Small actions, big stakes
My best memory of Dejan Milojević, the eulogizing of athletes in trades, and trying hard to remember life's necessary smallness.
We forget how small this all is. Even when we’re reminded what an insular world, a professional environment home to just under 600 people, the way we talk about it is in end over end multitudes. Entire galaxies of discussion and speculation on one person, or one team, on any given day. We make it so big that we forget how small.
I think what I’ve liked the best about covering basketball is learning from and about the people who safeguard that small world. Who, more than the athletes who participate in its most obvious production, are its passionate, wry, stalwart, strange, happy, calculating and tireless service workers. The assistants, the trainers, the agents, the people who crunch numbers for the agents, the communications people for athletes who tend to be their friends if they weren’t staffed by their agencies, but those people too. This is not to mention the comms staff of franchises themselves, or the league’s people, who all appear so proximal to the game and work to expand and spread and support it, but in their 9-5s barely get up against it. The collective legwork of all these people could power small cities.
Maybe I’ve taken a special, selfish pleasure in talking to them because they affirm the simultaneous rich and trivial connectivity basketball has, shrinking it further in revealing its minutia and humanness. You talk about the little things and they reveal so much more — of people, the game, its history, unexpected connections and the overlooked and bizarre elements you and them, when you’re really lucky, both delight openly at. And because, as a freelancer, I don’t naturally cross their paths on as much of a day-to-day basis as some of my colleagues, when these personal doors open to me I’m doubly aware of the threshold I’ve been invited to step over.
I can’t say I think a lot about why my approach to coverage seems to be so different than the norm, why I’ve been told so often it is. It’s one of those things that’s easy to spiral from if I dwell too long, because while access (in this sense, everything from physical proximity to compiling contacts to formal interviews) plays a major and unmistakable role in writing NBA stories, it can quickly butt up against permission. Who has it and why. Who’s considered an outsider and why. The reality is there will always be people who withhold permission because power anywhere tends toward commoditization. People who, if they ever grant that power, will remind you where it came from. I think recognizing how insular a world this specific industry is has helped me, because these dynamics exist everywhere — in every job or in how people relate to each other. It gets easier to trace limits of power, where you can avoid gatekeepers or skip them altogether by alternating between putting your head down and working and knowing when to address a problem (or person) to its face, when you pay attention.
Where my own has honed I’ve chalked up to all the different jobs I had before this one. When I think of those jobs I mostly think of the people I met and still know. People who loved or hated the work they were doing, sometimes hating it because they loved it so much, and how learning from their smallest experiences added up to a wealth and richness of industry-specific knowledge. That was the happy side-effect. The main event was always the people and the main takeaway that whatever the job, in whichever field, most broad hopes and tiny trivialities are the same. The sense of scarcity too. They all spring from the same root. There’s inherent connectivity there.
This isn’t an appeal so much as a necessary reminder for me, maybe for you, that all the people working to make things bigger for basketball are first, and sometimes only, concerned with its most minuscule workings. Small actions, big stakes. These tiny and repetitive labours of true love they will themselves to keep falling for.
Dejan Milojević called me around quarter after 10pm.
I’d been trying to pin him down for days. With phone interviews, team PR will sometimes stakeout practice or treatments and physically hand the phone off to an athlete or coach. You get them breathless, between one thing and the next, but you get them. You also tend to get wonderful background noise and colourful crosstalk before they find a quiet place to sit. Milojević had worked late or rushed off to work some more for three consecutive stakeouts.
I wanted to talk with him about James Wiseman, who was then with the Warriors. Milojević was one of the primary coaches, probably the primary coach, that James had been working with on his return since injury and surgery (wrist and knee, in rapid succession). My sense wasn’t that Milojević was putting me off, more that he was a bit of a whirlwind. I joked with Warriors PR that I was soon-to-be-starring in an art film called Waiting for Milojević, they said they were also going to appear in that film and pitched me on what they hoped to be the the “big finale”: Milojević was again available for a call later that day. This time, I was sent Dejan’s contact and the prompt that, ”He’d like you to call him just in case he forgets.“ I was charmed.
I did call him, he hadn’t forgotten but he didn’t answer. He sent me a text to let me know he was on his way home, he’d be there in 10 minutes and phone me then.
I wish I still had the transcript, or the audio, but I don’t need it to remember how happy he was to talk about James. Happy but at first a bit tentative, as if calibrating my approach. Protective.
