Tidings for the new year: Raptors, a big grouse and Draymond Green
Rick Carlisle was looking at me like I’d just told him I’d divined Luka Dončić’s return to be imminent from the pattern cinnamon made on the eggnog I’d had a couple nights earlier. Dončić was taking warmup shots in front of us, but I’d asked Carlisle about Tim Hardaway Jr.
“Where did you read that? Tim said it?”
“Tim said it,” I nodded.
He considered it, me. I had found him courtside after not asking him what I’d wanted to in his pre-game scrum. I hadn’t planned to go up and introduce myself, ask if he had a minute now, but the thing about basketball, about life, is the best chance usually comes in a minute you don’t plan for.
Rick Carlisle is very tall. He’s got a strong, serious face and a voice that stays level whether talking to a crush of reporters in an echoing tunnel or out under an arena’s several-storey high speaker stack blaring pre-game announcements. He asked me a few more questions, his eyes going between Dončić and I, before he said, “Do you want a quote?”
I did.
In the recording his voice is even more honed. Done with the small test I suspect he had put up for me and ready to talk Tim. The weirder thing is listening back to my own voice. The conviction in Carlisle’s voice when he describes Hardaway Jr. makes my occasional “absolutely”s come out verklempt. Of course I believe him. Everything he’s telling me is what I had wanted to write about. But the other half of the thrilling feeling vibrating through my voice is what it means to land in someone’s confidence for a moment. It’s like running alongside somebody you’ve been trying to catch and finally falling in stride. There’s a breathless quality to it, a little low rush that physically makes you lean in to what you’re being entrusted with, whether from an NBA coach or a friend divulging something to you.
A part of it, too, is that Rick Carlisle is tough. He seems like a measure twice cut once kind of person, but applied to his whole life. Everything is considered. So to hear him talk about a player the way I talk about players, the end of what I have him on the record with was, “I love him”, so straightforwardly, felt a victory for my intuition as much as it did the kind of conversations there are room for, no matter the glacial, dispassionate views to the contrary.
When I say, “Thanks, coach”, it sounds like I’ve just walked out of a museum wearing a bunch of heisted jewels I’m concealing underneath a priceless suit of armour, also heisted. Breathless under the strain of having to cart it all away casual, but beaming.
The grouse shot out from a small mound in the snow it had settled into, where George had almost stepped on it, and flapped up to a low branch in one of the red pines looming quiet around us. The trees were covered in a thin sheen of ice and the branch sagged under the large and fluffed up bird’s winter weight. George, scaring himself, had shot the opposite direction and stood tense with his hackles up a few feet behind me. There was still a thick fog in the air, no sun to burn it off, the temperature climbing while the woods, the lakes, stayed frozen.
I took a few steps into the woods wanting to get a closer look at what I first thought was a wood duck, mottled in winter colours, before the bird decided it was over it and took off up a steep cliff where we couldn’t follow.
Every day since it has walked down the hill toward the cottage and stopped on a slight ridge riddled with deadfall, where it can look inside at us and where it becomes almost impossible to spot. I only did it because I was staring out the window, taking a breather from Tim Hardaway Jr.’s stat tables, and ended up looking right at it. And the grouse, for all its prey instincts, seems to lean a little harder toward curiosity than it should probably be inclined to.
As far as I can tell it’s on its own. Hanging out on a pine and birch strewn point of land between a frozen solid cove and two lakes just about there, with the kind of bubbling, gurgling holes that get smaller every day and strike a very specific kind of cinematic fear in me whenever one of the dogs ranges too close, like even 40ft away, putting one paw pad on the ice. I worry for the bird when the lakes all finally freeze over and the wolves come farther south, following the deer out of Algonquin and down over these chains of freshwater turned discreet super highway
Up here in the summer can be quiet through the week, when the cottagers don’t come. I’ve stayed alone with just the dogs and a few times had to talk myself down from every noise that carries across the water, from loons to bachelor party renters from Toronto with mislaid opinions on how best to blow up the Raptors. But in the winter, it’s remote. The silence blankets any noise you could make and the sun slinks below the tree line just after 4pm. You understand better the kind of primal fear you can tap into of the dark, of getting everything ready before it settles. Like hauling in more wood than you can burn and making sure the chip cupboard is stocked.
The big-little grouse seems a strange kind of anomaly, getting close to what it’s scared of in order to keep better tabs.
At the end of a year it can be hard not to assign meaning, or transcendental qualities, to things just behaving somewhat naturally. But in this maybe dumb, big, half-flightless bird’s case I feel like there is something to be said for scoping out your fears when those fears are at rest. When you have the opportunity to see that wait, this terror just sits there staring out the window, occasionally lifting up its split-ends to natural light to see if a haircut is in order. To see that dread, doubt, jitters, anxiety, can all become completely mundane when you are looking the other way.
