Exits: The one who holds the sky

Writer Alex Lewis on Nikola Jokic as Atlas, the trick (and fortitude) of time, and Denver on the mend.

My grandma jokes about death. At 90 years old, she acknowledges the passing of time. Incapable of envisioning the future, she laughs, “I will be dead and gone by then.” We laugh, too, even though we’ve never known life without her. We, of course, know that death is inevitable. And still, it is our greatest fear. The clock hitting zero.

Reflecting on her parents’ passing in The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion wrote, “I understood the inevitability of each of their deaths.” She continued, “I had been expecting (fearing, dreading, anticipating) those deaths all my life.”

We live with this fear of running out of time—or chronophobia, as I recently learned it’s called. We see this fear on display all around us, but especially in our favorite musicians’ lyrics. On the remix of Charli xcx’s “I think about it all the time,” a song about her biological and existential clocks, she sings alongside Bon Iver, “I’m so scared to run out of time.”

I started collecting instances of this phrase in music, and I learned it comes up way more than I thought. Last June, I wrote how Childish Gambino joined Tyler, The Creator on stage at Coachella, Gambino singing with deep familiarity this line that shows up across his and Tyler’s music: “Running out of time.”

The lesser-known Mr Hudson, who voiced the hook on Jay-Z’s “Young Forever,” sings on his 2009 track, “Time”:

“Time is all I fear, it's why I just keep running

The quest for love was all that you and I held dear

With the beat still in your head, and a good book by your bed

We will survive”

The Denver Nuggets witnessed many ends this season. Only two years removed from their first NBA championship in franchise history, they fired the head coach, Michael Malone, and general manager, Calvin Booth, who helped take them there. For basketball fans less familiar with Nuggets gossip, the only NBA news that felt more shocking was the Luka-AD trade heard around the world.

Malone, the winningest coach in Nuggets history, became synonymous with the team. After 10 seasons with the Nuggets, he was also the fourth-longest tenured coach in the NBA. While he was particularly beloved for his unbridled joy at the Nuggets’ championship parade in 2023, taking the stage wearing Peyton Watson’s Cuban links and a T-shirt that declared, ‘Put this in your pipe and smoke it,’ Nuggets fans were most surprised not that he was fired but by the timing of Malone’s dismissal.

I knew something had to give. After last year’s team ran out of steam in the Western Conference Semifinals, and when it looked like they were heading for a similar end to this season (which, they did), I anticipated a change. But I didn’t expect the Nuggets to make that decision with three games left before the playoffs.

The decision, itself, a byproduct of fear. All firings are. This one rooted in the fear that a window is closing. My grandma’s laughter—an acknowledgement that we age, and so do NBA superstars, even if they’re the world’s greatest. Nikola Jokic is 30 years old, and I don’t mean to imply 30 is old because, of course, it isn’t. But it is to say, he won’t be who he is forever.

While Jokic has put no timeline on his career, when you have a player as dominant as he is, who also understands there’s more to life than basketball, there’s no telling when his powers will fade or he’ll call it quits. Retreat to a simple life of drinking beer with his horses and family in Sombor, Serbia.

The Nuggets acknowledge Jokic’s importance. While the three-time MVP asserts he had no say in Malone’s firing, Nuggets vice chairman Josh Kroenke called it a “responsibility” to make sure Jokic had the best chance at winning—and it’s one he takes seriously. This factored into his decision to dismiss Malone and Booth and also played a significant role in him promoting long-time assistant coach, David Adelman, to lead the team.

Commenting on Jokic, Kroenke told reporters, “If that guy's on your roster, you have a chance to win it, and you should be going for it.” He added, “I feel more weight than anybody because, one, I want to do right by Nikola Jokic, the Hall of Fame basketball player, but Nikola Jokic, the person, is spectacular… There's no one that we want to do right by more than that guy.”

All roads lead back to Jokic. In many ways, he feels like Atlas, the one who holds the sky. The Nuggets are often talked about as playing through Jokic and living or dying by his ability to get other players involved. Even he feels the pressure. He took it upon himself ahead of the team’s 2022-23 season to understand what winning entails.

In Jokic’s biography, Why So Serious?, by former Denver Post reporter Mike Singer, Booth recalls a conversation he and Jokic had while they were together in Sombor that summer.

“I don’t know what it takes to win,” confessed the Serbian center, who had just won his second MVP in a row. Booth couldn’t believe what he was hearing. In Booth’s mind, Jokic was doing everything right. “And he’s trying to figure out, what did the Kobes do, what did the Michael Jordans do, how hard do you need to go to be Tim Duncan and win the championship?”

Some are built for this weight. All the players Booth mentioned could withstand the crown thrust upon them. I believe Jokic is no different. He’s proven it. But poet and author Ross Gay speaks to the thing within the thing. In his essay collection, Inciting Joy, Gay writes, “In addition to the fact that we all die, the most salient or unifying feature of we the living is that we cannot survive without help.”

One of the clearest examples of this is the Nuggets’ past two playoff runs. The inability of their bench, and sometimes the starters surrounding Jokic, to contribute to the box score has left the Nuggets without stamina—and without time. Although unbelievably resilient, the Nuggets have ended their last two seasons with Game 7 losses.

While Jokic was still able to smile after this year’s defeat because of how far the team came despite the challenges they had to overcome, he was matter-of-fact, as he usually is, when asked if he thought the Nuggets could still win a championship as the roster is currently constructed: “I mean, we didn’t, so obviously we can’t.”

Fans crave more help for the Nuggets—and it seems Jokic does, too. That’s why Jokic, often subdued, pushed for the Nuggets to sign Russell Westbrook before this season. He knew they needed a spark. Even those who carry the sky require help, especially when that sky holds a sun that shines 300 days a year. While Atlas’ name comes from the Greek word for “enduring,” one can only endure so much; eventually, they long for someone to alleviate the burden.

Atlas offered Hercules the sky, and I believe Jokic will accept any help that means bringing the Nuggets back to glory. Before the Nuggets won in 2023, he endured seven years without an NBA championship. The Nuggets organization waited 47 years, and I held the faith for 20 of those 47 years. Finally winning is a two-sided coin of relief (as Jokic sighed, “The job is done, we can go home now”) and understanding that winning isn’t promised. Only one team can do it. And for the rest, time fades.

No one is immune to endings, nor can we predict what the future will hold. As my wife and I sat at the dining room table with my grandma, me recording our chat because you never know when that conversation will be your last, she reminded us, “You don’t know tomorrow.”

“How I look at things, even at this age, is different,” Grandma continued. “Things that I used to laugh about, I cry about. Things I used to cry about, I laugh about. You change with your age as you go through life.”

I’m 31 now, and I got emotional after the Nuggets’ Game 7 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder. I figured that might be the last time I’d get to see the Nuggets’ core group play together. Jokic, Jamal Murray, Aaron Gordon, and Michael Porter, Jr.—the guys who started on the team that led the Nuggets to their first-ever championship. And as it goes, I was right. MPJ is now a member of the Brooklyn Nets after a blitz of offseason moves by the Nuggets.

Time runs out for all of us, but we prolong our living through others’ care and consideration. Already with a new head coach, front office, and weapons to surround Jokic, the Nuggets are not what they were. A new era begins. But Gay reminds us, “The way things become more lustrous, dearer, when we know they, or we, are disappearing.”

And what I’ve known of the Nuggets is, in fact, disappearing. But for today, and hopefully the tomorrows that follow, I excitedly sing just as Mr Hudson does: “We will survive.”

And so does my love for this team on the mend.