Exits: What can kindness count for?

In deep appreciation of and for Mike Conley.

There’s a picture of Mike Conley on my phone. He’s in a space age looking bathtub wearing swim goggles and a single-use shower cap, the extremely puffy variety they have at nice hotels. The tub has an aerodynamic lid to it, it might be a sensory deprivation tank. It looks like an escape pod from a movie where everyone has to abandon the spaceship before they’ve reached their intended destination, and we see them instead shoot out into the vast reaches of space, tiny and very alone.

At least, that’s the scene that comes to mind looking at Conley in this picture, hunkered down in the tub with the lid partially closed, turning to give one last look to the person taking the photo. His knees are bent and drawn slightly into his chest. It’s mostly a funny picture but there’s something a little lonely or apprehensive about it. I don’t remember screenshotting it in the first place, and inevitably forget about it until I scroll back that far — November 2019 — to find something. Still, I’ve never deleted it.

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Conley slipping, swerving, taking it right to the rim through traffic, through Blake Griffin, DeAndre Jordan, then through Serge Ibaka, Derek Fisher, all in the 2013 playoffs.

There’s a sequence in Game 2 of the Grizzlies-OKC Western Conference semifinals series — same night Conley had a 26 point plus 10 rebounds, nine assists line — where Conley whips himself open off a 24-year-old Kevin Durant to take the ball back from Marc Gasol, who he just passed it to, and pops up quick above a lagging Durant for the shot. Durant, then having played through three quarters of the same zinging tempo, physically hangs his head in defeat, gives it a shake for good measure.

You forget Conley is a measuring stick for so many of the league’s stars who’ve, perhaps in broader audience appeal, eclipsed him.

How hard he made life for Kawhi Leonard, that Spurs team in general. Seasons spent facing them first, the ragtag team a well-oiled San Antonio had to begrudgingly chase. Same for the Thunder, Conley a cool wrench in Russell Westbrook’s engine for years, and against the Clippers, he was one of the only guards who could make Chris Paul question his footing.

Captain Clutch, that’s what they called him. Now, Anthony Edwards calls him “Bite Bite,” because Edwards says when he gets going, Conley looks like “he's ready to bite something” (Conley’s said he isn’t a fan of that one).

You forget that he shared the same Draft night stage with Durant, with Al Horford. Conley currently, likely, sitting on a spectrum between the two in your brain when it comes to not the actual age of age, but its arbitrary factors. How old these guys seem, and that age most certainly influenced by the number of zeros in their last contract.

Aside from Conley as tidy lever, the psychic pivot point in this exercise, it’s also likely you don’t think of him much, if at all.

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One of my favourite strange, sports artefacts of the pandemic — the NBA’s televised H-O-R-S-E contest.

A real hallucination you may have blinked and missed between Rudy Gobert slathering his hands all over those microphones and the season picking back up in the Orlando Bubble. There isn’t even a dedicated Wiki entry for it, just a measly mention tacked onto the entry for the H-O-R-S-E game briefly introduced at 2009 NBA All-Star — but you can still find clips floating around of each round.

The audio was earnest and bad, competitors’ voices and taunts jagging with their breath and blotching out with environmental interference. Mark Jones mediated each round, flipping a coin in a room that looked like a quickly converted “office” for broadcast (this was pre-practiced-Zoom office backdrop, remember), wrinkled jerseys affixed to the wall behind him. The full group of contestants were Zach Lavine, Chris Paul, Trae Young, Mike Conley, Tamika Catchings, and Allie Quigley, plus Paul Pierce and Chauncey Billups. They would complete their respective rounds via Zoom or Skype or wobbly FaceTime held by a friend or family member or phone propped up somewhere with a decent frame of the scene, either playing outside on neighbourhood courts or in their own backyard half-courts, all of them squinting into the weak, wintery sun.

Everyone, that is, except Conley.