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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High on the beginning of spring and the start of a yet another playoff series in Boston, we spent money we didn’t have on tickets to Game 1. The baby wore green, noise-canceling headphones; she looked like a tiny DJ, ready to party all night. I took a photo of her wearing them, safe in her dad’s arms, looking down from the nosebleeds toward the parquet below. The headphones lasted all of two minutes, and the baby herself didn’t last much longer.

I spent most of the game — a 32-point victory for the Cs — walking the baby around the concession area and nursing her in a windowless First Aid station that, at TD Garden, doubles as a lactation room. Occasionally, I glanced at one of the TVs that lined the walls. I was lucky to catch Jayson Tatum’s two-handed dunk, a play that suggested the star we all knew was, finally, back.

In truth, I didn’t mind missing the decisive victory. I figured there’d be another close game on its heels. Also, as the parent of a nine-month-old, I was used to missing out.

I hadn’t seen much basketball during the regular season. Celtics games tend to start at 7:30 p.m, a time when I was nursing the baby, soothing her to sleep, or resettling her during what, in the baby sleep world, is charmingly called a “false start.” By the time I left the pitch-black bedroom, it was almost invariably halftime. By the time play started again, the baby was almost always up. It was like she knew that, after spending an entire day with her practically sutured to my body, I wanted a couple hours alone.

But if there were a season to miss, I reasoned, it was this one. The Celtics weren’t going to be good. Jayson Tatum was out, recovering from a ruptured Achilles tendon. He wasn’t the only star from the 2024 championship team who was gone. In an effort to get under the second apron, Brad Stevens had traded Jrue Holiday — a dependable veteran guard — to the Portland Trail Blazers for Anfernee Simons, a speedy shooting guard who would himself be traded, come February, for Nikola Vučević of the Bulls. Kristaps Porzingis had been traded before the season started as part of the team’s salary dumping strategy. Al Horford had absconded to the Warriors. Even the funny and dependable Luke Kornet, the only NBA center in history to blog about Catholic churches, was gone; he had signed with the San Antonio Spurs and had quickly become what he’d been on the Celtics: a locker room presence par excellence.

Who remained? Finals MVP Jaylen Brown, now definitively a first option; the underrated Derrick White; Sixth Man of the Year Payton Pritchard; and a bunch of young guys whose names few people knew. They were hungry, the young guys, eager to earn playing minutes and what the Celtics broadcast team calls “Tommy Points” — named after the inimitable Tommy Heinsohn, they are given for hustle — but they couldn’t make up for all the talent and experience lost during the offseason. The Celtics weren’t going to tank, since head coach Joe Mazzulla is constitutionally incapable of losing on purpose, but they also weren’t going to compete for a championship. They were going to be a play-in team, maybe a sixth seed. People were calling it “the gap year.”

Preoccupied and sleep deprived, I let myself lean into apathy. I spent little time on the Celtics subreddit. I rarely checked a box score. I made myself watch game highlights on mornings when I felt awake enough to focus, but I almost never feel awake these days, and such mornings were few and far between. When my Celtics group chat debated the relative merits of Hugo Gonzalez, Baylor Scheierman, and Jordan Walsh, I found I had little to contribute. Instead, with the narcissism of the new parent, I sent my friends a steady stream of baby pictures and videos. They humored me, responding with the requisite heart emojis, and continued to talk among themselves.

Then suddenly it was spring, and the baby was crawling, and the Celtics were, supposedly, good. They were the #2 team in the East: a weak conference, for sure, but one that included the best Knicks team in decades. Brown had emerged as a leader, averaging nearly 30 points a game, and putting himself in the running for regular season MVP. Pritchard continued to hit astounding three-pointers. Rumor had it that Tatum was coming back — and by rumor, I mean Amica’s “Back to Zero” ad campaign, which featured video footage of Tatum rehabbing his leg while various clocks ticked down to zero.

The Celtics ended the season with the NBA’s second-best offense, its fourth-best defense, and historically good rim protection, allowing their opponents to take only 20.8% of their shots at the rim. Could Portuguese seven-footer Neemias Queta really be the center on a championship-contending team? Apparently, he could be.

When it comes to professional sports, Bostonians are spoiled, greedy. We expect championships every season, and we laugh at teams that celebrate when they win a division or conference. (I’m looking at you, 2025 Knicks.) By the time Tatum was listed as “questionable” on the injury report, we figured we were, once again, championship bound.

Never mind that Tatum looked absolutely gassed during his first games back; or that the starting lineup included three-point specialist Sam Hauser, a player best used sparingly; or that some of the difference-making young guys lost their playing time once Tatum was back in the lineup. Fans figured there was enough time for the team to gel before the playoffs began. And besides, the Celtics were starting off against the 76ers, a team they had, historically, owned.

Not this time.

The Cs lost Game 2 at home to a faster, hungrier Sixers group that included the impressive rookie V.J. Edgecombe and the lightning-fast Tyrese Maxey. Then Joel Embiid returned from his appendectomy, a change that I, foolishly, thought would benefit the Celtics, since Embiid tends to slow the game down. But he played remarkably well against the Celtics bigs, and before I knew it, a 3-1 series lead had disappeared.

Tatum, overcompensating and overly cautious, felt some pain in his non-injured leg and decided to sit for Game 7. The Celtics fell behind early, managed a comeback, then lost by nine. It was a dismal end to a season that, at least for a time, had seemed like it would be more memorable than it was.

Try as I might, I still can’t explain the collapse fully. Did Tatum’s return mess with the Celtics’ chemistry? Or was the team’s fate sealed when he failed to suit up for Game 7? Did Mazzulla, an ardent Catholic and self-confessed masochist, fail to make necessary adjustments, preferring instead to leave things in God’s hands? Or does the fault lie with Brown, who fought gutsily throughout Game 7, but whose play always seems a little out of sync with the rest of the offense?

Or, as Stevens suggested at the post-season press conference, was the roster simply not that good?

Listening to Stevens, I thought of how hard it is to see those we love clearly. When I look at the baby in my lap, she looks to me like the most perfect child ever created. I don’t think I’m capable of seeing her otherwise.

At the same presser, Stevens implied that big changes are coming. Brown, bafflingly, called this season the most fun he’d had as a player, leading some to predict that his days as a Celtic are numbered. Giannis Antetokounmpo has been publicly campaigning to come to Boston, and although it’s hard to see exactly how his game would mesh with Tatum’s, it’s also hard to see how the Celtics get better while staying committed to the Jays. It could well be the end of an era, the severing of a star duo that has alternately quieted doubters and incited debate.

The prospect makes me a bit sad: I’m a Taurus, after all, and resistant to change. But this past year — my own gap year — has been one change after another, and I’ve become a bit more accepting of turbulence, slightly more willing to be transformed.

Some days I slip on my old clothes and sit down to work, and I feel just like I did a few years ago, as if nothing about myself or my life has changed. But then I hear the baby keening, or I catch her smiling her gummy smile, and I realize that nothing will ever be the same.

I couldn’t have attended. He also knew my credential didn’t allow me into that room. Yet the sincerity with which he asked it has lingered with me. It wasn’t the conclusion of an interview; we had, in fact, no prior rapport. Perhaps I had an irreverent look to me. I replied with a joke. I don’t remember how, or if, he responded. He exited stage right, down one hallway that must have taken him there.

A couple minutes later, Ryan Anderson entered stage left. He was in more of a hurry; he was headed somewhere fast. He couldn’t have overheard that conversation that happened moments ago. Still, as he strode past, he glanced my way, asked one question.

You wanna go to chapel?

This anecdote became my story’s lede, one built around the paradoxical relationship between a team’s cold Moreyball mathematics and its internal belief it would work. You can still read it. Since publication, though, the carefully crafted formatting, which once looked like this, has crumbled from site redesigns that broke whatever HTML was behind it. The images bleed between paragraphs without any breaks, relegated in the same manner that squad was. In the end, after 27 straight 3s skittered off the rim on that team’s judgment day, it turned out neither faith nor science was enough to defeat golden (state) gods.

I still wonder about that moment. Was this something Beverley and Anderson had concocted to prank stray reporters? Had spiritual revival actually come to Houston that day? Beverley, we now know, could’ve listened more intently to the morality within those sermons. But how those two synchronized just then will always baffle me. It’s unlike anything I’ve experienced since.

Anyway, the extent the 2026 Houston Rockets resemble that team is more akin to the mangled web code that remains of my story.

Those were formative years, ones which shaped my own hoops worldview that has always oscillated between science and faith. The stories that have filled my author pages have flipflopped between analytical breakdowns and overwritten religious motifs. Stories that stress that to think like front offices do are the best way to explain what happens in the billion-dollar corporate sector of bouncing leather. Other pieces that lament thinking that way loses what charm and artistic expression draws us to these Pacific Rim-esque clashes in the first place.

