Exits: Grin through obliteration

The Minnesota Timberwolves finally find pleasure in the weight.

Last night, when the winds were up to 80kmph, there were people out in the park at midnight just screaming around in them. I’d been working through the afternoon, into evening, into night, and the wind went from slinking to shivering to shredding through the trees. By the time I left the attic and went downstairs to bed in the dark the steady boughs in the canopies of the old silver maples in front of the house were swaying like drunks that just tipped from dopey to belligerent.

I could hear the wind through all the windows, opened to the cooling night. It rushed and churned, changed directions, rattled the downstairs door in its frame. Earlier, taking a break to walk the dogs, Dylan and I passed a downed section of an oak a block over that had landed crown-first to lean on the street sign, bending the metal to a reflex angle. A block after that we watched two guys lift from the knees to shift a streetlight — the lamp and the arced steel support — from the road.

Sinking into bed and lifting the thick hardback library copy of Elena Ferrante’s Frugmentalia I’ve been dutifully downing segments of between Finals games most nights, I picked up on the voices carrying over from the soccer field Dylan runs the dogs in most mornings. I couldn’t remember the first time that night I’d heard them, but the tone of them was familiar. Like tuning into a far-off police siren that’s probably been keening for five minutes, or finally identifying a song in a neighbour’s muffled music through the walls.

They were howling. Alternating between shouts and screams, words to each other out there in the dark I couldn’t catch, but the rhythm way off for anything to be wrong. It was, I could picture, the act of throwing yourself around in the wind and heaving your voice like a stone to be swallowed up by the cascading wall of it. I’ve had nights where moving through the dark in a city’s rare open spaces, gripped in fog, edged by snow, framed by summer storms rolling in from the distance, the pleasure is in feeling the expanse of yourself for a brief moment stretching out free in the night. Even and especially alongside other people, feeling the boundaries of your body loosen and slip in easy communion. To hear your voice, for once, all the way outside of yourself.

My eyes had started tripping over the page so I set the book down on the nightstand, listened to the slow breath of Dylan and the dogs, none of them stirring, and reached to click the lamp off. I tossed and scuffled, shrugged the blankets around and settled, wind from the window behind me ruffling the hair on my crown and sunk into sleep with the howls carried on the wind and split in half — some vibrations coming to me and some going to the sky. Small tolls to the night.

The Minnesota Timberwolves were really howling, by the time they got done with the playoffs. I say got done because they were trying it on, testing their little snarls in the mirror before they went out for the night. Nothing diminutive in this, only a collection of people simultaneously shrugging on a new leather jacket for the first time and feeling how the weight settles at their shoulders, feeling how they like this, not even clocking that 20, 40 minutes have gone by and they’re late to the party.

It was a dress rehearsal. It was meant to be.

Patrick Beverley crows more than howls but he did plenty of both and we saw how it is when a villain comes into the power of their caricature, the menace and smirk they’ve filled in themselves with a shading hand so heavy they’ve got smudges all down the side of their palms, wrist. Karl-Anthony Towns, back in the postseason for the second time but first, really, as himself. How is one supposed to figure their steps before they’ve paced out the course? He took meaningful strides in the first round, even if he won’t be counting them until next season.

In the NBA the rush is always about getting there. Then what? It’s not so bad to moonlight, to party crash, to pool hop. You’re always going to have the most fun in the places you know you shouldn’t be, not now or not yet. There’s nobody who understand this better than Anthony Edwards.

Edwards, who had the entire NBA industrial complex contorting itself to navel gaze with the crude intensity of rubbernecking a car crash when he said he didn’t care that much about basketball. That he liked football more, and liked it more for its stunts and expression, but that the first time he dunked he realized there was something in it that would make him stand out.

That sense of remove — healthy, necessary, very rare — partially borne out of a person who lost his mother and grandmother early in life, is still there. It edges Edwards’ speech in his most memorable of quotes, sparks along the sweep of his arms when he dunks, powers the crush of his legs as he makes the entire action of a game lurch when he stops to pull up, and winks when he intercepts a pass, scoops a steal, stands smiling over someone he has just knocked to the floor by force of skill. It is what made so many analysts so nervous about him going high in the Draft, what makes them nervous still. The realization clicking every time they watch him run and ramble, take only pleasure in his body, its skill, without the “this was made to feel torturous” rhetoric that context can lend. He is, maybe, the most present athlete in the league, and he is the only one who may decide to leave it at any time.

The future success of the Timberwolves doesn’t depend on Edwards shedding this detachment, on growing more serious. In the same way a person can smile delivering to you the most damaging news to your life, Edwards will grin through his in-game obliteration. No, the future success of the Timberwolves depends on Chris Finch and Tim Connelly shielding, to some degree, their roster from Glen Taylor and the confusion of Minnesota’s ownership group. Every new GM wants to shake things up but upheaval, prior to this season, had been the only constant here. A revolving door of coaches, players, Towns’ would-be best years, Connelly should persuade Taylor to pay for some stability — a nice, steady center, more team pajamas — and should resist the urge of GMs like Gersson Rosas before him to treat the team as a walking exercise in legacy optics, but should otherwise work with a dutiful sense of remove.

What have the Wolves been, for so long?

The promise of something different.

Towns is treated every season like he’s perennially on the verge, as if it was just another year to get through. D’Angelo Russell, wrapping one of the most competent seasons of his career thus far and being reprimanded for his numbers, as if volume shooting wasn’t the stat you’d want a distribution minded point guard to lose while assists (7.1 per game, a career best) and 2-point percentage (49%, also a career best) climbed. Edwards, at the end of his second NBA season, and the expectation of him “growing out of it” — it being his ease, joy, maturity of knowing the value and peace of arm’s length — still lurking around the agitated brains who treat this all as commodity or a thing to fix instead of what’s already happening.

When the Wolves won the play-in they screamed, threw themselves around the floor and all over each other, felt the burden of presumption slip. It didn’t really matter how far they made it (though taking the Grizzlies to seven was not nothing), only that they felt themselves, the pleasure of each step, there at the end. What’s the harm in howling sometimes just to hear your voice?