I’m not a huge year end person or using the end of the year as a way to make a promise to the next one kind of person, either. I do take stock of the year because I think that is human nature and because for me, I am trying to get better at what I assign to luck—both that it happened and also in getting this far to see it happen; luck as gratitude— and what came from progress. And this one was big! A lot happened. I got a lot of mileage in, once to the other side of the world. I traveled alone and with people I love, sometimes to go and see people I love, other times not knowing I was going to meet people that would end up making those trips and marking that time, distinctly, because of how bright the air in the moments surrounding them got, thinned out from laughing so hard. And at home I tried to keep regular time with the people who hold room for my life within theirs, some stretches better than others because this was also a year where work, very distinctly, split into two separate worlds. There’s a lot to discuss there but let’s not! Big highlights included taking this newsletter live and quitting a haunted (traditionally and psychically) museum.
The reason I like spending New Years up here in the woods with Dylan and the dogs is because it makes up my mind for me. Sometimes people come up, but more often they don’t, and the emphasis of it being a specific day into night takes on the qualities of all the other days and nights up here, blurring together with reading, writing, sleeping, sometimes a walk, and a true and corny sense of recharging something in myself. It’s down at the complete other end of the spectrum from the other way I would like to spend New Years, the way most people hate, which is running all over just for the sake of it and the promise of something. Of the potential of seeing as many people as you can, chasing, cramming it all in, and usually achieving only half of your unobtainable expectation.
I love basketball at this time of year exactly for its continuity. There is no special occasion that shifts the season into the next year, because it is still the same one. We’ve already gotten familiar by now in calling it 2019-2020, we’ve been referring to it that way for three months. It is the most gentle way of sliding yourself over into a new year, pressure off. Even the games flanking it have so little at stake. On the 31st the Raptors will play the Cavs, who, when they met two weeks ago, were behaving like the most tender of friends toward one another. Casual and prolonged embraces were off the charts. Boston plays the Hornets, so a basketball pest meets the totem of a real life one, and Golden State plays the Spurs in a game where, no matter how feisty the Warriors have been feeling lately, San Antonio will smother that impulse like a weighted, and wet, blanket. Plus a handful of other games, some starting at 3pm (noon if you’re on the west coast, even), that will ask literally nothing of you, not even your full attention. These games will get you just about there. Depending on your time zone, you’ll have between one and four hours to midnight. And that’s correct, because none of it is the kind of basketball you want to ride into a new year on. In some cases being with people you love would be better, and in other cases, so would sleeping.
There are a lot of ways to take from basketball cues on how to best enter the new year, and by cues I mean layer them over the things you are already doing instead of tying your reality very intrinsically to them. For the sake of my own advice I’ve picked two.
First, the Raptors. If the traditional constraints of time make you at all uneasy then the Raptors have really busted up this notion to your benefit. It’s a new season, but they still won the title this year. They started that championship season in 2018 but will go into 2020 as defending champs, that means that they will have technically had a trophy as an asterisk for three years. Yes sure, it would be the same for any team, but it just feels better, a more deserving, friendly melting of time as we know it, when it’s Toronto. And because it was a first for the franchise, there is an even more elongated quality to all the ways that win is being stretched out and draped over everything. There are echos that Raptors fans shouted back in 2018 that are coming full circle now, that have still taken a slew of injuries to underscore.
The Raptors have worked this way for a while. And I don’t mean the team mechanics, I mean the action of effort. Sometimes yes, too effortful, sometimes it shouldn’t be that hard and it got exhausting to watch. But what is making the team work now, when the bench that have turned starters out of need, for other teams, would be dregs, is that the whole team is familiar with Toronto’s type of work. Sure, it took Pat McCaw some time to get there, and he can still look reluctant to be playing basketball, but the larger team mentality has for a long time been not caring what people said, because for a longer time people weren’t saying anything. It isn’t a woe is Toronto thing. It’s the thing most of us do. Going to work regardless of who’s watching. Sometimes you like the work, sometimes you don’t, and a good goal is to try and be moving more toward the work you like when you can, or to work so you can be moving away from work all together. Whatever you want. But knowing that attention, even when deserved, is roving. Like sun breaking out of clouds in winter to land on your face, you can’t just stand in the same spot once it's gone hoping it comes back. You take a small charge from it, maybe close your eyes dramatically to enjoy, and you keep going. Otherwise you’re just standing in the dark with your eyes shut.
