Exits: Whoop when you hit the ground

The Grizzlies going from rule breakers to stagnant, Ja Morant's air, and breaking out of Schönbrunn Palace.

Welcome to ‘Exits’, a retrospective series in its 5th year, published in order of team elimination in the NBA playoffs. Rather than a “what went wrong” these entries are meant as a snapshot, a mourning, a vent session, a hopeful vault forward, where myself and writers from in and outside of basketball media unspool their thoughts and of course, feelings. Hope you enjoy.

The gate was locked. Weird when I’d only just entered, checked the sign for when the grounds closed, and had 40 minutes. I swore I’d done a tight, 10 minute loop.

The Schönbrunn Palace’s grounds are a place where time slips, easily. Especially its botanical gardens after a recent downpour at dusk. The heat of the day, an unseasonal 30 degrees Celsius, pummelled to soft acquiesce by the rain. Now, mist hung low above the grass and chalk white gravel paths, and water clung to clumps of dusty mauve lilacs, pink and white chestnut blossoms, dinner plate peonies and shaggy pines. With lightning still streaking through the sunset-tinted magenta storm clouds, drifting off toward the Vienna Woods, and the sparse Friday night traffic of Hietzing muffled by the stone walls ringing the palace grounds, this time slip could’ve been centuries rather than an impatient guard locking up early and eager to get on with their weekend.

I pulled out my phone, pulled up the map, screen glowing a hue that matched the puddled lunar silver of the path. I walked to another gate, found it shut, and while I contemplated walking the 20 minutes it would take to get to the next one the monkeys in the Schönbrunn Zoo started calling into the encroaching night, coming down quick.

Walking a little, taking deeper huffs of the rain soaked air, I passed a cafe at the edge of the park. Closed, patio gates locked, but adjacent to it a long storage garage with an adjoining narrow parking area and a security gate, a little lower than the park’s old wrought iron ones. I tried to hoist myself up from a diagonal strut of the gate but the top ledge was smooth, slippery with rain, a little too high. Scanning along the fence, behind two tall stainless kitchen shelf trolleys and tucked against the garage’s stone wall where it met the gate, a stack of concrete tiles. I climbed, carefully, monkeys howling in the distance.

At the precipice of the tiles I looked down to the other side, to what I could lower myself onto from the top of the gate. A row of wooden skids, stacked vertically and leaning like dominoes, and a garbage can, dark plastic lid shiny and wet. I swung my legs slowly over the gate, pausing to sit on its narrow width and reach a testing toe to the skids first. They leaned away, into the garage wall, but held. With my other foot I tested the lid of the garbage can, willing my foot not to slip or anything to topple. I pictured rolling an ankle or worse, my rudimentary German (“Mein sohn ist groß”) not enough to explain myself to the person who found me, maybe the next morning, the last thing they’d want to see as they took out the trash and snuck a cigarette.

Hard not to let out a little whoop as I land, two feet firm, onto the ground. There are cameras on this side of the gate and I wonder who’ll catch a flash of me, sneaking out of Schönbrunn. Adrenalin up I walk the quiet, leafy streets of Hietzing, pleased and a little primal under its glowing green canopies.

The next morning my Viennese cousin texts, You’re true Viennese now, and I laugh thinking of the early part of this trip, in Amsterdam, when Margarita and I explained how we used to break and enter into any pool that would have us — every fence a calculation, every gate an invite to hop. How sometimes, to know a place, you have to push against its boundaries and locks. Reject its suggestions for entry.

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What was it Zach Kleiman said, back in February, that he wouldn’t deign to give rumours surrounding the Grizzlies trading Ja Morant any oxygen?

“Continue to underestimate Ja, this team and this city, and we will let our performance on the floor speak for itself. I’m not going to give this nonsense further oxygen and look forward to getting back to basketball,” was what Kleiman said to Daily Memphian reporter, Drew Hill.

The fear that oxygen would stoke further fires of speculation or come to be heard as sighing emission, the murmur of confession.

Interesting now when it’s oxygen that the Grizzlies, strangely stagnant in their last few months of the season, need most. The flush of it, whether fulsome or ragged, an element that could’ve served them in a four game sweep that saw their first loss with a 51 point differential. Perhaps a hint of the strangely tepid, reluctant effort to come.

