'A small foray is worthwhile'

The NBA's lens of behaviour, through the prisms of Giannis Antetokounmpo and Draymond Green.

What is the point. That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind. Sometimes the point is a momentum, a fact, a quality, a voice, an intimation, a thing said or unsaid. Sometimes it’s who’s at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once.

Trying to think of the dumbest thing I ever got incensed about. Not mad as in going around fuming like a cartoon character, but suspended in a state of feeling justifiably angry over something, and having that state last. Everything I can think of that stretched beyond a night’s sleep came down to a deeper hurt that lodged into a worry, a fear, a perceived shortcoming, a soft and guarded part of me, and even with the passing of time I wouldn’t call any of them dumb.

The dumb stuff doesn’t last, at least for myself. I don’t mean that to underscore anything noble, only that I have a tendency to talk myself out of very strong, negative feelings on my own behalf. I’m capable of holding a grudge, tending to it, hoisting it proud as a torch, when it’s on the behalf of someone I care about. Those things have and will stir up in me an anger that moves me to action. As with many things, it’s easier to be brave on behalf of other people.

Giannis Antetokounmpo sprinting headlong into the tunnel at Fiserv Forum, at first, felt to me like that.

As earnest as he’s grown to be with the sides of himself he opts to show us, when he’s been the most visibly moved or the most vocal, it’s been for other people. As a competitor, we know him to be the opposite. Zeroed in, with stunning focus and singular drive capable of controlling and upending games. His performance against the Pacers was like that — 64 points, the most scored in a game without making a 3-pointer since the three point shot was adopted. Still, he said in his postgame that the ball he lasered in on with that same honed focus, gone walking off the floor in the hands of a Pacers assistant, was one he wanted to collect for Damian Lillard. Lillard who, that night, passed Kyle Korver for 5th all-time in 3-pointers.

In the same postgame, Antetokounmpo said he wanted to give the game ball to his mom, something he’s made a tradition of. The Pacers have a tradition too, in giving the game ball to rookies who make their first basket, like Osar Tshiebwe had late in the same game. Whoever it was that Antetokounmpo or the Pacers wanted to collect the game ball for, both sides ended up incensed for other people. The ball (of which it feels important to note, there were conveniently two of, the game ball and a spare ball), in all of this, becomes not just a ball. It’s been transformed, through the hands of the people using it. Every palm slid over its circumference, fingertip that blunted it, and wrist that flexed to launch it made it into something greater. A conduit to an exact moment, a totem, a trophy, and eventually, artefact — vital as the action itself. It’s also silly.

The way Antetokounmpo went running, with Bucks security guard Danny Carter hanging off of him, for a ball he eventually got but said didn’t feel like the game ball, like the ball had a live energy discernible through touch, was an action that felt out of scope with the night in the context of one game out of 82, or a game, in general. But then, that’s the duality of sports. The outsized heat of any given moment tempered, or justified by, the act of competition. Of course, there’s the other thing: who gets to act this way, and why.

The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life. But if you are, for any length of time, custodian of the point—in art, in court, in politics, in lives, in rooms—it turns out there are rear-guard actions everywhere.

The thing about outsized anger, anger that moves to action, is it can also be quelled by embarrassment. This is important. Whether it’s your own, superimposed over the situation, or seeing it through the perspective of friends or someone outside the lens of your emotions. Sometimes just time, in its passing, can blunt something that once felt acute and all too sharp into embarrassment, a laughable thing you’re able to move away from. The absence of embarrassment in the ongoing actions of Draymond Green strikes me as the biggest difference between him and someone like Antetokounmpo, for where something they’ve done, one solitary action, comes to dwarf the rest of the night and whatever it held. Green, who finds himself suddenly — though not suddenly at all when you trace the pattern of his actions back through the years — on the outs of his own behaviour through the embarrassment of the people around him. Green, who has never needed to be embarrassed about the things he does at work.

Green has been called a lot of things: a bully, a loose cannon, a competitor, a liability, an expensive backpack for 30, dangerous, loyal, the nuts and bolts guy. What he’s been called tends to follow a reliable pattern of his in-game behaviour. Green does something just beyond the bounds of what’s necessary, is admonished for it, and boomerangs back around to begrudging praise. This could’ve, already has, lasted a long time, with the pattern of it rhythmic enough to blot out the aberrations that fall outside of gameplay — like Green punching Jordan Poole in the face at Warriors practice last October, or Green, arrested for assault in 2016 just prior to going to Rio with the U.S. Olympic team.