While I want very badly for the Raptors to be healthy again, and Siakam, Powell and Gasol not getting to play in the team’s first Christmas game did hurt me, how wildly inaccurate were our fears when it came to the kind of shape the team would be in when they were, physically, in such bad shape? The larger takeaway from it isn’t resilience, though there is plenty of that, it is just, like, doing what you always do when it is in the best service to yourself.
A bad example of this is the Warriors. Yes, I feel bad for them. Yes, I also think that there is a balance in basketball like most things in life that is less cosmic and more everything—good, bad—can’t last, will change. But yes, I also feel like the Warriors, as a team, a franchise, a mentality, a fan base, are doing what they always have done, not changing anything, and thinking it is still in the best service to themselves. They are standing in the same spot the sun last hit them and expecting it to show up.
But I don’t want to talk about the Warriors as a cue to take into next year.
I want to talk about Draymond Green.
Draymond Green is a good example of doing the thing you’ve always done when it is in the best service to yourself. Especially this year, especially with this Warriors team. Has Green been more frank and candid than usual this season, or is it that the other people around him, like Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, Kevin Durant (I had to think about that for a minute, “Who did the Warriors trade this summer? I know there was someone”) are gone from alongside him when he says these things.
Where the Warriors have come up frustrated, where Steve Kerr seems too much at a loss for someone who just needs to take a stark look at reality and run with it, there has been Green. Occasionally playing well, occasionally not well, occasionally not playing at all, but being himself throughout. There have been many, many days this past year where as much as I took a cue from the Raptors and got on with it, I could have, probably should have, taken a cue from Draymond Green and opted to skewer myself instead. In some ways it’s like doing yourself the ultimate favour, what can you hide behind when you have taken the part of you that throws things under the bus and instead put that part on the bus, paid its fare, and blown the bus up?
We all like to talk about self ownership, taking responsibility for our actions, and Green is a wonderful example of standing up for yourself, to yourself, plus to anyone else who has a problem with that. He’s like when someone is picking a fight on behalf of someone else and is like, say what you said about them to my face, but he’s in their face shit talking himself, and the honesty of it eviscerates them too.
Take Green on the bench, a little while after he almost got into it with Porzingis—got totally under Porzingis’s skin by refusing to acknowledge him standing over him, making Porzingis’s brattiness implode on itself—watching what was mostly a wacky side effect of guys who have incredibly long arms in close proximity to one another: they get tangled up. Marquese Chriss forcefully grabs the rebound and Dončić sort of shove-slaps him. This is a good example of letting someone’s bad example rub off on you, Porzingis’s brattiness in this case with Dončić’s, like, pouting expectation that the rebound was more naturally his. The ball gets away from Chriss and he is only focused on getting it back, but Dončić is there with lagging persistence, not really trying, but not really willing to wait, either. Dončić finally decides to add some intention by hooking his arm into Chriss’s, always the wrong thing to do but especially now after the shove-slap and the hangdog trailing, and Chriss takes both hands and shoves Dončić into the photographers and legs of people sitting at the baseline. Dončić is more embarrassed than surprised, righting himself and taking some measured steps toward Chriss but again, no intent to totally get into it.
Let me say, I don’t particularly like fighting in basketball. I don’t like it when it can get guys hurt and I especially don’t like it when it’s ramped up shows of dominance without provocation, like when Serge Ibaka choked, ironically, Marquese Chriss. While I sure would not have minded Green swatting Porzingis in the same game Porzingis got into it with Chriss, the better thing was how Green mirrored back this kind of futility at Porzingis that sure, they could have fought, but Porzingis was still going to look like an idiot (And Klay Thompson on the bench in his nice clothes mirroring the mirror. God, bless sweet Klay).
And there’s Green on the bench. Standing there, clapping. When he takes a step forward and Glen Robinson III (thank you to Joey Devine and his keen eyes) puts his two hands gently around Green’s waist, as if making to hold Green back, Green keeps clapping. When the Warriors assistants rush over, when the rest of the teams arrive, when the refs get there, Green has been shuffled a few more rows back from the action but he is still clapping, clapping and smiling, so slow that with the slow motion replay it looks like he is clasping his two hands together and giving them a small outward shake of thanks.
Cue the year. Cue the Raptors for what it means to refuse to be hobbled with both hands, a leg, a banged up groin, all tied. For making time work for you. Cue Draymond Green for dressing yourself down when all the attention that’s piled on you outweighs the true thing, that you can lie to a lot of people but not being honest with yourself only ever makes you the fool. And cue Draymond Green for a slow clap to the year, however it went for you, ending, smiling peaceably, knowing where you stand.
And cue my thanks for you, here, reading.