On parity
Or how, much like 2020, it's a lawless mess of your own choosing
Lately I have been missing the people I love as if I were with them in a moving car as a passenger. Free to gawp at their faces as they laugh and smile and zone out on the road and the impulse of driving, shooting me short glances, shouting through music, passing through traffic, all the different kind of light that could be playing across their faces. To be a passenger and taken care of, partially, but also tied up in that voyeurism the freedom of movement and company and the intention of destination again.
Steph taking me home across maybe five long city blocks along the Danforth, our first time in a car together just as driver and passenger and feeling all the years since we were teenagers invert to put us right back there, what it would have been like. Shanon taking us to Palm Springs as we passed an 18 wheeler on the freeway and I had to shout over the noise of it, shout that I thought the Clippers (2019-2020) could take it all. Believing in that for early conviction as much as the volume of my voice, Shanon letting out a long cheer at the same screaming amplification. Sean driving me around under palm trees, I don’t think we even talked about basketball at all.
The entire time my parents were stranded in the South Pacific in March and April, so long ago it feels like years even though everything else around that time — early lockdown, the belief this might be two weeks or a month at most, the woman I remember calmly loading the entire grocery store meat section for “Chicken” into her cart — could have been weeks ago but my brain has buried the trauma of that separation reliably deep, we had my mom’s tiny, gold two-door hatchback. Someone broke into it once, climbing in through the trunk with its broken lock, rifling through the glove compartment my mom didn’t keep anything in besides the stacks of extra napkins my dad had been gathering since I was a teenager. It felt like such a deep trespass though when I relayed it to my mom over spotty satellite phone she said it happened all the time. And it hit me then that was exactly why, because it was hers, theirs, and they were so far away, it was impossible to picture the next time we’d be sitting snugly in that ancient little Toyota Echo that permanently smelled like coffee and horses.
Thinking of all the ways this year has lodged into our softer parts, used them for leverage, cranked them wider.
To be in Chicago in February, with its rushing, biting winds, its icing over river, snow choked gutters, sinking into the backseat of cabs and cars with friends all of us swallowed whole by our parkas and puffers, hot, dry air from the vents there and in United Center scorching us warm, dry, with basketball exploding all around us, seemed so lucky. To be thrust into those extremes, haggard, worn out, no sleep to regulate our temperatures as much as the things we saw or said, all of it living on the slippery precipice of too much/not enough, but side by side and so close together, the last time so many of us would be. Chicago, for me, has become shorthand for where I left off and what things could still look like — for my ambitions, my quiet sense of internal control and power, my dumb and lingering hopes of affectionate proximity to the game and the people it has brought me to — when this is either over or far enough behind us to seem small, even if it’s an illusion of distance, because crack any one of us open and I’m sure you’d see the anxiety we’ve been submerged in like a high-water mark on our hearts.
It is so funny to me how much the idea of parity makes so many in basketball nervous. This season, what Brian Windhorst referred to just today as a “bloated middle class”, is the competitive equivalent of the league as a big blanket, taken outside and shaken. The dust and wrinkles erased, equidistant from one corner to any other when laid flat.
Parity is what’s been collectively mourned since the stranglehold of the Warriors dynasty, since LeBron could set his sights on any franchise going without and deliver. Parity like a pleading cure, a dumb little wish on an eyelash, a bargain you maybe didn’t realize you were making when you looked at your team and considered the distance between them and a championship.
But parity, now, with dozens of teams gaining at once, seems a scourge.
Is the worry that too many storylines will dampen each other, roil our limited attention, shift us from the easy urgency of two streamlined, easy to believe in contenders? Who could know that parity, for how smoothed out and lulling it sounds, means the grip of chaos, a lawless mess of your own choosing.
When Windhorst wrote that he was thinking of a league that’s return to competitive tidiness hinges on James Harden. A strange conclusion anytime but especially now, with Houston’s small ball system looking like an abandoned minotaur’s maze, intricate and labyrinthine, its lone inhabitant, who it was all made for, out to lunch, or I guess the strip club.
The two big things with Harden is no one knows what he wants, and who can really give it to him? Houston tried, for years, however slapdash or well intentioned (or sacrificial) you take their yearly pairing of new partner superstar. The other thing is that why does he have to go? Things aren’t working with the Rockets but it doesn’t mean any other team is willing to see if a change of scenery is what he needs. What you want, if this year has taught us anything, is so often not what you get.
Harden’s setting down somewhere else isn’t going to make the top two, or five, or seven in either conference clarify themselves any quicker. It is going to be a weird, at times drawn out, occasionally disrupted season where the Knicks will blow out the Bucks and the middle of the field expands so far, for so long, the shape of this year in basketball will appear more like the gulping flat of the horizon as you come down into desert than a mountain to scale.
We asked, probably disbelieving, for parity, and as briefly as it’s going to last we might as well enjoy it.
I wanted to fit this easily into the body of my last newsletter of the year but this year’s been more of a snowball than smooth segue, so. Whether you were here all along or signed up recently, Basketball Feelings has been an anchoring thing for me that I hope has been a coherent distraction for you. Thank you for reading and happy new year, let’s hope 2021 is the biggest chasedown block (of 2020) we’ve ever seen.