Shooting holes in the calendar
Two things tied to each other like sweaty hand holding: Jonas Valanciunas hasn’t gotten his homecoming game and time is roaming.
It did not seem possible, when I first thought of it, that JV hadn’t been back to Toronto yet. In all the time between his getting sent to Memphis and now, what seems more than one season rather than the less than one year in either real and/or basketball time, JV has not set one giant foot back on the high-shining hardwood in Toronto. Even with him now in the Western conference, with its strange visitation laws, it feels like this is something that has been skipped over entirely.
It felt like such an anomaly of time that rather than trusting the deeply knowing, near primal thing in me that senses when a player’s first return-after-amicable-trade-or-signing-montage is coming, so I can treat myself very tenderly leading up to it and afterward, I looked up the schedules on Basketball Reference. Peered at the plainer than Excel timetables for both teams, this year and last, and whispered, “What the fuck?” Because it’s true. It hasn’t been more than a year, only 88 basketball days and 283 real days. Because time is oscillating more than ever and if you don’t believe me you should know that when I went to add up the days between last season and now, since JV’s first day in Memphis and what’s gone in this season so far, it was 62 days last season and 26 this.
The day after the big snow dump this week leaves were hitting the sidewalks like birds in cataclysmic events when they drop from the sky, at once and all together. When the snow finally stopped, over 12 hours and something like 15cm, the temperature went so far below freezing that the last leaves froze and snapped off. It was a strange sight, a blanket on a blanket.
Is it basic to admit I’ve been thrown off all November by its weather? Probably, but then the weather, as it usually shores up the seasons, has been giving people their subliminal cues before they knew to pay attention to it.
November in Toronto isn’t usually nice, like I’m not nostalgic for freezing cold rain five days out of seven, but there is something in the gross build of it that gradually gets your body ready for what’s coming. Warm socks, the reemergence of some kind of transitional boot, layers against the damp to get used to the feeling again of restricted movement, limbs burrowed under so much clothing. And skin, so far from air, trying to tender it from cold but also the heat coming back on, in various degrees of sophistication, blasting from overhead or under, pulsing from clanking radiators.
The snow, that much and so early, set a record and beat the previous one—3cm in 1983—mid-way through morning rush hour. Before that there was no record worth keeping. It was beautiful, but there was a distinct sense, 400 collisions in 24hrs aside, that no one was ready. I only was because I’d hauled all my winter stuff out to bring to Calgary with me the week before. But the feeling with a first snow is usually like a smiling WOWWWW, this was mostly heads down, trying to maneuver, almost ignoring it, if that were possible.
Since then, more snow and a cold you brace against before you tense your muscles up to push against the door out. Probably some of you are thinking, flat as bathwater, “You live in Canada.” Yeah buddy, but there are levels to this thing. You can’t get through something that grips your whole body for 5-6 months otherwise.
Losing little increments can make you feel like you are losing your grip on how you parcel out time. How you account for it. Even if increments are “swap summer for winter duvet” or “army coat won’t cut it”.
I started wondering about JV’s homecoming game, and the time sinkhole around it, when I heard he wasn’t going to get a championship ring. First I thought well, since he’s already been back it won’t be the absolute worst missed opportunity for ruining a few thousand fans’ emotional lives. When I realized it was going to be the absolute worst missed opportunity I didn’t think of fans anymore, only JV.
What I don’t get, other than what a gigantic oversight it is by a franchise that so often appears to think in, I would like to hope, thoughtful ways, is how you build the team that won that ring without Jonas Valanciunas. This isn’t in a theoretical way, like going backward as an exercise in a vacuum and showing how every player in franchise history technically contributed to the same end. Two things mostly: the guys Ujiri got his hands on his first summer as GM and decided to shape as his core after cutting loose Bargnani and Rudy Gay had Valanciunas as almost a big sun-type-star to Lowry, DeRozan and Ross’s oscillating orbits, and, very directly, very very directly, you didn’t get Marc Gasol without him.
In there too are Delon Wright and CJ Miles. Wright, who had his best game as a Mav against the Raptors this week and then, post game, had Bobby Webster confirming that the last trifecta to go out before Kawhi Leonard’s bounce shot went in, wouldn’t catch the glint from even a little of their own blood sacrifice.
I am waiting for and I hope it doesn’t come, a comment like the correcting tack on a sailboat, that this is a business. Because is it? When the franchise has made a point to give out custom rings to Drake and Nav Bhatia, plus 19,000 replicas to its other fans, what is 3 more for players who played in 2/3 of the same season these fans all just watched?
Bobby Webster mentioned they’d done their homework, talked to other teams, and barring “unique circumstances” it just didn’t happen. He mentioned Anderson Varejao specifically and the Warriors giving him a ring in 2016-2017, which seemed bizarre to the point where I (again) looked it up to make sure the Warriors didn’t somehow ruin Varejao’s life and then offer him a ring as an apology.
Circumstance, in itself and always, is unique. By definition,
In this case, the unique circumstance is the very thing they are choosing not to reward. It is the Toronto Raptors winning the title. Not unique because it was so unexpected, so out of left field for so many, but unique as in any gigantic win in a field constantly shifting, barring injury, fluke, some other celestial fuck up will be. It was that one team, with those exact guys, for that single season. A season that Delon Wright, CJ Miles and Jonas Valanciunas won in and dinged up and triaged and built for.
The erasure, the picking and choosing, the deciding where that championship season really started, arbitrarily, skews time so that earlier means less, later more, and overall rewrites the narrative that only just finished, that is in some ways still going. The way the Raptors are referenced now and will be all season is as defending champions. When they play Memphis, Dallas or Washington and meet JV, Wright and Miles, they aren’t thanking them for their efforts way back when, they are thanking them for the work those guys only just clocked out from. All those dudes probably still have Raptors warm up gear that either hasn’t been washed yet or is still lying around in a locker somewhere at Scotiabank.
When you decide narrative means more than time you lose the weight of the minutes themselves. Of the work that went in to what you are rewriting, in this case backward, in order to get away from it. To pick and choose is just shooting holes in a calendar.