I didn’t understand this year’s Rockets. I loved them deeply, but they made no sense to me.

The math says this team had the seventh-best offense and fourth-best defense this regular season. Did it ever feel that way? The D’Antonism once practiced upon my first visit has long been expelled in an inquisition; this current team, instead, was a clusterfuck of contradictions. Take the offense, co-led by the sleekest athlete you’ve ever seen, fittingly named Amen, and also a biomechanics enthusiast’s nightmare. (‘Şengün’ translates to ‘joyful days’; that’s another strike against normative determinism.) What you love about your 1999 Honda Accord isn’t its sunroof, but its reliability no matter how it looks.

Add to that a shep(p)ard, a son of a father, and a nomadic crusader-for-hire, one who rejected his Slim Reaper moniker, saying, “I’m here to shine a bright light.” If that 2018 team had faith, this one did, too, but with each player boasting their own theology. That heterorthodoxy plagued their season. The same front office that saw some Steve Nash in Reed Sheppard was pitted against an Ime Udoka, eyes wide open like A Clockwork Orange, who saw another missed rotation. How unassumingly Jabari Smith Jr. embraced his role player path, to Kevin Durant, was proof he was too weak. Even Fred VanVleet, who the front office described as a savior, came to be seen within the fandom as the golden calf enabling those in charge to ignore their earthly suffering.

I mean, come on. Houston’s season even met its death at the hands of a king named James.

What I saw from Rockets fans this season, more often than not, was bewilderment. At Sheppard’s usage, at the front office’s acquire-any-point-guard abstinence, for Durant’s leaked DMs (which, trust us, no one was even bothered by, the #sources said), for how headless the late game offense always looked. That Steven Adams, even beloved by all mankind as he is, couldn’t have his offensive rebounding be the face of this team.

Durantless and doomed, facing its 0-3 humiliation with no more appeals left to proffer, the fandom’s joy finally seemed to come in this season’s final games. We all most love the scrappy upstarts, something Durant, despite how he became this squad’s best player from the first game, had taken from this team’s base. Starting five players, all 25 years old and under, was when that us-against- mentality returned to a fanbase. It came from the Sheppard bounce-back game, when Şengün took the coach’s chair. It was a callback from what Durant had taken: Really, the fandom’s innocence. Against the dying light, even if it was doomed this time, what I saw were fans that believed again.

Houston’s front office, like any other’s, has no room for these aesthetical musings. It’s tasked with the numbers, with making them go up. But those rising numbers didn’t tell Houston’s story. They always felt fraudulent, and the ending made that indisputably true. So we’re left in a lurch between what the data says, even despite itself, and what the fans yearn for. Because if the data doesn’t back its art, we’re forever stuck wanting to return to that innocent gap between science and conviction.

I would prefer almost anything to what the front office seems likeliest to do: run this same team back next season, almost through indecision rather than choice, in hopes its now risen messianic figure of a point guard can perform this team’s necessary miracles.

Perhaps it’s not chapel invitations this team needs, but an invite to Durant’s burner group chats where, hopefully, this team’s moral clarity can be found.

The Denver Nuggets lost in a 6-game series to the Minnesota Timberwolves on April 30, 2026.

Nikola Jokić averaged a triple double across the series, but inefficiently. Rudy Gobert played really well. Murray could never shake Jaden McDaniels. Cam Johnson had a good series. Spencer Jones worked productively on both ends in game 5. The rest of the Nuggets struggled.

Whether the issue came from a scheme, injuries, or roster construction, the result was the same. Denver worked harder to score than usual and did not sufficiently defend their own basket. The Denver Nuggets 2025-26 season ended in the first round.

Let’s listen to N.K. Jemisin and try the ending again, writ continentally.

As the crow flies, around 1,100 miles (1,500 km) separate the cities of Denver, Colorado and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. Both are mid-sized cities located in the United States, a country in the Northern Hemisphere of the Americas.

Both cities have franchises playing in the National Basketball Association, the premier professional basketball league in the world. With this proximity, the two teams have played each other many times in the last few years. To many, Minnesota’s roster seems to have been engineered by Tim Connelly, an old friend of Denver, to specifically have the upper hand in the matchup. This became evident once again in the 2025-26 postseason.

All of these competitive games can lead to animosity. The fans don’t like each other much, and this is a bit unfortunate. Both cities have histories of recent civic virtue. We should ground ourselves here.

Over this past winter, the domestic security agency of the United States mobilized thousands of officers to patrol the city, ostensibly to identify people who had broken U.S. immigration law. Tens of thousands of residents of Minneapolis-St. Paul countered by strategically protecting their neighbors. By the time the administration declared the end of “Operation Metro Surge,” the administration had lost esteem in the eyes of the U.S. public, but at great cost.

Denver residents extended a spirit of welcome to asylum seekers from across the Western Hemisphere throughout a fraught period of years from 2022 to 2024. Republican governors in Texas and Florida placed thousands of asylum seekers on chartered buses and airplanes destined for cities governed by Democratic mayors. Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia welcomed many people. Residents in all of these cities worked together to get families shelter, food, and a place to work. But relative to population, Denver resettled and integrated as many or more asylum seekers from the buses and planes as any city in the U.S.

A remarkable era of municipal hospitality when many in the country were growing increasingly unfriendly to newcomers and a forgotten moment in recent Denver history, swallowed up by our memory of other events that have transpired since.

Newcomers originating from places near sea level no doubt had to adjust to altitude in Denver. You have heard about this. We love reminding you about this one. Especially in sports.

This blessing of altitude provides the professional franchises of Colorado with a tremendous advantage, particularly at the end of games when playing at home. In the case of basketball, one of the first signs that I know the Nuggets have a chance at coming back from behind is when the opposing team starts missing their threes. The shots start hitting the front of the rim. Short. The legs are gone. It’s the altitude. We saw a version of this in Games 1 and 5, when the Nuggets pulled away in the second half of each as the Wolves’ shooting started going dry. Opposing players get tired at altitude, it’s undeniably an advantage.

This blessing comes with, if not a curse, a warning. I’m not a doctor, but the relative lack of oxygen at a mile high seems to makes injuries more troublesome. Injuries definitely seemed to affect the Denver Nuggets this postseason. Aaron Gordon didn’t play after Game 2. Peyton Watson didn’t see the postseason at all after reaggravating a hamstring in early April. These things happen to all teams, but it’s the recovery period that seems particularly fraught for elite athletes playing in Denver.

Nuggets partisans can’t blame it all on injuries, though. The Timberwolves missed key guys, too. But Minnesota kept defending and the Nuggets couldn’t. And that was that. After the loss, pundits started calling it the end of an era for the Denver Nuggets.

Interesting. How certain can we ever be that an era ever truly ends? That another era has begun? What constitutes an era?

I think the first time I learned the word was during that dinosaur phase that so many children go through. Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous. Around 165 million years that make up the Mesozoic Era. Did the dinosaurs know it was their era?

It’s not just for the kids, either. I might estimate that era as a word is not quite as in fashion as vibe or slop, but it’s close. It was the title of very famous concert tour by a certain very famous musician. People assign themselves certain moments in time when they form certain temporary habits in dress and behavior that are later cast aside. We all do crave some kind of structured periodicity in our lives. There is a yearning to know when one season ends and another begins. A sense that one is trying to situate oneself in a particular season of one’s own life.

People do this with the important stuff, too. It’s a terrible time for democracy at the moment. Earlier this month, the high court of the United States gave a green light to states to rig congressional districts so as to favor the political faction currently in power. This feels like the dawn of a new era (derogatory).

And yet I think back to a previous 2010 court case that my lawyerly friends call Citizens United. Something about a new era in campaign finance, dollars as speech and all that.

But then I think back to 2000, and some kind of court decision involving a presidential election and what were they called, “hanging chads”? Seemed like it effectively decided a presidency, so kind of era-defining, that. When was the start of the democratic backsliding? It’s hard to say.

Pro-democracy folks like myself look desperately at previous eras for guidance. Reconstruction, that was an era. The attempt at rebuilding a multiracial democracy out of the atrocity of slavery and the carnage of the U.S. Civil War. We’re still about this task, if we are honest with ourselves. The historians tell us that there have been multiple Reconstructions in the United States. Multiple attempts to get it right. Definitely two, maybe three, depending on your interpretive delineation.

While interesting, I think it best for pro-democracy folks to cast aside the sequels and just call it Next Reconstruction. Next provides both anticipation and the unfinished nature of the work. The struggle to prevent the concentration of power will never be over, and that is both a challenge and a gift.

We look back to look forward.

Trivial by comparison, but I do this in sports too. I suspect many Denver fans are doing the same right now.

The Denver Nuggets just concluded their 8^th straight appearance in the NBA postseason, first arriving in the Jokić era in 2018-2019. They have won many playoff games; they have lost many playoff games. They won a title. But unlike past years, when one could always count on another level-up from Jokić, this coming season seems like it would be unwise to count that as a certainty.

