Chipping away, post chip
Determining how much loss it will take the Toronto Raptors to grow.
Growth, you can feel it sometimes. A lack of reaction at something that used to rouse the quarrelling little animal coiled up in you, feeling that animal instead lift its head to look, settle back on its haunches, relax. In the days after physically pushing yourself, small muscles you had no idea existed sore and tender to the touch. Your body, in ways that seem removed from you though you were the one who set it in motion, burgeoning.
After a long break from swimming I got back in the pool this week. Slept through my alarm the morning I ambitiously planned to do laps at the crack of dawn and showed up for the lunchtime open swim instead. Couldn’t find the women’s locker room so used the universal one, like the first time I’d been to this pool back in September when we moved. Before I was willing to cut myself some slack and admit I was missing, deeply, the old pool (and before I was willing to cut myself some slack that it was okay to miss, deeply, a pool). Couldn’t figure out how the lockers worked, that you have to slide an exterior handle up to align the slots to slip your combination lock through, went locker to locker rattling handles until a 70+ year old man calmly and slowly lifted the handle on his a few feet away.
It’s surprising to me, how immediately confident I feel when the chlorine tang hits my nose. That any sensitivities I’ve lately been feeling about my body disappear when I pull the tight straps of my swimsuit up, shimmy around in it to adjust, snap my cap on and walk out to the pool deck dripping from the showers. Maybe something to do with purpose. Knowing everybody there is doing, or about to do, or has just done, the same thing.
In the water, in the brief glimpses between breath, is where I marvel at bodies, anyway. The pull and stretch of their limbs, how the water works around them as they work their way through it, all their softest parts bubble-wrapped by the oxygen streaming from their nostrils and mouths. There are always the loud swimmers, who hit each stroke with violence and come up always a little incredulous that other people are in the water. The ones I wind up falling for are the quiet, sure swimmers. They can be slow or liquid quick, but their strokes are pure rhythm and when they come up — which isn’t often because moving that way, they don’t wring themselves out — they’re often smiling, or blinking in soft surprise.
A less accepted thing about growth is the loss it often takes. Trades underscore this to the quick.
I can preface this as someone who held fast to every iteration of a Raptors team before this one, who had to talk myself into trades by learning, closer, about the person coming in — someone has to go for any change to happen here.
Basketball’s impasses creep up. Toronto’s unravelling, the more I’ve thought about it, has been going on since Tampa. The personal issues and very real anxieties that flourished and sprung to climb around the team in the central Florida sun like so much kudzu has yet to be all the way cleared, if it ever can be, but what came out of Tampa was a group largely going through the motions. It runs the risk of psychological overstep by citing that season and the latter half of the one before it as markers of ambiguous loss, but then we don’t yet really have the understanding of what all happened to us in the onset and public peak of the pandemic, let alone a basketball team — the people on it — going through it.
The chipping away, post chip, has inched beyond the Raptors roster. Losing Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green in tandem was something. Losing Marc Gasol, Serge Ibaka and Norman Powell within months of each other, for how the group had dug in and run before the pandemic took the NBA’s and the world’s legs out, hollowed out the middle. And none of this is mentioning the heart on two legs, Kyle Lowry, up and walking away. But there’s been a continuous exodus, throughout all those departures, of assistant coaches. Arguably the people who know best the marrow and muscle of a team, can be honest about what’s there or what’s lacking, and can coax it to grow in this direction or that.
I did start this by saying that growth takes loss, but you’d assume much of this loss on Toronto’s part was calculated. That there had to have been an idea, even a rough outline you could squint at, of what the gaping space around those losses could and would be turned into. Looking at the team now, no different than it was last season on paper minus a couple bench players who’ve flourished since they left (a worthwhile point, probably) (the team staff who’ve gone have flourished too, though those successes have been less in-game facing, less something I can readily google), the losses seem to have amounted to a caving in underneath them. Like the structural integrity, as much as a basketball team can have one, is gone. Has been so slowly chiseled at that everyone’s footing is different.
There’s been disappointment, frustration, confusion in the losses stacking up since November, for sure, but the word that’s struck me in listening to postgames or being around the team, hearing how quiet the locker room’s been compared to previous seasons when you could hear literal hooting and hollering from the hallway, is bereft.
Advancement needs runway, improvement needs scope. A lot of space. But how smart is it, to start in a sinkhole?
Growth, this one harder to discern but I’m sure you’ve felt it: the rare occasions where you sense things aligning for you. This sweeping latitude of life’s usual mess coming to tidy with you fixed at the centre. Maybe more successful, more driven people feel this all the time, but when I have the best I can describe it is as an inkling, a nudging in the back of my mind that eventually grows to the feeling of being in step with the good things happening to and for me. A sense of keeping pace.
While I do believe in energy, or light manifestation, I more think of this as adaptability. A willingness to roll with the punches, to be less closed off in or shut down by your responses to life’s really irregular news delivery system. That the letdowns and disappointments and crushing blows will come, but it’s how you maneuver out or away from them counts and puts you back on an upward track.
It’s also much easier to think generously when good things are happening to you. To respond to life wholeheartedly, to be considerate, to see the shining belly of any problem. To float around benevolently above life’s weather.
A surprising thing about trade season is also who stays. Myles Turner taking a two-year extension with Indiana, after his name had come to be permanently caught in the grinding teeth of the trade machine, is certainly one. I get it in that it’s always half true — and half feels generous — the things you’re hearing about players wanting out. I also get it because some of the biggest growth you can go through is realizing leaving for the new or next thing isn’t always growth, it’s just going somewhere else.
I wouldn’t be surprised if nothing happens in Toronto and everyone stays, at least until summer. Partially because practically speaking, the best deals for athletes who aren’t one of a dozen commanding superstars in the league looking to renegotiate their contracts come from the team they’re already on. It might not be fuck you money, but it still tends to be honest.
What I wonder is even with all the space around the team as-is, in these performance gaps and relationship vacancies, if nothing changes, how much room is there for anyone?
The day after the swim I feel my spine stretched out when I walk around in the world. My shoulders, probably subconsciously always hunched from the work of hammering over a keyboard most days like a cartoon vulture, pull back. My ribs, the smallest ones, tender to the touch, my triceps reminding me they work.
The reason I like swimming, like ripping my bike around in the summer heat, liked riding horses is the same as what I love about being in hot weather — the consuming awareness of my body as something strong and extending and exposed. My limbs bare in the heat, rangy and loose, blood broiling and cascading, every inch of skin a little bit flushed. Here I am, just one body but expansive, taking pleasure in muscles stretching, straining, growing. Here I am, alive.