Strange weather

The parallels, deference, and indifference we show to weather and basketball.

We took the dogs out at the end of the afternoon, like always. The day started cold and eventually opened to rain, hours of it. By the time we stepped outside the clouds were clearing and the wind ruffling the dogs’ fur was less brittle, not mild but not the kind you burrow your chin down into your coat for. The clouds overheard started to break apart in the wind, big sections sliding away to make way for sun and blue sky.

Because of the rain, the temperature warming, and the two inch deep layer of ice and hard crusted snow still encasing everything, mist was rising from the ground up. So much that it hung like thick fog in a maritime town.

In sections where the sidewalk was too narrow, from ice and snow or from snow and ice melting, we went single file. I kept looking back at Dylan and the sun, sinking like a molten disc behind him, light flooding the road. At the end of our loop, heading home, is a long section of cemeteries that run in a narrow strip shoulder to shoulder, like a somber buffer. A short path cuts between them from the road to a school. I paused there to look out across one section, seeing the same thick mist hanging between slick tombstones but now the sun slanted so low that the fog was infused, a haze of gold. Strange weather, like the light was caught out and decided to stay a little longer, stretching its legs.

Dylan and I have a joke, “Another heaven”. From a trip we took at the end of one summer deep in the pandemic, from Lake Superior out to Nova Scotia. So much of the trip was concentrated on going from one big body of water to another, mostly at my behest, and at each the sky above proved active and crushing. Each like a portal, wild light and more cloud combinations than I’d ever seen. Even the long stretches of road through Northern Ontario or Quebec, forested New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia’s final slant to the Atlantic were patterned with rapidly and often ruggedly changing weather. The sky never settling.

Heaven, I’d say, while pointing at a particularly heartbreaking stretch of sky. Another heaven Dylan would respond, pointing another out a while later. I wonder if it’s because we were spending so much time looking up and out on the world, after so many months at home, inside.

Bookended by cemeteries, I forgot to say it, but stared until my eyes watered and the dogs grew restless.

---

Who in basketball is most like weather? Who deceives us with an outward appearance of inactivity, passivity, only to split the sky like a bolt of lightning from the blue? Whose presence, checking in the game, drops the barometer, makes the hair on your arms rise? Who plays sunny, a joy to behold; who lurks and looms, sulking and ominous like a long day of low clouds and soaking rain?

Games have dual weather — there’s the collective conditions best exhibited in the look and feel of a game, and then there’s the promise of individualized events.

Like you would packing for a familiar city, you know what to expect from a Celtics game. A controlled, gradual rise of pressure, rarely an extreme or volatile outcome. A Rockets game, likely the opposite. Sudden shifts in headwind and ragged, choppy clouds that let the sun shoot through in erratic Morse. In Boston you might get an occasional Derrick White nor’ester, in Houston a Dillon Brooks derecho is all but certain.

Whether the individual weather upends the game’s atmosphere is contingent on the kind of patterns we witness leading up to them. Drops in temperature, see-sawing barometers, floods of moodiness, sudden thaws — basketball’s weather might be the most unpredictable, akin to the Great Plains or monsoon coasts.

When Nikola Jokic got his historic triple-double this week (30 points, 22 assists, 21 rebounds) he cycled through every kind of weather basketball can be.