Exits: Sugar and silt

The Pelicans first hit of sweetness after so many seasons of concessions.

This is a city of strange concessions.

Founded by France, ceded to Spain as a condition of defeat to the British, flipped briefly back to France until Napoleon sold the place (all stolen from the Chitimacha to start with) to the expanding United States in the Louisiana Purchase, a tract of land that stretched from the Gulf to western Canada.

New Orleans was a city of refugees — Filipinos from the French-Spanish colonial era, Dominicans in the Haitian Revolution, Louisiana Creoles of French, Spanish, African and Indigenous backgrounds that predated American expansion — free until whichever colonizing power in control needed labour. The city conceded its economic power, established through once dominant river trade, to the growing hubs of New York, Philadelphia and Boston. The Civil War and Jim Crow eras saw constitutional amendments utilizing grandfather clauses to revoke the civil rights of established Black New Orleanians because it wasn’t enough to crudely and violently quash autonomy in the present, it had to be retroactively, purely symbolically, smothered too.

The thousands of feet of silt, sand and clay that make up the depth of ground stretching out from the Mississippi River used to be restored by its occasional flooding — fresh sediment was piled up, keeping everything above sea level. Now, the city has conceded to the very land on which it sits, sinking, by the year. Originally built on natural levees and higher ground, expansion crept into marshland and swamp behind man-made floodwalls and levees laid down by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The river was walled, water got pumped out, the swamp sprung houses and strip malls in place of tangled cypress and towering stands of water tupelo. In 2006, with blue FEMA tarps stretched out across the city in Hurricane Katrina’s wake, Louisiana voters amended the state’s constitution so that all revenue from offshore drilling went into restoration of the eroding coastline. Since then, 24 tropical storms and hurricanes have surged into New Orleans, seven since 2020 — that’s almost 30% in the last two years.

Concessions are an expiring measure by nature. Promises made in boon and plenty when everything, even the ground underfoot, seems on the rise. When you give up and give away year over year, century into century, when the very land buckles at the cost, resiliency becomes one of the only things left to stand on.

Is this about basketball? Should it be?

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What a difference a trade makes.

C.J. McCollum and Larry Nance Jr., along with Tony Snell, for Josh Hart, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Tomas Satoransky, Didi Louzada, a 2022 first round pick and two future picks, on paper, was a large deal. Hart and Louzada stayed in Portland — Hart living in Nance Jr.’s house, Nance Jr.’s wedding pictures still hung on the walls — Alexander-Walker and Satoransky hop-scotching to Salt Lake City and San Antonio, respectively.

In New Orleans, this was not a concession. The Pelicans needed McCollum’s reliable 20 points per match and Nance Jr.’s range game, and beyond their immediate skill they also needed their surety, their staidness. Plus, some new faces prone more often than not to smiling didn’t hurt.

The last and only time I wrote about the Pelicans this season it was about Zion Williamson, the spectacle and immediacy of him, how badly he and the narrative of him could use some company, or a distraction. It felt a relief, outwardly, and it’s not a stretch to say there was probably some internally in New Orleans too, with the arrival of McCollum, Nance Jr., and Snell, like the sensation of an unwanted stare finally shifting away. The Pelicans nabbing a play-in spot made everyone blink, winning both made everyone sit up a little straighter, them taking the Suns to six games made everyone remember there’s still an entire team here.

A lot was made about how Williamson took to his new teammates, and too much about the fact that Williamson hadn’t spoken with McCollum within the first few days of his arrival. Too much because have you never had trouble getting in touch with, not even your friends, but a new colleague in this case? (But also, have you ever even done that?) And now, when calls hold their own weird aversion, plus Williamson’s in a generation that has probably spent less time on the phone than any one before. McCollum had to initiate it because of course he did, he’s one of the most cordial people in the league. It’s the right thing to do, so he did it. That’s his whole wonderful code. I could understand wariness if there was some, given how run off from the franchise it felt like Williamson was before that trade happened, but there wasn’t any. Once they connected, both said the requisite things, and then when Williamson started showing back up at games again, and the requisite things were dropped, a genuine interest emerged.

Turns out, what Williamson wanted was respite, to sit back and watch his team play basketball without the eyes of everybody else in the arena watching him. Suddenly, he had nothing to do with what was working or wasn’t on the floor because the floor was working well enough for people to, for the first time since he was drafted, forget about him.

Brandon Ingram captivated, averaging 27 points, six rebounds and six assists in six games, his springy steps infused with something distinctly Durant-esque. It was the first time, on that kind of stage, that you got to see Ingram’s physicality, that he got to quell the long-running criticisms about whether or not his long, lithe frame was capable of spectacular force. Though I’m not sure how you could ever have clocked the arc on his shots, the emphatic height at their peak, eyes squinting against the lights in the rafters to track them, and thought he lacked for strength. Jose Alvarado going from undrafted to two-way option to playoff starter is not the kind of story you expect from New Orleans, if only because for so long young talent, if not deigned superstar calibre, went stagnant here. Alvarado’s quiet diligence (he’s 8th in the NBA in assist-to-turnover ratio) finally got its mirrors alongside McCollum, who called him fearless, and Jonas Valaciunas, who, grinning after the Suns series, shook his head in disbelief and said the rookie wasn’t afraid of anything.

The problem for this franchise is still in the ways it is willing to concede.

Gayle Benson, joint owner of the Pelicans and New Orleans Saints, was reported as recently as this week to say the team wasn’t willing to offer Williamson a full five-year guaranteed contract. It’s a football style deal, a lot of money floating up in the air for an athlete if their future, its promise and ambitions, don’t come crashing down to earth. It would seem a shrewd, sensible approach given Williamson’s lack of in-game experience thus far, if it wasn’t rooted in football’s logic of bodies being easily replaceable. Within that context, it just seems cheap. Callous. A mentality this franchise has gotten in trouble because of before. It also makes the necessity of getting another center — for rebounding, a buffer for Williamson, and a breather for Valanciunas — hinge on cost, which puts Rudy Gobert, who should probably get out of Utah, more or less on Mars instead of the shores of the Mississippi.

This is a group finally, happily, beginning to work. What’s more, in having a taste of the kind of momentum, success and and excitement — sifted sugar haloing their lips after a bite of a warm beignet — that must have not only seemed out of reach but walled off entirely to them, now appears earnestly up for the prospect of all the work to come. To concede after that recent a hit of sweetness is to leave only an insatiable want, a caving subsidence, instead of wanting more. Swallowing seasons of silt for eight games of sugar.