Exits: The tenderness of routine

Denver is a working team, can they still know themselves when that rhythm falls away?

Nikola Jokic thrives in the tenderness of routine. That is, those small, measured actions that quietly build and layer into the bedrock of our lives.

Tender, because there is something so inherently trusting in how we organize our days, ourselves, and by extension our lives; a feint of control from the function of routine, the pleasure of menial order.

Not just the small, surreptitious satisfactions that habit lends, but the practicality of its boundaries, limits we’ve designed so meticulously ourselves. To have a routine is a comfort. Even for people who shirk at the weight or quiet repetitions, the rejection of routine is still a thing to rely on.

So much of ourselves is borne out in routine. Not only our preferences, but our base speed and emotional frequencies, the way we attune to other people. In a year spent in the company of, mostly, ourselves, it felt unbearable at times, how predictable and limiting our repetitions. They were also lifelines. Easy, well-worn roads to follow on autopilot with perspective as a view.

Now that the small spheres of our so long closed routines are cracking open, spilling again into a larger, less contained shape, I hope I can keep the careful attention it took to differentiate what became so habitual. Like a morning this week, Dylan taking the dogs out and 10 minutes after they left the sky, already brooding, split. They got home soaked but I could hear his voice murmuring to them in the front hall as he towelled them dry — Captain will lean into it, duck his big head into the curve of the towel under Dylan’s hands, George is reluctant but lets his paws be lifted, relaxes when his chest gets rubbed — the quiet concern and patience of it. Or driving home from my parents in the grips of early summer, past the strip malls and low commercial buildings of Scarborough, comforted by the familiar rhythm their outlines cut against a sky washed magenta, violet, a chalky powder blue, settling so deeply into myself with their decade-same sequence that my breath slowed, shoulders rolled to ease in what felt the first time in months.

Creature comforts are primal, that is, they live around your pulse, feel secondary as instinct. What’s an overclose habit can yield a better if annoying/stubborn/basic as in vital understanding of yourself.

Jokic inhabits himself completely. It’s what makes him so magnetizing, even ataractic, to watch. It would perhaps feel limiting if it didn’t first feel like the lack of ready comparisons to Jokic — everything from how he moves to his mannerisms, the same in the heat of competition as on the cool shoulder of it — didn’t open an entirely new world on court. It’s the comparisons that would be limiting, assigning this form or that shot. Models are somewhere to start from but if you never stretch past them then you clamp down on what’s possible. That our brains don’t always know what to do with Jokic are our limitations, not his.

Jokic plays easy because he is first in his body. I’ve talked to players who’ve been asked to guard him, players who study his tape to try and decode a new physical language for their own, and they all acknowledge a physical awareness right down to the millimetre. How Jokic can “put you in jail” with his angles, like Kevin Huerter told me. Body like a riptide — quiet on the surface, a high sheen of threat if you know where to look, a still, slow space to be drawn into.

To say he’s a natural might be the best we can describe it. Natural talent, knack, athleticism, all that, but all that out of an open, unaffected sense of his body not as it moves through bullied spacing, but as a conduit for all those things aligning around it. On court, watching him, we’re made keenly aware that things move through him or not at all. The game organizes itself around Jokic, orderly as routine.

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“What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them.” - Cormac McCarthy

He’s meditative with his horses, you can see that right away. The slouch of his body made soft, impossibly compact when he folds himself into the tiny, two-wheel racing cart, how his eyes go gentle when he approaches them, the way his eyebrows lift, his face opening up. With an animal that’s evolved from 35 million years on the run, how it reads you will start before you’ve said anything: what you had for breakfast even in the long light of evening coming on, how well you slept for how jangled your nerves, your pulse practically made to radiate out from just the tentative reaching tips of your fingers.

I can picture Jokic in the thin, cool light of morning, quiet but for birds already up and busy, reaching the barn and seeing ears prick and swivel in the blue shadows at his approach, eager heads swing up behind the bars of a stall or an open window over its door. Warm huffs of air from so many wide nostrils picking him up before he’s close. I can picture it because in the photos I’ve seen of him handling horses his huge hands reach and hold with just fingertips, no grasping. Even when he hooks a hand into the halter around their heads the contact is the right balance of firm and fluid, a responsive, liquid handle. Asking. Working with horses is a dialogue, every channel open, listening even in the comfortable lulls.

The way he talks about them is rhythmic: “I just enjoyed [being] with them, just to clean them up, just to ride with them.” The punctuation of “just” to emphasize the point that if each action were it, if nothing followed, it would be enough. That he returns to this every summer as a necessary reclusion as soon as he can — how short it must feel. Summer as safe haven and its fallback, familiar routine as low-stakes idolatry. Tender worship of the time you have.

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Denver is a working team. Less flourish and finesse as much as straightforward, well-practiced basketball. Reps at high altitude, effective without taking work as persona. The root of habit, steady as a mountain, the scope of its reward the view. The Nuggets did not come tumbling down, their routine was disrupted. Without Jamal Murray, with Will Barton out from May until what were Denver’s last three games, with Monte Morris spotty for stretches, the rhythm fell away.

The trick of routine is not to grow so reliant on its rigging over results, that the accessories of habit aren’t what become compulsive. To take habit lightly can be its own kind of heavy work, but with Jokic gone for summer, slipping with ease into a well-worn version of himself put carefully away like racing silks, with Murray’s rest and rehabbing and with Mike Malone’s name out of the coaching mess of this offseason so far, the disruption is really just a reset. A tenderness in loosening.