Rule breakers — isn’t that what the Grizzlies were, three short seasons ago? When Memphis made it into the West’s semifinals with an overachieving young group, not shy about taking up all the air in any given room? How that performance led to the Grizzlies, and Morant as their figurehead, as the league’s next unconventional hope. Maybe a frenetic dynasty-toppler, maybe the next dynasty. Morant pushed into face-of-the-league contention, that mantle no one seems to want for its weight and superstition.

And how do we square breaking rules, the desire for a team like the Grizzlies to shake things up, with Morant the very next season wielding guns where he shouldn’t and seeming to shirk this request of the league to be its token, its proof? How that blurred the bounds of Morant as charismatic statesman, unconventional and unpredictable on the floor, to undesirable, because he began to apply those qualities off of it.

Morant’s league-mandated atonement thereafter, replete with studio lights and scripted repentance. That one could be so talented as Morant to take a short leave (very short, just two weeks) and understand completely what he had to change — a minor, totally staged miracle.

Since then, the Grizzlies have drifted. Missing the postseason entirely last season, an early exit the season before and the same again now. Kleiman firing Taylor Jenkins with two weeks to go in the season now looks like that desperate heave of hot air gusted up into a sinking balloon: an antiquated move in field this season — catapulting coaches, heist-like trades — so full of them (though I did like what interim-turned-official-head-coach Tuomas Iisalo said when asked about the history of his tenure and the weight it was already being assigned, “We had 15 games and two practices. I tried to do my best in those”).

Morant was once a figure we knew best set stark, stretching, shapely and contorted as a late-Picasso, against air. He’d vault up and into it, limbs cleaving easily through gravity’s tethers to reach for and find the basket, body boinging open like a spring and suddenly the ground so close, rushing gape-mouthed and greedy up to meet him along with the fear that he was now due for the awkward landing, the bad fall we’d all been holding our breaths for — for seasons.

Morant took to air like a stork, all gangly and gawk until he found his celestial footing, the downbeat of wings, some athletic updraft then whoosh, he was away. Or back, depending what you considered his natural state.

The heaviness of expectation and its asks weighs differently on everybody, maybe it was what brought Morant so hard, at times immaturely sulkily, back down to earth. But as Morant grew laden his teammates tried to strike a balance. Desmond Bane anchored himself, no longer zipping, fresh hell on two comparatively shorter legs but someone considered, necessarily patient. Scottie Pippen Jr., new to the core of the group but playing into both its public and working persona — tough, “a dog,” sure, but also diligent, even a little wise.

It’s been Jaren Jackson Jr. who has stood out the most for me. In his exit interview, he was direct, good humoured, and precise. He spoke about “being better late”, not as catch-all but with clarity that that’s where the Grizzlies were losing their games. His voice was even, but tinged in it came a bit of distance. Jackson Jr. and Morant are the last two left from that group that was heralded as rule breakers, heedless, but listening to Jackson Jr. now he’s anything but. I wonder how it is to be the one tasked with keeping two feet on the ground while your teammate all along has been encouraged to free-wheel in one way or another. What’s the air like between you then, strained or easy with understanding?

I don’t know as well as some of my peers the inner-workings of Memphis’ team dynamics, haven’t texted Kleiman for a couple seasons (he was always very nice), but the toll on the team seems like the gradual, deceptive heaviness stagnation will bring. After they broke those few rules in 2022 it now looks like they hung back. The field of playoff competition is currently rife with similar rule breakers, but none wear powder blue. After a brief, scorching early season this team feels stuck, from bottom to top.

In the last week I’ve been taking deep hauls of all sorts of air that feels at once weighted with half my family’s history and subsequently light, my first gasps in it. Alpine oxygen churned up by the snowmelt of glaciers running down from peaks to pristine, breath-seizing cold lakes below. Sticking my face close to moss and plants clinging to the cliffside the water runs through, gurgling up into springs you can drink from, air so heady with air, fresh, new forming air, I have no idea the word for it. Or else, stepping into medieval and more churches dense with incense and age, cool marble and wood polished with the wear of so many trailing hands. Forest air tinged with wild garlic after rain, air in bakeries tinged with powdered sugar, spices; air thick with the live smell of working horses that I peered down on during the Spanish Riding School’s morning exercises. And air rushing up to me as I scooted from fence to free-fall in the twilight at Schönbrunn, hoping to stick the landing.

Despite Kleiman’s February reticence, the Grizzlies could use oxygen, a lot of it. Sometimes the best way to get it is by making the jump from way up high, back down to square one. And whoop when you hit the ground, why not.