Jokić has a contract through the 2027-28 season but has been eligible for an extension since last summer. When asked about the extension after the Game 6 loss to Minnesota, Jokić repeated twice, “I still want to be a Nugget forever.”

In the end-of-season press conference, Denver Nuggets President and Owner Josh Kroenke backed coach David Adelman and made clear that Jokić was safe. No changes there. Then he noted that such certainty could not be extended to any other player on the Denver Nuggets, saying “Continuity is a powerful thing. But change is also a powerful thing.”

End of an era? Hard to say.

One meets the most interesting people on trains. I was on the California Zephyr when I got to chatting with a gentleman visiting from an East Asian country who was touring the United States. He was making a special trip to Denver and planned to spend a single night. Naturally, I asked him if he was going to see the mountains. That’s usually what visitors do.

“No. I’m going to watch the Nuggets. I want to see Nikola Jokić pass the ball. I want to see him play.”

How things change. People now cross continents to spend only a few hours watching the Denver Nuggets. I still remember seven-year-old me, suffering through that 11-71 season. He would never believe what I could tell him today.

What a different era we live in. I look forward to Next Season.

Side out of bounds, Hawks ball, inbounder: Trae Young. Madison Square Garden frothing with energy, anxiety; an immaculate backdrop for Young as he collected the ball to restart proceedings. It was in the moment, as the Garden shifted and shook, vitriol boiling and spilling over onto the court, that Young looked over his shoulder and smiled smugly.

Singular antagonist against a wave of the righteously angered. That moment, forever etched into my brain, exemplified what was special about that Hawks playoff run. Boundless confidence worn unapologetically on the sleeve, none more so than by Young, the leader of that charge.

It was the same confidence that had oozed from Young as he waved off assistance in Game 1, twisted left, right — six seconds — left again, right again — four seconds — blow by, fake to the corner, floater. Ball game. Young fell, bounced instantly back to his feet, swaggering back to half court, swarmed by teammates, basking in the deathly silence he had plunged MSG into.

Across the Atlantic and far away I was hovering over my laptop screen, revelling in this wild set of events; the ungodly hour and latent stress of university unable to quell my intense fascination. A quiet commitment was spoken in that moment — there was something special happening here and I wanted to be a part of it. And so it began, a fairytale playoff run for the Atlanta Hawks. It was a fantastic ride, all the way to the Conference Finals. Unlikely heroes, shots of adrenaline, the rollercoaster felt like it would never end and even when it did, excitement could not have been higher for the future. The Hawks had arrived.

Every franchise aims for a championship-level roster and at times being bad is a necessary step on the road to that end. Unfortunately for the Hawks, they were not nearly good enough to make any noise in the post season and not bad enough to draft the franchise changer needed to swing their fortunes. There they sat, in the dreaded middle.

In the four seasons post Conference Finals run, the team finished in the Play-In four straight times. The disease floats around like a spectre through State Farm Arena: mediocrity. For its many downsides, persistent mediocrity robs a franchise of exactly what made that ’21 team special — excitement, drama, gusto. Fans are lulled to apathy by the slow, gradual road to the middle. Despair feels out of place as true catastrophe has not struck, meanwhile hope becomes a finite resource as talent seeps away from the squad with every offseason.

This damning stat was being bandied about in early March: the team had gone 31-31 in their last 62 contests, but also 45-45 in their last 90, 67-67 in their last 134, 174-174 in their last 348, and so on. An incredible feat, but one that showed the crater of average Atlanta seemed to be sunk in. Even the lottery balls falling in the Hawks favour in 2024 were a mirage as the chosen one at the top of that draft, Zaccharie Risacher, has to date been serviceable at best and poor at his worst. While caveats abound for this specific outcome, it slots perfectly into the morass of mediocre that has gripped the Hawks for over a half decade. And as the heroics of cult heroes like Danilo Gallinari, Lou Williams, Bogdan Bogdanovic faded even further out of view, the Play-In looming large for a fifth season in a row, Atlanta faithful didn’t have much to get excited for.

And then something happened. A win against the Trail Blazers at the start of March created a noticeable four game win streak, which stretched to five, and then 11. This was the fourth longest win streak in franchise history, the longest since Atlanta’s 2015 60-win team churned out 19 W’s on the bounce. There was something in the air again, we had almost lost the taste for it. Eyebrows were lifting in earnest wonder, Is something special happening here?

The answer, a resounding yes. The Hawks closed the season on a scorching 19-5 run, vaulting them out of the Play-In and into a comfortable playoff position, so comfortable that Quinn Snyder rested starters in the season finale at Miami. Jalen Johnson blasted past his impressive breakout numbers from a year prior, Onyeka Okongwu developed into a genuine stretch 5, Dyson Daniels continued to be elite on the defensive end and Nickeil Alexander-Walker was truly blossoming in an expanded role. Eventually, the brackets coalesced into form, a familiar foe stood between the Hawks and the second round — the New York Knicks.

I grew up a football fan (soccer for the uninitiated). Slight of frame, twinkle-toed, on-ball magicians are common fixtures in the lore of the sport and an essential ingredient in my dear Arsenal FC’s great many successes. Incredible mastery of the ball made them seemingly impossible to dispossess, 360-degree vision and technique to match allowed them to find passes through the tightest windows. Near-telepathic levels of synergy with fellow players made for some of the most incredible team goals you will ever see. I was nurtured on the legends of Ian Wright and Marc Overmars; grew up marveling at the exploits of Cesc Fabregas, Jack Wilshere, Santi Cazorla. I look forward to the next generation of diminutive savants to grace the carpet at the Emirates stadium. With that history, it was quite easy to fall in love with Trae Young. A supple pine among oaks, his preternatural talents thrust him to the focal point of every offense he’s played in.

He put up monster numbers in high school and college before being picked by the Hawks on draft night in 2018. In the seven years, Young blew hot and cold efficiency-wise but was a lock to provide spectacle. Logo three, crossover into a logo three, drive fake behind the back lob dunk — the highlight package is extensive. And even more impressive, he was never scared of The Moment. Young built a persona that thrived in high-stakes, late game scenarios. Pulling victory from the jaws of defeat, staving off certain disappointment, creating irreplaceable memories.

This was the Trae Young experience. In January this year, that era came to an end in Atlanta. As the small guard position continues its path to seeming-extinction in the NBA, teams find it harder to justify massive contracts for undersized players like Young who get picked apart on the defensive end, especially during the playoffs. The giants run the league now and the sprites need to call on near-mystical levels of craft to stay on the floor. Regardless, personalities the size of Young don’t come along too often, not with the ability to back up that confidence in the biggest moments. He was a critical part of my Hawks journey, and the shape of my fandom will never be the same.

The pang of this specific loss rang through me as Game 2 of Hawks vs. Knicks hurtled towards its finale. The Hawks down one at Madison Square Garden with 2 minutes to go and in desperate need of clutch scoring. Up popped CJ McCollum — layup high off the glass, floater in the paint, and the ridiculously difficult baseline fadeaway jumper against a strong contest — a 6-3 Hawks run, and the eventual victory. There’s just something about an Atlanta guard at the Garden that brings out the fireworks every time. There were more McCollum heroics in Game 3 as the Hawks jumped out to a 2-1 lead, but Knicks’ talent proved overwhelming and the series was over in six. That brought the curtain down on a complex season.

This was a loss in the first round, but it felt different. The Hawks now enter the offseason buzzing for the first time in five long, drab seasons. The road ahead is laden with potential for growth, with new playoff moments to replay endlessly. The sackcloth of mediocrity has been cast off, the grey of these last four years is lifting. It might’ve been shock therapy, but we have our swagger back in the A.

Coveted, that’s how Mat Ishbia framed the Suns desire for Dillon Brooks.

“Him and Jalen Green were two people that we coveted,” Ishbia said on Phoenix sports radio this week, “Jalen for his immense youth, athleticism and upside. Dillon for his grit, his toughness, his leadership and his all-around winner mentality.”

“Immense youth” is bizarre poetry in itself, Blakean even, but let’s stay with Brooks.

What does it mean, to be coveted? There’s a surface-level connotation to it, an at-a-glance apetite. To be so deeply desired that people are ready, even eager, to forgive your shortcomings and trespasses. And it tracks, in his exit interview Brooks said he didn’t feel the full support of the Suns fanbase until after his late-March DUI. He said it with a bit of a self-referential smirk, a nod to the fact of his fallibility, perhaps. Possible to make light of it now, at the end of the season and because the consequences of that DUI were isolated only to him.

But that is the pattern with Brooks, a pattern he’s self-aware enough to recognise. That he has certain hard-coded habits he needs to bend, to wield more responsibly, and that those habits exist in a warring spectrum of push-pull. That he can be a villain, be the bad guy, but that he doesn’t want to be seen as one-dimensional. That to be labeled a villain — only — is a shortfall of character, that he has been hurt by the characterisation in the past.