Personally, I’m still caught up in the way Green vaulted himself onto and then off of Domantas Sabonis’ chest early in last season’s playoffs, the split second of calculation in the way Green decided to move over Sabonis by stepping on him versus, say, backing up, obvious in every replay. The reason I go back to it when there’s plenty of other, fresher, examples — the Rudy Gobert chokehold, or Green spinning and swinging on Jusuf Nurkic, connecting with his head — is that with every bigger, more obvious incident from Green, his incredulity has grown in parallel. With Sabonis, Green used it to be revisionist. He said on his own podcast that he “lost a lot of respect for Sabonis” because Sabonis didn’t shake Green’s hand when the Kings eventually lost the series. With Gobert, his incredulity came at himself. He said when he first watched a replay of the sequence, he didn’t realize how long he’d held and dragged Gobert. “When I watched it back, I said, 'Damn, I held him much longer than I realized in that moment,’” he told Ramona Shelburne of ESPN. Green notes how easy it is to lose track of time when you’re directly part of something, when the action is all around you. Which is true, but his incredulity, the slippage of being able to place himself inside the very action he’s performing, serves to blot it out.

With Nurkic, Green’s incredulity is more clear cut. Green said he was tying to sell the foul call by putting his whole body into it. “As you know, I’m not one to apologize for things I meant to do,” Green said in his postgame, “but I do apologize to Jusuf because I didn’t intend to hit him.” Green went on to talk about all the ways he’s not a flopper, stuck, clearly and tellingly, that this call didn’t work out.

The call, obvious to anyone watching, wasn’t going to go that way. Green got ejected, and following the five game suspension he just returned from, was suspended indefinitely. The disconnect between what Green is doing and what Green is capable of seeing himself doing, maybe and especially in the moment he’s doing it, is harder to discern. Nurkic, asked about it, summed the incident and Green’s last precipitously backsliding year up the most succinctly: “That brotha needs help.”

What I’m interested to see is on what side of “indefinite” Green falls on in his suspension. When Ja Morant was given his indefinite suspension, before the 25 game suspension he got to start this season, he was trotted out in a strange and televised manufactured contrition. I can’t see the same thing happening to Green. One, because of his depth of career, and two, because repentance undermines the caricature that career has created. Green is also, despite behaviour that subverts it, smart. Playing dumb in character is one thing. Acting this dumb, this muffled to safeguards of friends, professional wellbeing, recorded proof and personal embarrassment, and operating instead from a place outside what in recency looks and sounds like reality, totally another. About that disassociation, Steph Curry told Green: “I worry less about what you did, but more the why and how it happened.”

As if to say, where are you?

To see a thing clearly, and when your vision of it dims, or when it goes somewhere else, if you have a gentle nature, keep your silence, that is lovely. Otherwise, now and then, a small foray is worthwhile. Just so that being always, complacently, thoroughly wrong does not become the safest position of them all. The point has never quite been entrusted to me. — Renata Adler, Speedboat

Back to Antetokounmpo, just briefly. There are lots of ways to read what happened in Milwaukee. Some found it ridiculous, some meaningful, I think moments like it act as prisms for the way we all watch and more importantly perceive the game.

As much as those final moments spread, tangling up everybody from the Pacers and Bucks respective rosters, to coaches and arena staff, to Pacers GM Chad Buchanan who apparently caught an elbow to the ribs in the tumult, Antetokounmpo is largely alone. In his actions, sprinting from the floor to the tunnel after the ball, back out onto the floor to confront the Pacers, he’s alone. A singular furious force, sure, but a solitary one. There’s something in this that’s surprising, because as long as we’ve know Antetokounmpo as a public figure in the NBA he’s been shown as part of something greater. Toted as leading the next generation of superstars, the smiling face of a franchise or an immigrant success story, he’s always been representative of more.

There was a flash of something else, watching him. An echo back to a lonelier part of his life where, maybe, he was the one looking out for himself, all too aware of his limitations — that he was only one person. Where what happened did because he made it, from determination or a day-to-day perseverance which we laud in retrospect but is, definitely and bone-deep in the moment, lonely. I think it’s what caught so many people by surprise, and what briefly rendered Antetokounmpo unrecognizable. I think it’s also illuminating. A flash capable of taking you out of the moment, especially when the moment is lulling entertainment, and allowing for compassionate inquiry. A furrowed brow, a pang deep in the chest, a nudge somewhere down in your brain.

As if to say, who are you? And who do I want you to be?