Exits: The toilers of Texas

The Dallas Mavericks love to make it look hard.

There is something utilitarian about the Mavs. They were a stubborn, pick-and-roll powered team through the engine of Dirk and Nash and even when they adapted for the league’s increasing speed, in one of the earliest postgames of his career, Luka Doncic said the team was playing faster so they could “play more possessions”. Wringing out the available minutes in a game, the basketball equivalent of telling someone there are 24 useable hours in a day.

But to watch the Mavs is to be reminded that sometimes work is what it takes. To gather yourself, to sit down and start something, to methodically put one foot in front of the other not until you are there, because that’s going to take a while, but to achieve a measure of progress to determine the distance for yourself.

And to watch Doncic is not to see smooth, unburdened basketball.

With a game predicated on pump fakes and passing, juddery false starts meant to bait and lurching, sea sick stops, his motivation is to set snares and snarl not just a defender, but anyone on the floor who sets a wrong foot. His threes are the most fluid thing and probably only because that long, sinking arc of the ball allows enough time for anyone watching to pause, catch their breath, get off the ride for a minute.

There are times when it isn’t clear what he’s not endeavouring to make more difficult for himself, from work on the floor to occasionally clamouring, petulant, with the refs, his face suddenly rosy, expression incredulous. Some players grow rhythmic, subdued, meditative under strain, but Doncic will puff his cheeks out, grimace, twist his face up as he clears one defender after another, making furrows through the paint.

It’s not all bad mood. There are his exultant airplanes, landing with his arms out wide and loping back up the floor. His single palmed chest thuds, his out of context thumbs ups, his hopping finger guns, but then it’s right back to what’s arduous.

Rick Carlisle is all quiet, head-down grit. He can level a glance that might force a mountain into moving, for how flush with disappointment. He is a surprisingly tender coach, too. Cataloguing all the years and all their knocks that his players had to go through before they got to him to memory, ready to be called up and used as weight behind his words. I’ve had him flip that switch on me, talking about Tim Hardaway Jr. Carlisle’s curt, cursory responses suddenly melting warm when he made it clear we were talking about Tim, now.

Hardaway is that chipping away player. The kind who seals his face off for 48 minutes and unspools loud and rangy in the locker room. He’s spent the last three seasons proving that Dallas could be his landing place. Pushing past bouts of spotty shooting and boomeranging around the league, grouped in as a number more than an addition, a “making the ends meet piece” in the Kristaps Porzingis trade, which has now completely inverted. Hardaway being the reliable, ready, engaged return.

It seems redundant to write about Porzingis. I know it certainly will be for Mavs fans, who spent all season waiting for him to kick in. If he really is frustrated being a backup to Doncic then I wonder what he anticipated, here in Texas.

Remember how he got there? His hurried exit from New York. The way he’d flouted the possibility of his leaving before it happened. And what was he, right then? A kind of Hail Mary hope, a gloated over idea. There was something about it, plus the violent assault and rape allegations trailing behind him like cans on a Just Married car Mark Cuban thought he could ditch at the airport, that was way too opportunistic for the Mavs pragmatic, non-idealistic brand of what a team ought to be.

(An aside: it always feels strange that a franchise so practical would have someone like Cuban in charge, someone as prone to bouts of bluster, backtracking and sporadic bursts of revelation. But then most billionaires seem to oscillate between pragmatic and altruistic on the spectrum of self-preservation.)

It was such a rush of a style change, like impulse buying through imagined crisis. If Porzingis played like he wanted to be there, it might be easier to believe him when he says this isn’t what he expected. I’m biased, because I never believed him, but what, really, did he picture life to be like on a workaholic team? The Mavs, Luka, love to make it difficult — for them, for him, for you, for everybody. They are toilers. Even Boban’s joyful brightening bursts do nothing to detract from the way he is prepared to grind, pestle and mortar both, anyone down on the floor.

I admit that Dallas makes it hard to be easily captivated. They want you to strain along with them. And it must certainly feel like an onerous thing that they’ve spent years to get just, right, here. But then, that’s progress. The work nobody tells you about. All the bracing steps between there and not what’s here, but what you want to come after.