“I wanna keep going. I probably only got— I want 10 more years in this, but the life expectancy of a basketball player’s very small,” Brooks said in the same interview. “I don’t want to take it for granted, or ease up. ‘Cause that’s the most human nature thing, to have a great year like this and ease up.”

Brooks’ nature has been pegged as volatile, erratic, difficult to control, but watching him for years now in the NBA and in his summertime runs with Team Canada, his nature is actually quite seasonal. That is, disciplined. Rhythmic. The times his jabs, psychological or physical, have felt particularly pointed they’ve been rooted in a rueful pride. I think of his baiting of LeBron James, a role model who refused to see Brooks, so Brooks turned himself into the kind of person James truly hates to see coming — a person who has no regard for the calibre, or considerable breadth, of James’ work. A person who treated him as regular.

In this, and Brooks’ other seasonal targets, we see the explicitly tender, most exposed part of his nature responding. In other contexts we might call that honest.

In the same exit availability Brooks was asked where his career-best shooting season came from. A quiet career-best, muted for the Suns getting swept, but one his friend, reigning MVP, and Team Canada teammate Shai Gilgeous-Alexander touched on in his Game 4 postgame presser, after his team did the sweeping.

“It’s impressive to redefine yourself this late into a career. Very impressive. For myself, it was my second year I got to redefine who I was as a basketball player,” Gilgeous-Alexander said, and a lot there to unpack on its face. “It just goes to show the work he puts in, he’s a worker. He’s always in the gym. Being around him, you know that.”

A follow-up came later, about Brooks’ character. That Brooks took the time after the Suns loss to congratulate everyone on the Thunder.

“He’s great competitor — a great guy,” Gilgeous-Alexander said, the “great guy” emphatic, each word staccato. “No matter what people say about him. All that villain stuff doesn’t phase me, I know exactly who Dillon is.”

There’s a hint of Gilgeous-Alexander’s sly smile then, the sort of glimpse that goes past the podium, before the looks, like his luminous plum coat and specific material tastes, that brings to mind scrimmages together but more than that, all the downtime. The training, the commutes, the bumping into each other as teenagers and kids, the character that can only be gauged over many monotonous years.

That sort of respect and understanding of a person’s character, the patterns and parameters of their nature, only comes from repetition. From time. It can mean a dulling — and maybe that’s part of it for Gilgeous-Alexander too, why Brooks can’t phase him on court — a familiarity that borders on boredom, but it’s also being able to trace someone’s bones. Their roots.

It’s the opposite of what it is to covet. To want the flash of a person as they are just then, right then, the culmination of so much time. Coveting comes from one sense — the eyes, and their limited scope. Neither is wrong, really, in a basketball sense. You could say it’s a team owner’s job to covet, and to spend money in generous response to that impulse. But I feel myself leaning into the rote days behind what Gilgeous-Alexander hints at, their pattern and rhythm. The dull gift of being stuck in the slipstream of time alongside somebody.

In East Preston, Nova Scotia, where Brooks’ paternal family comes from, there’s a two lane garter snake of a road called Brooks Drive. It winds through the scrub, the bayberry bushes with their stubby, waxy leaves, the stalks of feathery white meadowsweet flowers, pink St.John’s-wort poking up from the blacktop’s cracked shoulder, clumps of marsh marigold and wild purple iris. Occasionally, taller stands of trees will rise: trembling aspen, scraggly white pine, black cherry. But this is low, salt marsh land, ground like a sieve for the Atlantic, just a 10 minute drive away.

Brooks Drive will get you to the East Preston recreation centre (a long and low brick building, strip fluorescent lighting over the scuffed indoor basketball court) and the Baptist church (single-storey white clapboard, gravel lot) but mostly it will run you along lazy curling rivers and past shallow, grassy lakes. In the winters the land loses all definition, flat and low and brown, but in the summer it turns every gradient of green you can picture with low mists and morning fog that makes it nearly impossible to pick one place to let your eyes settle.

East Preston was founded by Black Loyalists, former slaves and refugees from the American Revolutionary War who were relocated by the Crown. East Preston was just Preston then, the North and East monikers combined into a community that stretched from Porter’s Lake, just north of Lawrencetown, over to Dartmouth. The boundaries have shrunk since, with Halifax now absorbing the community’s western edge. I’m not 100% sure Brooks Drive was named after Dillon Brooks’ family but with the history sunk there like sediment, deep and rich in slow, shifting layers, I’ll make an informed guess.

Brooks wrote recently about his summers spent in Nova Scotia, out in the countryside, out in East Preston. How he and his cousins would come inside green from days spent wrestling in the grass and scrub. What you wouldn’t know if you’ve not been to the Canadian Maritimes is that it takes no time at all to get out of the cities. To be in the thick of a sweet, placid nowhere.

When I first left Ontario I moved to Halifax, and the first time I left Halifax, on a road trip down the South Shore, I was startled by how quickly the coast came rearing up. Piled into a friend’s car we were doing donuts on a wide strip of empty beach less than 10 minutes into the drive, flashing clouds of mottled, tiny and trilling piping plovers trailing us to peck up anything the tires kicked up. The Maritimes are deceptive in that you think you’re well-tucked into their forested, green cores, only to make a turn and find the view in front of you suddenly sheared away, replaced with nothing but a wide, flashing plane of blue. Living blue. The Atlantic never stops churning.

One of my favourite stories about the shiftiness of land out there is that when Halifax built its airport the proposed location was surveyed way out, 35 kilometres inland from the city and the ocean. That far in and the developers found themselves finally free of the coastal fog, fog that settles into a milky wall and can stick around for days. The thick pines were cleared for the runways, the modest terminal building, the control tower and like clockwork, the fog rolled in. It was the trees keeping the fog at bay. Gone and the fog flocked like so many gulls in ferry wake.

In the same piece Brooks writes about what he refers to as “the dark arts” of shit talking. The psychology beyond shit talk, when he gets into opponents heads by whispering single words to them during the brief, shuffling silence of a free throw. The name of their mum, a school they never got recruited for, tiny pin-prick points of vulnerability to pierce them with. Brooks isn’t some malevolent seer, able to see deep into a person’s secret and individual nature. He is, however, adept at understanding the through-line of soft spots we all share, probing them — family, ego, belonging — until one stings. Once he does that the doubt settles, thick as fog.

It takes a great deal of intuition, to become so skilled at something that it makes people think of you as one-dimensional.

The best thing about being in Halifax, in Nova Scotia, was proximity to water. It’s why I picked a college at random, I was romanticising the ocean. It turned out not to be trivial at all, because the ocean became the texture and background of the years I spent there. How in the extremes of Maritime weather, the warm rain and freezing sleet often in the same day, there’d be a tinge of salt; or cresting the top of Citadel Hill on my bike to get to class or the city stables I rode at, I’d look back and see the harbour steady at my shoulder, giant cruise ships, commuter ferries, little sailboats dotting the deceptively calm surface. How easy it was to bike to the warm, Atlantic-fed lakes around the city and spend an afternoon reading, or hop a fence by Dalhousie’s marine biology campus to sunbathe on the wide concrete slab of their boat launch. Waking in the night to fog horns, tone so deep they thrummed through you, falling back to sleep in the blanket of their pulse.

I wonder how Brooks feels, living in the desert. Memphis is landlocked but the Mississippi flows through like those East Preston rivers, just 10 times as wide; and Houston itself is settled in swamp, air thick with green humidity. Of course, he can get to whatever water he wants in a matter of hours, but it’s a different feeling, not having water looming.

What does Brooks covet? He wrote about Nova Scotia for the first time, at least the only time I’d read or heard him mention his ties to it, after his inaugural season in Phoenix. Eight (almost) dry months in the desert. A nudge, prompt, or caress, maybe, to his deeper nature. Pulling at the blood like tides.

Each entry, rather than focusing on “what went wrong” for each team, is instead a snapshot, a mourning, a hopeful vault forward, a vent session or something else entirely; where writers from in and outside of basketball unspool their thoughts and of course, feelings. Hope you enjoy.

Imagine it worked. All of it. You started a business, say, a way to provide the less fortunate with cars they wouldn’t otherwise have access to, and it worked.

No, not in the sense that you solved transportation challenges for countless Americans at a grand scale. But it worked. Your subprime lending company was acquired. You have $700 million and the type of swollen confidence that has you devising plans to triple that figure.

It kept working. Downtown office buildings, racquetball for the fleece vest-clad class, and a now ubiquitous “What If Chilli’s Was a Driving Range?” concept. Then the big one, a most poisonous proof of concept for a certain class of Rich Guy. It worked: Transforming a sad sack hockey team in a moderate sized southern capital into a perpetual money printing machine.

