Fog on the league's trick mirror
Fog or snow, it was hard to tell. When I’d gone to sleep the moon had been rising over the tops of the houses across the street, washing the room in a diluted, soft white, and when I woke up 8 hours later the light was milky and muted, almost the same. I sleep so deeply at my parents house that when I wake up, in the night or the next morning, it feels like my brain is coming up through time, picking up years like objects and turning them over, setting them down, taking stock. Not the panic of waking somewhere new, but the holdover of memory so deep that working through it is physical.
It was fog, thick and shrouding, the only thing reaching through it the black branches of the beech tree beside the driveway. From somewhere downstairs the scrabble of the dog getting fed, the crash of my dad closing drawers. Impossibly, I burrowed down and went back to sleep.
The Raptors won’t play tonight, it’s likely they won’t until after the All-Star break. In the span of two days the team went from down Pascal Siakam and a handful of coaches, including Nick Nurse, to having less than the requisite eight players to play a game by the makeshift rules of a hobbled season. Rules that never really set out to provide a meticulous framework as much as the ruse of moral one. The Raptors aren’t anything special in this, they’re now the 27th team forced to bail because they’re less the bodies it would take, but the 48-hour cycle surrounding what’s happened does a good job at highlighting what’s so strange, uncomfortable, explicitly wrong with the overarching reality of this season, a reality the league keeps trying to shove out.
When Nurse didn’t coach it became occasion for Sergio Scariolo to step in. A handful of feel-good articles followed, of how unbothered, how composed Scariolo was in his NBA coaching debut. A small sidebar came in how capable Kyle Lowry could be as a player-coach. Rolled up in this narrative was a kind of forced resilience, as if this coach and this player had not been put in this position by the overt negligence of their employer. A day later and there was no talk anymore of a next man up mentality, because there were no men left.
What’s more unsettling, that we can be so quick to cobble together a story to shroud a threat that’s never been encroaching, only overt and pervasive, or that we still feign surprise when the threat steps beyond the imaginary bounds we have allowed the NBA to place it within? To exercise control over Covid would require the league to have once, ever, this season, existed in the same reality it instead continues to be surprised by. It’s as much a moral failing as it is an entirely frustrating thing to watch, this play at being agape at the inevitable and the stern pantomime that follows.
I went on Dave, Seth and Mo’s show this week to talk about empathy, to talk about how difficult it was in a season that felt adrift, its tethers to reality cut by the same people who have pushed to keep it going. We talked about the lack of storyline, that there hadn’t been a big one, or any number of building ones, and how the season lacked a sufficient rhythm easy to succumb to even if you wanted to try, despite all the reasons not to.
It’s because of the stops.
Every time the season idles because of “health and safety protocols” we understand this to mean a player has tested positive for Covid or had been close enough to someone who had. As garish and detached as the pandemic has made us, able to compartmentalize and carry on, we haven’t yet removed virus from person, we feel a private flinch of recognition at the understanding. This is, pretty much, our saving grace. The league, as a business, is bereft of this flinch. It’s why the NBA has felt perpetually several steps behind in what it deems important, in what it deems that the fans will deem important — Christmas Day games, anthems, All-Star — the urgency is misplaced. Like a trick mirror showing a ghoulish imitation of an entirely different person standing behind it pulling faces; the reflection is way, way off.
The disruptions have become the rhythm. Staccato alarms impossible to sync to. A mixed blessing, maybe, because it means that if you’re watching with a semblance of awareness it’s impossible to be lulled. Every stop is a body in potential distress, disarray, and in a repetitive reality as this, days slipping and sliding together in succession that seems, if anything, like leap-frogging instead of moving forward, it feels good, reassuring, that we still have the capacity to be jolted.
It’s the days I’m having a hard time with. How relentlessly they’re starting to turn over. In my longest possible forecasts of how far out I could picture things going, I only ever got to the fall. The winter, let alone early spring and a year anniversary of when things more or less stopped (for me, last year’s NBA season) was so far out my brain didn’t even try to put it in focus.
I started crying in the street this week. Standing in front of a closed hair place, Steph and I leaning against the sun warmed glass at opposite ends of the shop’s front window, to-go coffees steaming in the late February air.
“You always try,” she said, “in all the time I’ve known you, you’ve never stopped trying.”
We weren’t even talking about me, it was more about a generalized effort for moving forward, creating impulsion in your life. I hadn’t been looking to hear it but it caught me in a soft and secret worry and yanked all the same.
Every day requires a kind of renewed buy-in, a conscious decision to listen to the logical part of yourself that understands the timelines, where things could turn around for the better even if it still feel so far off. Clumsily stabbing a finger under my sunglasses to deflect the tears from running under my mask I felt, in front of my best friend, a little reprieve. A deep heave of breath under the weight of that agreement we’re all making to move forward, even if the days offer nothing but hours collapsing.
I came home for the weekend because it’s my brother’s birthday. I also came home to idle where the pressure was off. Walking winding stretches of suburban streets with my mom and her friend, listening to them talk as I kept steps ahead and looked at the houses I remembered being inside as a kid, home to my neighbourhood friends. Playing Scrabble in the kitchen after dinner as my dad put down “ENROPY” and we told him, “Almost!” Feeling the familiar tightness in my face of getting sun and falling asleep in a room so steeped in time it felt outside of it.
It is not such an ambitious, elevated wish to want the thing behind what you love to try, to want the NBA to try. When you consider the way we’re all just feeling our way forward, a corporation with all the data and money and power it does should do better than shift the rules depending on what suits it. We’ve seen how the NBA has done so far this season in the ambiguity of optics, thriving in the fogged-out limbo stretching between where the rules bend and where they break.
Another thing all the stops offer is clarity. Forced out of even the limping flow of this season and we blink, take another, maybe longer, look, and reassess what it means for all of it to be happening. Like waking up with the fog burned off, or wiping a palm across the league’s trick mirror of trying.