Letter of recommendation: The NBA Draft

Oh but it’s hopeful, isn’t it? For one night crushing expectation and holdover pageantry merge to create a pocket universe where the cruelties of reality are briefly delayed. All of it reliant on your own willful suspension of disbelief of which, if you’re like me, will waiver throughout the exercise, threaten the whole thing to come crashing down.

It’s a lot, so we’ll start with the hats.

The only time a player is probably going to wear a ball cap of their own team or even a basketball hat at all and it’s oversized and screaming. A billboard of a hat to signal an exit off a desolate highway, no more going it alone. Here’s your team, put it on your head.

Unless — and I hate this part — in the time it takes for a draftee to walk up onto the stage, have the giant hat placed atop their head while they duck and stand there grinning under the lights, then take the testing steps under its weight (destiny, expectation, surplus material) and walk off they were subsequently traded. And they don’t know yet.

You know, watching at home, that the phones of the draft’s participating front offices have been ringing hot for this poor kid who is just starting to picture what it will be like to live in his new city. You know, a slob on the couch while his family, dressed up and crying, sitting out on the makeshift ballroom of the host arena’s floor don’t. Then, expecting to be asked his thoughts on this new city, maybe he’s even landed on a good line about the place, the broadcaster tells him he’s been flipped. In the gigantic shadow cast by the oversized brim of the enormous hat, his face scrambles.

I understand sometimes this works out better, it’s weird to picture Luka Doncic playing for the Hawks or Kawhi in Indiana, but that’s a stabilizer of hindsight. The night of, no matter the version of the future that is unfolding, it’s always too much.

To ditch the hats could be a kindness. One less symbol of permanence for an event that fights so hard to be a sure and steady marker of accuracy, assurance, but is in fact only chaos, lightly concealed for the evening. Leave it to the handshake, leave it to the big board.

The board! The board has had some modernization. Before, each impatient team was made to wait for their pick, First initial. Last name, slid into its requisite space. Void, for that moment, for all time if you chose to believe it, filled. Now it’s like a big digital divining screen beaming down the future. The board is immunity, a name in its destined place forever*, relief for that second spelled as a surname.

(*for however long)

Out on the floor, where the waiting potential picks — the language of the draft is even geared toward outcome; to call them rookies would be to imply they are going to be, to call them draftees does the same — and their families watch the board is also an hourglass in a shape that makes less sense the longer the night goes on. Every space that’s filled without their names goes against their entire reason for being there.

At home, watching the wide pans of the thinning crowd is what will constantly threaten to take you out at the knees of your heart. Your disbelief, the thing this entire exercise is riding on, will sink closer to earth with every glance of a face attempting to override its tension or a parent giving a reassuring pat on the shoulder. In every reminder that not everyone there is going to make it onto the board, gravity catches up. Because you aren’t even thinking of beyond this night, the training camps and two-way assignments and what kind of realistic minutes these guys are looking at, it’s too faraway and far too practical.

This night is for the spooky organ music before the commissioner takes their steps up to the podium, music where you have to wonder, if this is not supposed to be scary for anyone, why is it a small Halloween in here?

This night is for the hope that a pretenseless, straightforward dream can still exist. That if you put in all of your effort and keep your mistakes to a minimum you can still come out on top of something insurmountable. This night is for the outfits, the surprise shining linings of a suit jacket, probably velvet trim, a shoe buffed to blind. This night is for crying pretty much the whole way through, for momentarily getting a hold of yourself until a parent takes over a post-pick interview with the briefed and smiling reporter and talks about how happy, how proud, poised and determined until the moment and the place collides with them and they cry, their son cries, you are crying again.

This night, in its great hoax, is about hope. You know the odds each player is fighting against and you believe truly and deep down that they are going to work out exactly right, exactly as they want to, all of them somehow the best anyway. You can count the number of number one picks who have become life-giving league stars and not eventual inverted points of light where the promise of a career once was and still think this year the number and all of its shattering pressure will be worn lightly, will tally true. You know in only two years you will look back on the results of this night and think, Really? but you will deride the team that waits too long, that overlooks, that leaves someone waiting. Because you also know the people you are going to love watch inherent the floor in five, ten, more years are there somewhere, waiting in a jumble of projected numbers that isn’t going to mean anything when they ultimately become the player they will be, when they make you gawp, lose language, feel your bones pool to bliss over something they have done.

This year’s draft isn’t going to look anything like itself. No hats. A board like a monolith, alone somewhere, casting out names into an empty arena or converted conference room where Adam Silver and a team of PAs waits between awkward and glitching cuts from Zooms of living and family rooms the world over. We will puzzle at decor just out of frame, a wayward pet, lighting. It will feel so much less tense though the exact same amount of everything is riding on it. They had better keep the music.

The draft is, in most every way, aspirational. Even as an event it aspires to be different from what is actually happening: the assigning of people to numbers to teams. A bizarre and bordering on problematic practice that needs the props and the music and the rhythmic script (“With the X pick in the X NBA Draft, the X X select…”) preceding every name to sustain itself as ritual. And still in all of its over-production and ostentation the most tangible, measurable and pared down thing is the hope plain on the faces of the young men and their families, waiting. That its truest element is the most aspirational of all is why we watch. To know the weight of the odds, their creeping gravity, and to still hope for the best is the dumb, ardent and reliable habit of being human.