It keeps working. It always works, you see. You’re the common thread. When you show up and crunch the numbers and make the cold calculated decisions that others didn’t see or wouldn’t push, it works. The proof is in decades of making money. Lots of money. A bunch of different ways. It all works.

Now imagine these people, most of whom you don’t know or plan to know or care about, imagine these people are hollering that you’re doing it wrong.

Why would you listen?

Tom Dundon bought the Portland Trail Blazers because he could. Because he made enough money through predatory car loans and Top Golf and Pickleball and the Carolina Hurricanes that when an NBA team tucked away in the Pacific Northwest was available for purchase, he was on the short list of billionaires (perceived billionaires?) to call. He bought the team because it’s the next charm on the bracelet. It will work.

A month into the Dundon era, making it work looks like a tragicomic level of cost cutting. Booting employees from their hotel rooms in the morning because late check out costs money, leaving developmental players at home because traveling costs money, low-balling coaching candidates because expertise costs money.

The Trail Blazers, finally relevant after a half decade in the desert, are playing the most meaningful games of the season. On the court they are as compelling as they’ve been in years, with reasonable hope that this is the early stage of the next era of competent Blazers hoops.

Off the court, the new man in charge is reducing anything and everything to a line item on a spreadsheet.

Those inside the Moda Center over the weekend were not greeted with customary free playoff T-shirts. Instead, they got towels; draped on the chairs and immediately forgotten. But you don’t walk into the arena for the shirts sponsored by a local grocer or credit union, you go to feel the collective joy and angst of playoff basketball in a full building seven years in waiting. It was community catharsis, the release of pent up emotions both joyous and peeved.

The worst part about rooting for this team in this moment is not that Victor Wembayama has returned to thwart postseason dreams. It’s that you might get caught in a situation hoping that Tom Dundon makes it work. While the owner is slashing ancillary spending and cutting every corner to save small thousands of a billionaire entity, you’re stuck hoping that the team excels in spite of him. And that’s the catch. If the team wins while nickel and diming every off the court expenditure, then Tommy D made it work. Rooting for the Trail Blazers success, however you might do it, is inescapably tied to Dundon’s success. Should the Blazers succeed on a shoestring budget, it’s simply more proof that The Plan Works.

The Trail Blazers will make more money. They’ll hit their KPIs, go green on the spreadsheets, and prove to be a worthy investment vehicle to spin off into whatever entity is next in the conquest of soulless success.

Fans are caught in a light hostage situation, authentically supporting something that Dundon frankly doesn’t care to grasp is the last line of defiance. Passive indifference won’t change things and larger scale boycotts aren’t realistic. If you let him take away the thing you love, he will still make it work for him, just without you.

The dude is rich and in charge. And cheap — in a way he seems to cherish, perhaps even celebrate. Everyone who has been able to get close to him suggests he isn’t moved by public opinion. He shows up. It works.

In the NBA world, Dundon is notable for his budget conscious approach. But more broadly, his first month running the Blazers is symptomatic of the entire billionaire investment class to which he (kinda) belongs. It’s a club filled with folks demanding credit for their shrewd acumen when they are more often parachuting in to destroy an entity to which they have no connection, powered only by greed and lust for profit. The bottom line is more sacred than any human investment or any understanding of what makes something special. These are vultures building condos on your block, snatching up local hospitals, and acquiring your newspapers. Dundon spread his wings and landed in Portland, perched comfortably from a vantage point where he can run the Trail Blazers with the same cold, calculated approach that built a car loan empire.

Tom Dundon is not out of touch. He is untouchable. Rooting for the Blazers in spite of him seems like the only viable path. He’ll make it work without you. The challenge is for you to make it work without him.

That line in full — If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? — is often misattributed to George Berkeley, an Irish bishop and founder of immaterialism, or subjective idealism. Berkeley never really made a great case for the theory, one borrowed from Mahāyāna Buddhism, but the gist was that to be was to be perceived; that things existed if they were seen and understood in the same way (“The Existence of an Idea consists in being perceived,” A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge).

Think how fast Berkeley, or any monist thinker, would’ve had their head spun watching pro basketball. And the fabric of their intellectual and spiritual worlds torn asunder watching Victor Wembanyama.

Or maybe Berkeley would have considered it an ecstatic truth, sitting in an arena alongside tens of thousands of other people so eager to perceive; and perceive one specific person. Who watched him fall, hard, to the hardwood just minutes into the second quarter of Game 2. Fall hard and stay down. Thousands of people who all wrestled with Berkeley’s key concept, that they saw Wembanyama quite clearly, his outline stark against the shining court, but could perceive no movement. What they could perceive — flurries of fear, anxiety gripping their chest, seized breath, sudden and nauseous dismay — felt too real but were of course intangible. Imagine though, Berkeley trying to argue that to them in the moment?

There’s a few brief seconds, once Wembanyama’s body has slid to a slow stop, that he appears to flicker from consciousness. His jaw unclenches, brows relax; his head softens against his right hand with its fingers splayed out on the floor. His forehead rolls against the supporting right hand and his mouth opens slightly, his shoulders sink a little more liquidly down. It’s the face of a person who has just slipped from sentience, dropped their guard into sleep or another gone state. It’s nearly imperceptible but the change in his features, his body, flashes a glimpse to a much younger Wembanyama — and he already is young.

Watching, I felt an intense wave of vulnerability for him. Like you would watching a child sleep. The perception of that bare sliver of a moment replayed over and over as the broadcast was fed other angles and finally stuck on the main replay, filmed from the perspective of the camera person whose feet Wembanyama toppled at.

Replay is one of the strangest components in basketball. Replay in general and replay of injury, certainly. The ability to stop and revel in time — I do it often. Studying footwork, where and how the body moves. Zeroing out to parse the people around whoever is central and how they react, hinge on the action of that central axis, then zooming back in to trace up to the person’s face, fixate on their features, follow where their eyes go. Whether it’s ever possible to pick up on intention watching this way, I’m not sure, but I’m sure that’s why I’m watching. To discover the exact split second a decision is made, to see the brain fire.

Replay of injury, and I’ve written about it, when I’m feeling generous I think of it as a way for us to process grief in small glimpses. To see a person’s pain and mete out our own response, decide how we’re going to feel as we watch what’s happened again, now from another angle. It’s an anaesthetising way to grapple with the unknowable full spectrum of emotion the person we’re watching, in brutal slow motion, is experiencing.

When I’m feeling less generous I think of it as blunting. As a way to neatly package injury into something that happens “in-game” by showing it from so many angles, within the bounds of a basketball court. That way when the person is removed from the floor, by their own power or at the hands of other people, we cease to think of all the time now unfolding in front of them — of how they are even going to grapple with the concept of all of that time — that they must manage on their own. Road to recovery is a quant euphemism when really, it is a wilderness.

Wembanyama travelled with the Spurs to Portland. He’s in concussion protocol, which was clear to anyone who watched his fall and how he took the brunt of the impact with his chin, and then watched him jar awake and roll over, attempt to stand up only to groan and sit with his head hanging. When he brought his knees up to his chest and held a hand to his eyes, rubbing them gently, willing his vision steady as the crowd began to chant his name, I felt — maybe not for the first time but drawn in a different, sharp relief — how vulnerable a game this is.

Bodies, bare limbs, in motion, tangled and in flux; it’s what makes basketball so captivating to watch. Faces and expressions exposed, defeat and triumph flashing in every possession — in playoff basketball at least. The shakiness shot through Wembanyama as he tried to feel his way back into his body, his usual stolidness, stripped away. It’s confessional, this level of perception into another person, their body showing us what they don’t yet know. Wembanyama’s right then is swooning, but even under full faculties we’re handed revelations.

As he gained his feet — not letting any of his teammates help him up, choosing instead to stand under his own power and jog to the tunnel and out — my mind kept flashing back to that short, secreted glimpse of peace slipping over his face. How transportive, one shifting second and a person’s features relax, the decades drop away. An awareness of a life, of life, untenable, precarious, precious, too huge, so small, balancing at every second on a breath.

My father, like most people, was a series of contradictions. He was an upstate New Yorker who came down to North Carolina to attend Wake Forest. He somehow loved both the Jets and the Giants. He hated the Yankees so much that he became a Red Sox fan. The sport I remember us watching the most together was golf; we never missed a Sunday at Augusta. But for all that, he loved college basketball. I’m sure a large part of that was because he attended a university in the ACC.

Growing up in Greenville, SC, we were in close proximity to Wake Forest. We’d drive up for all kinds of games, whether it was sitting on the hill to watch the football at Groves Stadium (I know it’s the ‘Allegacy Federal Credit Union Stadium’ now — but my god what a mouthful) or Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

It was there, in the LJV, where I remember seeing Duncan play for the first time.