His voice was tired, the team had just got back to the Bay from the road and he’d been busy all day, I already knew, with practice. He’d likely had enough time to step in the door, drop his things and greet his family before calling up a stranger, but he was patient. He walked me through the paces he’d been working James through since before that past July’s Summer League — at that point it was late-October. At first, due to his recovery, James couldn’t run or jump, and so much of a trainer’s work is in motion. Catching the body in its mistakes in the context of action. So a lot of their initial time together had been spent sitting side-by-side in video rooms, studying film while Dejan alternately studied James’ face for when it lit up, when something clicked. They talked a lot about James’ in-game strategy in those stretches, and Dejan talked to me a lot about trust. My sense was that James, who I’d spent a day in the Bay with a couple weeks before, leaned on Dejan to navigate what it felt like to watch his team move without him. That Dejan gave him the peace of mind that moving without wasn’t necessarily moving on.
He was also honest with me. Offering what felt like gentle admonishment when I got too far afield. “James,” he pressed, “he has to be a fit for the Warriors, because he’s playing for the Warriors.” But he wasn’t so strict that his voice didn’t get a little chuffed when he noted how they’d developed James’ left hook shot together, something he didn’t do before.
There’s always a point in an interview, or in any longer conversation, when you establish a rhythm with someone. With athletes, or the people who work with them, it can take a little longer because there’s trepidation not to say too much. That’s what media training is mostly about. There are frequencies though, things you pick up on if you’re patient. Dejan struck me as someone who was happy about the work he did, who took it seriously because he understood he was good at it, but wasn’t intractable in his approach because he’d already had a career outside the NBA and had covered a lot of ground in life. Also because he worked with people, who are changeable. That struck me as his favourite part for the way his voice warmed up when he talked about James — the two spoke every day, even if they didn’t see each other — and because he was so funny. His jokes and asides were self-depreciating to himself and a little teasing about James. He had the sort of sense of humour that turned toward you, pulled you in rather than underscoring the distance between you.
At the end of our call, about 40 minutes, we’d wound into talking about James’ recovery and the toll it took on him mentally. James had been candid with me about his mental health and what he’d done to process his fear and anxiety, and I shared some of it with Dejan. I realize now that I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know.
“In your life, every difficult situation makes you tougher. So I’m sure he became a tougher person after the injury than he was before. I have no doubt about that,” Dejan told me. Then, as if sensing we’d waded a bit deep, plus I’m sure wanting to wind things down so he could get back to his family, a smile crept into his voice. “Like in Predator, I like to say this line: Arnold Schwarzenegger says, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ I heard the line, I think from this movie. It’s a good line.”
We both said goodbye laughing.
This thing that happens when trades do of eulogizing athletes. The news that Pascal Siakam had been traded to Indiana came almost simultaneously to the news that Dejan Milojević died.
I understand the sincerity in people sharing what an athlete meant to them, and how their tenure with a team overlapped with the ups and downs of someone’s personal life. I have whole stretches of Raptors seasons, or with specific players, that went on an arc that felt eerily personalized. Some tied to wrenches of grief that had, have, nothing to do with basketball but all too real loss. I wrote Siakam’s first ever cover story (which was also my first ever cover story), and spent a day on a studio set getting to know him, his brother, his agent. Siakam teased me because the interview questions were “so long” and looked to his brother and I when he was on set, in beautiful clothes brought in for the shoot, with excitement if a touch of nerves. All firsts he’s experienced a hundred times over by now.
The point is even the most cap-brained, trade machine forward fan isn’t immune to the way fandom’s feelings encroach, blur the most stringent, unemotional lines. Still, I’d never experienced anything that so plainly and cruelly underscored the reality of one grief, being felt acutely by a family who was away from a person they loved when he died, and the fantasy quality of the other.
At the other side of it is something outsized reactions to trades touch on, which is fandom as an emotional outlet for people that’s both personalized and permissible. Where it might look odd, or be considered suspect for someone to be openly grieving, like crying in public, if that person was asked what was wrong there would be relief, some humour — two-fold empathy — when they said their favourite team just traded away their favourite player. That same empathy would be, if not absent, then uncomfortable or awkward to weld if the same person said someone they loved had suddenly left them.
Sports are to so many the window they open to air out their feelings. I don’t think that’s wrong, but I do think it shows how anemic, or plainly afraid, we are of human expression.
