at, spring bridging into summer over a decade ago. How I’d spilled from the apartment onto the rooftop with a lot of people there, how one rooftop’s worth of people spilled onto the building beside. That section of Queen West is all apartments over storefronts, all the buildings up against one another.

I’d gone looking for people I knew, trailed by a guy I only sort of did. We shared a Venn diagram of social circles, first in Montreal, then in Toronto. He was a west coast transplant who always seemed, if not a bit of a hanger-on, then harmless. A rich kid, he had the sheen of ease, of not having had to bump up against much resistance.

The more I searched, and the longer he followed, the stranger I felt. Heavy, feet dragging, limbs beginning to separate from the circuitry of my body. I remember thinking no, I’ve heard so many accounts of what getting drugged feels like and it wasn’t explicitly this, so it can’t be. But the guy, as if sensing my body beginning to grow clumsy, grew closer. He stopped trailing and began to try and direct, became assertive in a way I hadn’t seen before.

It was then that Meli found me, sitting slumped against a chimney stack. Her eyes darted from me to him. Are you feeling alright? She asked. I feel… tired, I managed. She nodded. Do you want to come to my place and I can call you a cab? She offered, her face telegraphing everything though her words were short, offering no room for debate from him.

Was the air shot with that specific quality of predatory tension, desperate as it slackens? Probably. I only remember the smell of cigarettes, lilacs, beer I had begun to spill. Meli helped me into the apartment from the roof, went slow down the flight of stairs in front of me to the street, unlocked my bike and walked it beside me like a buffer as I weaved over the sidewalk. We laughed a lot, I remember. Relief, recognition, how much a cliche, all of it.

She gave me glasses of water and we sat in her living room, in the half dark and orange splash of streetlights filtering in, talking about it and making fun. The best way then we knew how to armour and forgive ourselves, though there was of course nothing of blame in it. I don’t know how long it was until I felt better but when I did I insisted on biking home. There was a power in it, autonomy, it was how we got around, how we got away; how we met up and bombed along beside each other, howling in the dark.

When I go by that block of townhouses and the memory churns up I don’t feel distress. I don’t think I ever have. I only remember care and tenderness. How in a moment of vulnerability that could have been made to feel considerably worse, or made me feel exposed or stupid or afraid, I was handed my agency like it was something I’d only just dropped. Picked up, dusted off, given back. I remember how assuring that was, and that it made it possible to laugh at what was happening, make it feel like it was already in the past — had happened — and thus easier to push off from.

Biking home I remember smelling the wet grass in Trinity Bellwoods, the deep cool plunge of temperature against my legs coasting by the edge of the dog bowl; climbing up Delaware Ave under the new canopies of green, the good strain of the muscles in my legs working, the flickering strobe of streetlights. I was open to all of it still. Stubbornly soft.

There’s nothing in NBA playoff basketball of shaky expansiveness, like the still translucent blooms of tremulous spring flowers stretching open, expectant and longing for pollination, for completion contingent on another entity. There is nothing left, not in these rounds, of blind hope.

There is hope, of course there’s hope, but it’s hope with a caveat. Hope that hinges on hardness, grit, clenched resolve. Hope that hungers but can’t make clear its appetite. To say too much, to want too much, a jinx. Asking for it.

If there is a difference this season and last, maybe even going all the way back to the Raptors winning in 2019, it’s that expectation has waned enough to allow for impulsiveness. A side effect of competitive parity is that there’s a willingness to name or express bare ambition, spontaneity, capriciousness. I think of Jared McCain’s accessible excitement, Dylan Harper’s ability to amaze himself, how expressive Karl-Anthony Towns is and how that still makes so many people uncomfortable.

“Head down” as a mode is fine, preferred by some, but head up, wild-eyed and huffing the win as it unfurls well before it’s happened, that’s new — and maybe what makes playoff basketball stand out more this time of year is the contrast. The barreling focus, the sharp intention, locked in at the end a season as another unfolds feathery, pliable, gutters flooded with lilac and crabapple blossoms that choke the sewers, wrecking the whole system in their deluge of softness.

The joke being (never good to need to explain a joke, I know) that this was the same team I talked about being a speedy exit in light of their end-of-season listlessness, all the oomph they couldn’t summon to get head and shoulders above the curling rip current of the Eastern Conference’s bottom standings. The Magic just didn’t seem to want to play basketball anymore, let alone win. The prospect of having to win to extend their season — given injuries, given the slippery shape of the East, given the open-ended stretch of time in front of them when everything behind already felt so effortful — loomed like a last hill in the distance, one they did not seem equipped to climb.

But then, Orlando won their first game against Detroit, in Detroit, bringing the sort of stifling silence down on a fanbase’s head that threatens to smother a whole season’s worth of confidence. Less was made about the Magic than the Pistons. These were the number one seeds in the East, and this was how they showed up against an eighth place opponent?

It was the Magic that brought doubt out in Detroit. The Magic that likely woke some of the Pistons roster up in the night, kept them up, their minds reeling in their own beds and then in some hotel room on the road. The Magic that won gutty and gritty, the way the Pistons were supposed to. The Magic that controlled the pace and rattled Cunningham’s rhythm, inverting his hypnotic, herky-jerky handle.

Watching, it was clear the rekindled will that coursed through the roster banished what had become unsteady, unsure, decidedly low about the team. Revived through competition, isn’t this the best-case scenario for any playoff series?

It wasn’t the Magic that were depressed — it was me.

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