I don’t quite recall the particulars, but he left an impression. I begged my father for his jersey, getting one that looked quite similar to this practice penny instead. I think he knew I wouldn’t wear it that much and opted for a cheaper version. Ultimately, he was right; it hung on the back door of the bathroom I shared with my two younger sisters as a shirt I’d wear to the neighborhood pool as my interests shifted away from sports and toward video games during my middle school years.

I was more obsessed with Wake Forest basketball than I ever would have been with the Hornets. Logically, our proximity to Charlotte should have meant I claimed that NBA franchise as my ‘local’ team. That’s certainly how I ended up as a Panthers fan. But Duncan’s dominance meant that when the Spurs eventually drafted him, they became my team. Texas, and by extension San Antonio, might as well have been Mars to me. Yet, they had Duncan, and therefore, were the only NBA team for me.

We didn’t have cable growing up, so I relied on my Dad to tell me when they’d done well or won something. I remember hearing about the ‘03, ‘05, and ‘07 championships. But as I moved into college at the University of South Carolina, SEC football became my sporting passion, and I devoted my free time to that instead.

In 2011, my Dad passed away from a brain tumor. It was a quick decline. He told our family at the end of January of that year. By early October, he was gone. I was 21. The same drives we’d make to North Carolina to watch Wake Forest games were now replaced with treks to Durham to some of the best oncologists around. Dad definitely gave all the Duke doctors a hard time; I wish I could remember some of the more specific jabs, but I compartmentalized so many of those hospital visits away. To this day, I still hate going into a hospital. It’s never good news.

It’s June 15, 2014. I’ve started to come out the other side of this seismic loss. Things are still hard to process, but I do feel like I can breathe again after years of feeling like I’m drowning. I’m a year out of college — I took a victory lap after changing my major from business to public relations — and I’m still hanging around Columbia. I’m with my buddy Joey, and we’re at an anniversary party for a local recording studio called The Jam Room. At some point, he and I wander across the street to Lavanderia Wash World. A handful of televisions hang from the ceiling as Game 5 of the finals is well underway. Joey glances up and quickly remarks that he wants the Spurs to beat the Heat to stop LeBron James from getting three straight. We make our way back and forth across to Lavanderia a few times throughout the night as the team battles back from the early deficit. Kawhi Leonard puts on a clinic as that classic, Spursian ball movement allows the Big Fundamental to lift the Larry one last time. I think about my Dad as the seconds tick down to their victory.

A few months later, I moved to DC for a change of scenery. On my first night in town, I head to a now-defunct bar that’s the first in a rotating series of South Carolina bars. But this one, named Red Light, is in the shadow of what’s then called the Verizon Center. It dawns on me that seeing a professional sports team is much more accessible than it’s ever been. I start paying more attention to the sport, taking in a few games from the Warriors’ dominant 2015-2016 season before committing to watching basketball more consistently.

I remember the exact temperature of the heat inside the Mega Bus that carried me back to DC the July Fourth weekend when I read a story about the Warriors landing Kevin Durant. The Leonard injury is still looming large as I realize the Spurs won’t be competing anytime soon. The Claw’s eventual trade shatters. I watch him hit the shot in Toronto after falling in love with how consistent a midrange artist DeMar DeRozan is. I’ve started to become invested in a way that I never had before.

It’s June 30, 2022, and I’m on my way to see a press screening for Thor: Love and Thunder, a movie that I try to talk myself into enjoying more than I actually do. Seconds before I get in the car to drive to Silver Springs, the Spurs trade Dejounte Murray to the Hawks. I get to McGinty's Public House, where my buddy (and Celtics fan) Chris is waiting for me. He asks how I’m doing. I immediately yell an expletive. I look at my Twitter mentions, and someone tells me to keep an eye on the bigger picture, that Victor Wembanyama is the grand prize that may await at the end of this pain. Losing Murray after trading away Derrick White feels like too much. The next season, I watch Gregg Popovich trot out lineups that include Romeo Langford and Blake Wesley. The team goes 20-62.

The season comes to an end, and I find myself in a similar place. It’s June 22, 2023, and it’s not only my mom’s birthday, but the night of the NBA draft lottery. My stomach is in knots. I intentionally attend a press screening, once again in Silver Springs, for the live-action The Little Mermaid remake. Outside of The Jungle Book live-action remake, I hadn’t brought myself to see any of these other blatant cash grabs reimaginings. I decide to see it as a 10% professional obligation (so I’m not talking out of my ass when broadly assessing these sorts of movies), and 90% as a reason not to stress about the lottery. I tell Chris that he can push through my do-not-disturb if we make the top three.

About a quarter of the way through the movie, I stand up to go to the restroom. No texts on my phone, which immediately disappoints, but puts me at ease that I don’t have this hanging over me for the rest of the night. Only, I quickly realize the draft hasn’t even started yet. Now I’m keenly aware of what’s happening. I go back into the theater.

Eventually, my phone buzzes. I stand up and try, as quickly as I can without disturbing my fellow critics, to make my way down the stairs so I can look at my phone. I round the corner to a text from Chris that says we’re in the top three. Before I can even respond, he tells me we’ve won. I step out into the hallway, and my body curls into a silent scream not unlike this moment from A Star is Born.

The first person I want to talk to is my Dad.

I miss a lot about my Dad. I think the thing I’m saddest about is that I never got to spend time with him as an adult. Not having him here for the big moments of my life is, of course, extraordinarily difficult. But what’s almost worst is not being able to talk to him about the most mundane things in the world. And there’s nothing more importantly unimportant than being able to talk about sports. I wonder sometimes whether he and I would have connected more about the Spurs over the last 15 years if he had been around.

My journey into basketball and the Spurs has been a tremendously rewarding one. I remember watching highlights of those Duncan teams and how beautiful the ball movement was, or how heartbreaking it was to watch the Ray Allen shot. Sharing all of that with him could have been so exciting and brought a new depth to our relationship. We didn’t talk much about sports when I was a kid; I had more of a passive interest, and I wonder what might have been if we’d had a chance to connect on it.

I wonder what he would have thought about this Spurs team. Would he have loved Keldon Johnson’s tenacity? Luke Kornet’s admirable goofiness? Devin Vassell’s sharpshooting? Julian Champagnie’s steadiness? Castle’s defensive prowess? The way Dylan Harper drives through traffic? How De’Aaron Fox pilfers the ball away from an opponent like he’s Danny Ocean? How everything Victor Wembenyama does reshapes the landscape around him? Mitch Johnson’s leadership? Would he have come to visit in DC to catch a game with me when the Spurs were here? Would we have taken a trip to San Antonio together? Hell, would we be at one of these playoff games together, getting a chance to share in that experience?

One of the things I learned early on after his passing is not to play the what if game. If you spend too long doing that, it will consume you, dragging you into the water until you’re completely and utterly submerged by grief. I can’t help but wonder what he and I might have said to one another about how utterly special this team is, and how poised they are to contend for (hopefully) a long, long time. And how introducing me to a generational talent some thirty years ago now puts me in a position to watch a game I love with a team that’s on the verge of something magical.

In the immediate aftermath of his passing, I received a lot of my father’s possessions. His watch, some of his ties, a few of his sport coats (I was too tall for a lot of his stuff), and more random things. At a certain point, those gifts dry up, and you’re left with the past.

It’s rare to receive something new from someone long gone. In these last few weeks and months, I’ve thought a lot about how this Spurs fandom — and all passions, really — are some of the last gifts I received from my Dad. Perhaps that’s an overly romantic way to consider it, but why not?

I think of him when my (now) wife surprised me with a trip to a Spurs game for my thirtieth birthday, and when one of the concession workers hears my story about us visiting and decides to generously gift me one of the Fiesta medals she’s wearing. I think about him throughout those fledgling Pop years, when we win the draft lottery, when we draft Wemby, when he has his first home game, when I finally see him in person — on and on it goes. I’m thankful my Dad introduced me to this sport, to Tim Duncan. Saying that my Dad lives on in every Spurs possession sounds insane, and yet, it kind of does.

That’s the thing about what sports can do. It can create these ethereal, otherworldly connections between you and people you don’t even know. There’s no need to play the what if game here; I know Dad would have been beyond excited for what’s to come with this Spurs team, and how surreal it would be for us now, thirty years after first learning about Tim Duncan, to be on the verge of watching history possibly repeat itself.

Sports are just life, it’s just intertwined. You get to ride the highest of highs with the guys when they make their first All-Star team and everybody’s so excited, and then the next day one of your stars tears their meniscus and everybody’s grieving. It is the emotions of life, and I’m one of those humans who wants to feel as much as I can every day.

On NBA TV this season one of the features we used most during our shows were live look-ins. These are what they sound like: cutting to a broadcast of a game underway and the local crew calling it. We’d linger, at most, for two to three minutes, oftentimes less if we got caught with a dead ball or timeout. What I came to enjoy most was getting familiar with the cadence of the local broadcasters, some better than others.

