If a punch falls in Vegas
On Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro's Summer League altercation, and the volatility of this offseason so far.
The first thing I think when I read that Bam Adebayo punched Tyler Herro in the face in Las Vegas is how strange, it happened three miles away. The smallness of Vegas, and the even more compact nature of it during Summer League, crowds in. It isn’t abstract, like the reverberations of the punch drifting over on the dry wind rolling out, past me in my hotel room, to Rainbow Mountain and its gradient mesas in the powder blue distance. It’s concrete. It feels close in the sense that I know I will soon be hearing more about it out of the mouths of people who were there. It’s within social and physical range.
The second thing I think is, how uncharacteristic of Adebayo. A person whose calm, steady nature has been essential to the Heat in ups as much as downs, a nature that includes altruism as impulse in the wider world. What and how much it takes to push a person like that, to that.
The third thing I think, leading up to 24-hours after I found out, and have run through my own initial Summer League emotional warmup of mixed nerves, professional interrogation (am I doing enough, who do I need to see, what do I want to come away with, is it fine if I don’t know), and slipping into the rhythms of the place, is how parallel everybody’s insecurity is, in this contained ecosystem and beyond.
If there’s a through-line I’m beginning to tug on for this summer’s NBA transactions, which are really interpersonal dynamics couched in “business”, it’s the primer notes for insecurity.
