Relentless revving
The NBA's trade machine churns on, and what's been knocked loose in Giannis Antetokounmpo?
For days there’s been one persistent sound. It starts guttural; low, nagging complaint from the belly of a beast. From there it moves into churning grumbles, tapering to silence or else climbs, pitch gaining tonal strain. If the strain gets too frantic, too tight, there’s an easing off, seconds later it begins again. Cars, many of them, struggling in the snow that’s been dumped on the city. Spinning wheels, stuck.
Toronto gets snow and most drivers are used to it. Still, there is a muscle memory that must be coaxed back to life for drivers in the city and it usually comes with the first big snowfall. The sound of that reawakening is revving.
Relentless revving.
All the windows in my apartment face onto one of the city’s main roads where it begins to climb steadily uphill, and where another of the city’s big streets intersects it, dead-ending and spilling its traffic. One morning this week, after a night of straight snowfall, I made coffee and idled at the window while it brewed, watching the early morning traffic creep cautiously along.
There’d been no overnight plough, the road was the same colour as the sidewalks, as the boulevards, as the thick blanket weighing on the trees: white, all white. Most every driver kept it cool — after all there is no rush to get to work with the baked-in excuse of a snow day — but sure enough, pouring my coffee, I heard my first rev of the morning. Back over at the window to watch a small silver sedan make a swaying fishtail forward a dozen feet before sliding backward and punching the gas. The wheels spun but the car didn’t go anywhere. That churn, that strain, somehow extra futile in an extra muffled world.
Eventually, if you’ve got a situation like mine, you learn to tune the sound out. Either that or you leave the house. I suppose the same goes for the NBA Trade Deadline.
The revving of the NBA’s trade machine, its strain this time of year, I try my best to shift my attention which only works so long as I’m not asked about it and that only lasts as long as between podcasts, shows and idle conversations at games. Not a winning strategy, but the best I can do.
I don’t like trades for their own sake. The monetary machinations of front offices, the win/lose dichotomy of trades, pretty dull to me. The proprietary language placed on athletes, assigning people a wholly arbitrary going rate (X for X player, future picks, or worst of all — cash considerations) or that shuttling people’s lives around is such a gleeful prospect to some, that part has always felt gross. Trades centred on individual experience, that part I enjoy and when I’ve spoken with athletes about it, yield the most interesting takeaways. Careers that suddenly blossomed or rekindled, new perspectives for athletes, more recognition and appreciation for them from new fanbases, those things feel great. To some degree, I can admit that is me finding the silver lining of trades in order to exist in the same ecosystem that demands them.
Huge stars, the people fans and media alike most want to be traded at deadline time, are the least likely to be moved. When and if they do it’s in the summer, and then, they tend to move themselves. So it’s been unusual to witness the rev and churn of this trade season centre around big stars — Giannis Antetokounmpo, Ja Morant, Anthony Davis — to the extent that I wonder if last winter’s Luka Doncic-Anthony Davis swap warped everybody’s brains to a degree we haven’t recovered from yet.
It’s possible players haven’t either.
A kind of steady phenomena in the NBA has been the correspondence between perceived stardom and safety. That athletes who achieve a certain level of star power are removed from the steady, banal churn of trade talk and its related stresses. That it’s possible to become too big to be traded.
When Doncic was traded to the Lakers the two-way mirror gained with that tier of stardom shattered. Players at that level suddenly and wholly exposed.
“If he can get traded then anybody's up for grabs,” Kevin Durant said.
“I'm scared,” Anthony Edwards chuckled. “Tim [Connelly], if you're gonna trade me let me know dawg. When Luka got traded anybody is able to get traded at that point.”
“I think nobody is safe in the league, it seems like,” Nikola Jokic said.
“Luka being a guy that everybody has claimed is untouchable, and untradeable, and the NBA shows you again. You just can't predict it, you know, it's a business. They're always having a conversation about you, so don't think you're safe at any point,” that was Devin Booker.
It was Antetokounmpo who gave one of the longest answers when asked for his reaction to the trade. An answer that ranged from shock to rattling off, by heart, Doncic’s career-best stats and accolades then circled back to himself, his own efforts, and finally, to what rang like a future-proofing appeal:
But at the same time, it goes both ways. You cannot have a double standard here… When a player believes that he can go to a different team and he believes he can have a chance to win a championship, we cannot crucify the person and say that he's not loyal and he didn't do the right thing and he let everybody down. Because history has shown you, you have to do what is best for you and your family. You have to do what's best/most important to win.
That was nearly a year ago and the rev around Antetokounmpo, the entire NBA ecosystem spinning its wheels to smoke, hasn’t let up. As if his public-facing realisation — that effort didn’t guarantee infallibility, that dedication didn’t mean a fan base wouldn’t turn on you — corresponded with our own.