There are broadcasts that make you pause because you wonder whether they’re watching the same game, or the game at all; there are broadcasts with bias piled on thick. There are crews that thrill because of the way they work so symbiotically, and because they always manage to make the listener feel like they’re on the inside of what’s happening. There are voices that resonate and voices you tire of. I never got tired of listening to Kate Scott.

Kate is the Sixers play-by-play announcer alongside colour analyst, Alaa Abdelnaby. Her steadiness and humour make for one of the best listening experiences a fan, any viewer, can have. She is generous, forgiving, knows when to dial in and pan out. In a word, she’s seamless.

We talked about her start in media as a radio producer for traffic in The Bay, and how asking “Can I fill in for Larry?” one day changed her life. We talked about sports radio as a form of therapy, the intimacy of radio and why it perseveres, and what she’s taken from radio and applied to her jobs on television. We also talked about her move to a single sport, team, and new city with the Sixers, how difficult her start was there.

Plus: Katie’s preparation process, knowing what to tell and what to leave out in a broadcast, still working like it’s your first game, the best things about learning the rhythm of a team when you’re attached to and alongside them all season, how Philly fans are adjusting to feeling hopeful about the future via Tyrese Maxey and V.J. Edgecombe, the frustrations of media as monolith, the relentless lack of routine of the NBA, Kyle Lowry appreciation, and the side of athletes fans don’t see.

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I can’t blame him. Everyone is inside already. I watch the mayor, who stepped out a few seconds earlier on the opposite side, head for the open door flanked by her security. Her staffer hurries after her and I trail them, spot Crina inside the doors and wave, she motions for me to follow. The mayor and her team veer one way and Crina and I go the other, she directs me through the curtained chute down to the arena floor, to a couple dozen folding seats angled to face the court. I walk as fast as I can, but this is why I was late in the first place. My steps are more clipped than I realised they’d be, shorter and slower with my still sore back dictating the limits.

It’s a little wild to see a hardwood court laid in the basin of the arena. One, for its glowing newness, practically thrumming. The Tempo logo stretching over centre court, the lilac arc around either key set off by the deep plum framing at the base and sidelines. The club’s first ever players will set foot on it in a matter of hours for their first scrimmage and it will radiate with a different kind of energy, given life the way all courts are when sneakers squeak and scuff over them, when the energy of bodies working and in motion vibrate down from legs slicing over the surface and feet connect. But just then there’s a hallowed quality to the court, hushed, even the many camera operators setting up their rigs, gathered reporters, and city staffers seem reverent.

The other reason the court takes some time for my brain to orient is that for the bulk of my life, as early as I can remember, this was where I came to watch horses.

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The Sky have spent the ensuing days attempting to stop the mass exodus of fans with a flurry of splashy free agency signings. Since Reese’s departure, Chicago has acquired Jacy Sheldon, Skylar Diggins, Rikea Jackson, and DiJonai Carrington. These additions are a needed salve for a fanbase smarting from years of organizational ineptitude. If nothing else, the team should be competitive, a welcome reprieve from its 23-61 record across the past two seasons. These new players, especially established vets like Diggins and Carrington, bring a sense of legitimacy to an organization that has struggled to consistently attract big names in free agency.

What these players cannot fix however, is the structural issues of an organization that often feels less like a professional sports team and more like a well funded rec team. In this era of exploding WNBA popularity and (now CBA-required) improved working conditions, the Sky as an organization seem to relish blocking their own progress and wagging a finger in the face of their fanbase.

The blunders are cartoonish. The firing of head coach/WNBA legend Teresa Witherspoon was rationalized by the assertion that the team needed to be playoff contenders — they finished the following season 10-34. The team has also traded away years worth of first round draft picks, leaving less to show for such a humiliating effort.

Fans have criticized Chicago’s in-arena experience, which feels semi-pro compared to other franchises. Most notably, a practice facility that was the promised end to public training sessions won’t be ready for the season. The Sky’s lack of proper training facilities has been the subject of criticism by players and ridicule by fans for years. The team used a public rec center, sharing space with anyone who happened to be working out at the same time.

They’ve been called the worst organization to play for. Numerous former players have stated with no uncertainty that they’ll never go back.

That talent includes — or, included — Reese. Perhaps we should have known her tenure in Chicago was never meant to last when the video of her welcome to the aforementioned public training center was shared. Despite having premiere talent in the past, the Sky seemed unprepared for the Moment of Angel Reese. The league as a whole struggled through the growing pains brought on by Reese and Caitlin Clark’s draft class, but Chicago seemed particularly ill-equipped to handle the influx of new fans.

It’s no wonder, then, that there was quickly conflict between the organization and Reese, a bonafide star before she ever played a minute of professional basketball. Reese was vocal about her disappointment in the decision to fire Witherspoon, who coached Reese to a double-double average rookie season. In the middle of the following season, Reese was suspended for half a game for “conduct detrimental to the team” for her comments on the Sky’s need to attract premiere talent.

With her departure, the story of Reese as the future of the Chicago Sky ends. In reality, the Sky struggled to ever make her part of their present. It’s tempting to look at the drama of the last two years and call this a clean start for both parties. And it’s true, on the surface the relationship between Reese and the Sky seemed irreparably broken. But that narrative is at odds with public statements from both player and team who both went on record saying they were working on rebuilding trust. Of course, it is impossible to know whether the relationship was ever repaired.

Even for fans who claim Reese wanted out, it’s important to take one more step in the thought process to consider why one of the most popular players in the league, on a rookie scale contract, would be so eager to leave. It also begs the question of whether this new team, with its roster of big names and bigger personalities, is worth investing in. Afterall, it was only five years ago that the Sky were on top of the league. The seasons since have done little to reassure fans that Chicago is ready to handle the talent they’ve secured.

Looking at the Sky’s offseason moves (including the surprise selection of Gabriela Jaquez in the draft), it’s still unclear exactly what the organization is trying to accomplish in the short- or long-term. Jaquez was a breakout star in the NCAA tournament, but many Sky fans were perplexed that the team took her ahead of players like Kiki Rice, considered more league ready. Free agency action suggests a win-now mentality but the team — outside the projected starters — is largely composed of underwhelming performers, yet-to-be-developed young players, and now, a first round pick who will take some time to find her footing in the league.

Perhaps the Sky feel a sense of urgency to win back their fanbase by signing as many popular players as possible. It’s reminiscent of the ubiquitous landlord special; the past two years have been hastily covered up with a refreshed roster, but there’s no hiding the flaws within the organization. With the season just around the corner, Sky fans will have to wait and see if this team can find the space to grow through the cracks in the foundation.

If it burns, he says.

It is burning, I say, craning around best I can to look at my lower back in the mirror and see whether the skin around the adhesive bandages is flushing red.

If it hurts, he says. Want me to take them off? He offers.

They do hurt, I say, pausing. But maybe… it’s good?

The package warned, I read, that a small percentage of people experienced severe burns from the bandages. I start to swing my arms in slow, ragdoll rotations, half wondering whether this will accelerate the heat.

Floppy, ungraceful arm swings are the only movement that’s brought me any relief over the last few days. First, just in the relative dark of the kitchen after wincing my way out of bed, self-conscious, but quickly uncaring, in the aisles of the grocery store, or standing on camera between the host’s ad reads doing a podcast; in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, and carving out a bubble of space for myself on the shared city trail we walk the dogs on, making cyclists and joggers veer away.

I stood to do them every 10 minutes working through rounds of edits on a giant story I wrote for The Ringer, joking with my editor both the pain and the swings were a good analogy for the editing process. I’ll do them during commercial breaks later tonight, on the last regular season segment of NBA TV I’m scheduled for.

I did them watching Artemis II drop like a stone down through Earth’s atmosphere, nervously speeding the swings the longer it seemed like it was taking for the capsule’s parachutes to deploy.

I should back up a bit.

I hurt my back, the jury Dylan was on got sequestered, Donald Trump threatened to annihilate Iran — 93 million people — ostensibly with nuclear war, and I wondered, not for the first time, how to care about the convolutions of NBA playoff seeding in a time of existential threats as proxy and posturing. Not morally, though there is that too, but just how, in the brain, to line those two up.

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Luckily, the young Buck already had a highly abridged alias, which Jack gladly embraced: here was “Mamu.”

But, I thought — how hard could it be to get the full name right? Once you have mah-moo, two simple syllables, there are only four more (rather musical) beats in it. Kel. Ash. Vee. Lee. They might be weird siblings in a very large family. Lost Kardashians, perhaps.

Delicious bits of language like this, I tend to repeat in my head. And why not, I thought, for Mamu? Even back on the Bucks, with whom he only logged one season, he brought to the court an undeniable energy and a unique sincerity. So, I started following Mamu’s career, and once I had mastered the syllabic structure and pronunciation of his name, I built a little song around it.