We give basketball multitudes — of sincerity, vulnerability, emotion. We gotta save some for ourselves.
Toward the end of the hour-long press conference Masai Ujiri gave on Thursday, at the heels of Pascal Siakam being traded to Indiana, he brought up a story I’d never heard before. Eric asked him whether, in the inevitable human response that comes with making trade decisions, did he think it would serve him better to be colder.
“Colder than I am now?” He voice notched up, a little shocked. “I mean, god damn,” he laughed.
He said when he knew the team was going to trade franchise cornerstone (heartbeat, more like), DeMar DeRozan, in order to bring Kawhi Leonard to Toronto, he paced around a hotel in Kenya for two hours in the middle of the night to “sum up the courage to call DeMar”.
I could picture it, everyone can. Can probably recall the setting and what you were fixating on as you worked up the courage to do whatever it was you knew you needed to. It shrunk, with vacuum-sealed speed, the loftiness we often equate with operating at that level. At the end of the day you’re going to extinguish somebody’s hopes, break their heart. Ujiri has too. Those things stick with you not for their hugeness, but for how concentrated and exacting the hurt. A few minutes for you, a shedding of years, maybe, for someone else. And at some point you know you’ll be the one on the other end, having the scope of what you wanted brought down to size. Ujiri even touched on that cyclicality, though framed on the business of trades, “I always say in the NBA, time comes and it goes,” he traced a circle in the air in front of him with a finger, “it comes back around again.”
“Time, it heals a little bit, but man, it’s not easy,” he continued. “Something about the NBA — I don’t know if other leagues are like that — but something about the NBA, it’s family. No matter how cold we can get, there’s something about it. It remains the most difficult part of this business — trading a player, or when they leave.”
I’ve been well north of the city for a week, up in the woods to work on my book. It’s already a shrinking of the world up here, more so in winter. Of the cottages around the cove and down the lake chain, there’s only one family who lives here year round, the rest are closed up for the season. Days go by quickly, the sun starts to set about an hour earlier than in the city and it’s been so cold, with so much snow, that Captain and I bundle up to go out in the morning and take a longer walk toward late afternoon and that’s it.
Days are made smaller by their tasks, which are things I don’t necessarily have to do but can make me feel more bodily meaningful than writing. Bringing in wood from outside and stacking it against the mantle, scraping ash out of the fireplace, knocking down the tapering fangs of icicles that grow back every day along the eves.
In the summer here there’s the feeling of languid days that follow the sun tracking overhead, from one hill of forest to the other, arcing over the water. There’s noise of people and nature you can hear both in and outdoors. In the winter, days contort. If it snows all day then time, in the absence of light, will be marked for how long between fresh logs laid in the fire or later, when the day’s in a dash to finish, how fast the temperature sinks with the sun and how much faster we move with it, hurrying home. Sounds are the hum of the fan in the fireplace ushering in heat and me mumbling to myself as I work; outside, the squeak of snow underfoot and my breath made loud as an engine, it feels like. When we stop walking, silence.
When we set out on walks there’s the sense that around every turn, or after cresting each hill, the world might explode open. Captain tugs me along, pulling toward deer tracks that cut from the narrow trails we’ve tamped down over the days into thigh-deep snow, his every step urgent and unflagging like he’s not 11-years-old and these tracks weren’t cut silently by animals that melt into the landscape, hours before while we were inside and oblivious, less than 100 metres away. A certain feral anticipation or wishful thinking, in itself a primal understanding. If we don’t see anything there’s always the next hill, and if not there, then the next day. The smallness is simple.
I woke up the other morning to underwater snow falling in the early blue light and watched a video from the night before of Matty on stage at the Emmys. As far away as it was, absolutely an alternate reality in comparison, the distance from him to me weirdly felt like nothing at all. My happiness for him so unencumbered in its scope that it sped me through a decade and change of knowing someone, of life, while lying still. The rare clarity that comes in bizarre circumstances of life’s stretch and pull, its occasional bursting expansion. Where you see it seemingly move on from you only to boomerang back. Little glimpses in a flurry of chaos, like a sudden dump of snow cascading down from tree branches too laden with it. A brief whiteout before everything settles, stills again. The possibilities in life, one moment to the next.
I wish I could hold to that clarity. The trick of it sometimes almost feels saintly, out of reach. We forget how small this all is.
Beautifully written Katie!
Pictures painted and thoughts kindled of experiences from the past. Well written and very relatable.