Although this song only exists in theory, I can describe it to you pretty well. It is in brisk 4/4 time, based on a simple electric guitar downstroke pattern played in a vaguely anapestic rhythm, the same you might clap in: one-two, one; one-two, one. The snare drum doubles this. The tune has the crisp, new wave bounce of the The Knack’s “My Sharona.” The only words are “He’s my Mamukelashvili… my Mamu.”

I could go on, but the point is, the song exists in my head, it rips, and I sing it (silently or out loud) whenever Mamu comes onto the court. Or sometimes when I’m cooking or doing dishes. Sometimes just because it’s the kind of thing I do — and not the only song I have.

Alexander “Sandro” Mamukelashvili came into the world on U.S. soil, in New York City, in May 1999, but his Georgian family moved to Tblisi when he was still a baby. He comes from basketball; Wikipedia tells me his grandmother, Ira Gabashvili, was a member of the Soviet women’s national basketball team. It also says he was in Chicago visiting his famous pianist aunt when the Russo-Georgian War broke out in 2008. At 14, he went to Italy to pursue basketball. At 17, he moved to the States, to play for Florida’s Monteverde Academy in high school, and went on to play college ball for Seton Hall.

Mamu was selected as the 54th pick in the second round of the 2021 NBA Draft — the same one that got the Raptors NBA All-Star Scottie Barnes, who now plays alongside Mamu, a Raptor since the 2025 offseason.

After thin stints with the Bucks and the Spurs (and their respective G-League teams), this season the Georgian has become one of the Raptors’ two go-to replacements for often-injured centre Jakob Poeltl. He’s averaging around 10 points, 5 rebounds and 2 assists per game, with a field goal percentage of 51.5. On good nights, his three-point shooting can space the floor for the Raps. He’s plucky on defense, big but fluid.

Mamu’s best attribute, however, is his effort. He brings a jolt of energy to the court that comes partly from having had to prove himself as a legitimate and valuable NBA role player (right now, there are only two Georgians in the league: Mamu and the Orlando Magic’s Goga Bitadze).

But some of it just comes from Mamu being, abstractly, a little different. He’s one of the NBA’s few heavily tattooed white guys. His beard is ungainly. He needs a more loving barber. In interviews, he is among the Raptors’ more polite and normal-seeming spokespeople, but he has the tendency to make goofy faces for the camera, which always make him look a little embarrassed by himself.

In the NBA, “different” has a specific context. Players with unfathomable talent are called “different” as the ultimate form of praise. A “difference maker” is someone who can change the tenor of a game. In an NBA context, the phrase “Steph different” would only ever be taken to be a statement about Stephen Curry’s preternatural basketball skills. It would not be interpreted to mean, “Steph Curry is weird because he never stops chewing on his goddamn mouthguard.”

That iffy kind of difference has haunted a handful of NBA players who didn’t quite fit the Be Like Mike mold of the superstar model. Dennis Rodman? Too colourful. Dwight Howard? Too thuggish. You can see the same dynamic at play in the current aura clouding the future of Ja Morant, who, even before the gun thing, was maybe just a bit too flashy for the NBA’s comfort.

Sandro Mamukelashvili isn’t different like Rodman or Morant or Metta “World Peace” Sandiford-Artest. But he has his own kind of difference, an endearing awkwardness nicely encapsulated in his name — which, in Georgian, looks like this: ალექსანდრე მამუკელაშვილი — and, in my head, sound like “My Sharona.”

For years, I never thought much about my little songs, the tendency to fix on phrases and privately vocalize them into easily repeated patterns. I first noticed the habit more pointedly during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when the whole world was in an accelerated state of stress. I built songs using random Korean words, common names and funny animals (horned grebe, etc.).

Then, one day I came across a post on social media, in which the poster “shouted out” those, like them, who listened to particular songs endlessly on repeat, had obsessive compulsive leanings, and — using a term with which I was unfamiliar — did “vocal stimming.” Those, in other words, considered neurodivergent.

I grew up in the 1990s, when depression was a trend. Nobody was neurodivergent except Dustin Hoffman’s character Raymond Babbitt in the Oscar-winning film Rain Main, and we called him autistic. Autism, of course, existed as a complicated experience for anyone managing it in themselves or a loved one. But the larger cultural conversation was much more binary: autism was a kind of disability (unless you were gambling).

I have never been Raymond Babbitt. In high school, I knew my brain worked differently than a lot of people’s — but whose doesn’t? We all live in our private cells of perception and consciousness. True understanding is beyond reach. It took me years to ask my doctor for an anti-depressant prescription, and since it turned out to be a helpful and successful intervention, I figured my tics were just part of being “generally fucked up.”

This new information — that my difference might fall into a recognized category that didn’t really exist in my youth — though admittedly inferred from an anonymous social media post, became more relevant when, not long after, my daughter was similarly assessed.

It also offers a possible explanation for the songs. Vocal stimming is any self-stimulatory behaviour that involves the use of the mouth, lips and vocal cords. It is often triggered in response to stress or excitement. In Rain Man, Raymond Babbitt’s release came out in muttered calculations and misinterpretations of his own name.

For me, the answer comes out, in part, as Sandro Mamukelashvili — my Mamu.

“Difference” is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can mean brilliant, or fascinating, or diverse. On the other, it can be a brutal agent of separation.

That matters nominally in the NBA. Most of the athletes who make it to the elite tier of professional basketball are, by definition, successful. Dwight Howard judged this year’s three-point competition. Ja Morant is being given indefinite chances to be better at everything. Mamu, for all his syllables and Sasquatchian grooming and goofy faces, will be fine, even if he spends much of his career coming off the bench, or ends up on the Wizards.

Away from the basketball court, difference matters urgently. The fascist project is to cleave a rift in the public consciousness, creating a gulf between the accepted and the different. Accounts from across the United States say that ICE’s project in Minneapolis was to detain anyone with brown skin. The current assault on Iran is bolstered by endless statements on the basic inhumanity of Iranians. Here is the most sinister use of difference: the racist project of white supremacy. It is rooted in an ugly ideal of conformity and groupthink. The perfect citizenry of the new right looks like a vast army of faces made indistinguishable by blind service. The same spirit fuels the boom of large language models and other generative AI tools that promise to enable the making of anything, but all pump out visual crap coloured by the same giveaway plastic sheen. The geometry of absolute power is a funnel pushing everything toward sameness: a processing machine that turns diversity into bland, nutrient-bereft sausage.

It is, perhaps, a stretch to get from here back to the NBA and Mamu and what it means to be typical in anything at all. But I think I can get there by putting on a few jerseys.

It’s easy to love or hate the superstars. Steph Curry is a generational phenomenon; Steph Curry needs to stop chewing on his goddamn mouthguard. As long as Steph Curry is playing, and longer, his #30 Golden State Warriors jersey will always be a bestseller. Because, as we all know, Steph different. Same goes for LeBron James, Kevin Durant, probably Victor Wembanyama. The big-difference-makers live forever.

Sometime in January, I went searching for Mamu jerseys on the official NBA shop. For the Raptors, the options included the obvious choices: Scottie Barnes, hometown favourite R.J. Barrett, good old #1 (Gradey) Dick. I had the option of ordering the jersey of Mo Bamba, whom the Raptors picked up for maybe seven games this season before waiving.

Mamu’s name was not on the menu.

I think sometimes about when Pascal Siakam left the Raptors, and published a heartfelt essay in the Player’s Tribune. He wrote of the first time he ever saw his number in the stands:

With some rookies, they come into the league, it’s a lot of buzz. But with me, when I got drafted, my agent went to the team store to buy a Siakam jersey…. and they didn’t even have it for sale!!! I definitely wasn’t on fans’ radars, you know?? And I’ll admit something to you now. I would do this thing as a rookie, during the anthems, where I’d look around and try to spot my jersey in the crowd. Obviously you can’t be doing that during a game, you need to be chill. But during the anthems you’re looking at the crowd anyway, so it’s less bad. It’s crazy, though: I’d never see any. I swear, every night I looked. Nothing. Then finally, this random night, I’m doing my usual scan — I SPOT ONE. RAPTORS 43. I’ll never forget that feeling. I’m going, YESSSS!!! on the inside.

Turns out, you can buy a Sandro Mamukelashvili jersey through the Raptors store (of course, you can; assuming otherwise in this psychotically consumerist environment is, in retrospect, very dumb). But I’d wager it’s a relatively small club that has made the leap — a group of fans who are drawn toward something a bit different. At any rate, this is my mission for the rest of the 2026 season: I will acquire and don my Mamu Raptors jersey. I will become part of a club for which I have already written an anthem that, aside from my wife and child, no one will ever hear.

I will wear number 54 with pride, as an expression of my love for a utility guy whose name is a beautiful sound that has given me an anchor. If I, and the Raptors, are lucky, I will wear it to a playoff game. And, during the anthems, I will wonder if Mamu can see up high enough to notice it, and think to himself, YESSSS. That guy? He’s different.