We build our own walls best

On hitting walls and all the ways the Los Angeles Lakers have to tear theirs down.

Mar 06, 2022

I’ve been on the verge of tears for a week. Not passing tears, the kind of crying that comes in a sudden jag and rolls over you like a quick wave, but a deep, hand your whole body over to it for hours crying. I was holding off, not sure when would be the best time or where would be the safest place. I was holding off because it was unnerving to me, to have no idea how long it could last. To know that I’d be giving myself away if anyone called, because I have no poker face in my voice, or if anyone looked at me, because I have no poker face on my face, either.

I didn’t know how to explain it, this sudden bout of feeling so sad, so overwhelmed, not even to myself. What I knew best was just what it felt like, that it had dropped down out of nowhere on me, that I’d hit a wall.

I recognize my wall as myriad, the ways that I’m hitting it circumstantial. Some spread beyond me, mortar in other people’s, some very stubborn bricks the result of many skilled layers stacked there by my own hands. This one’s emotional overextension, this one is doubt, this one is grief I haven’t processed pushed way down and pressurized. Even if you cant remember why or when you laid them, you recognize the maker’s mark. We build our own walls best.

LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers do not have the same walls. As an organization, the Lakers are labyrinthian in their wall building. For NBA franchises the walls are part of the myth-making — produce the maze and the show of getting out of it. If a team gets stuck, really stuck beyond anything in-game, it’s due to a lack of imagination or resources, occasionally both, but a savvy or cutthroat owner (also occasionally both) will have a bulldozer idling or the climbing equipment ready to get through or over the walls as needed.

The Buss Family Trust, the official ownership group of the Lakers and before Jeanie Buss litigated her way into the club’s controlling stake, was split six ways. Those were all walls unto themselves. In its most mundane, day-to-day operations as much as the big picture, Rob Pelinka may actually be in a rare position of too much money and imagination when it comes down to running the team.

It isn’t a superficial, or oversimplified observation to make that at a glance, right from the start, this season’s Lakers did not make sense. Hindsight is certainly 20/20 but the view here hasn’t changed. Pelinka put James’s disparate group together, just like he did last season and the season before, because the biggest metric in play was a holdover hope that his once winning formula would still bear up the weight of a season and all of its expectations.

I wanted it to work for the same reason you did — it seemed fun. The glory days duo that never got to be, appealing to peak nostalgia, of James and Melo, the verve and pomp of AD and Russ; cheerful, even holdfasts Wayne Ellington and DeAndre Jordan, and room, it still seemed like, for Talen Horton-Tucker and later, Stanley Johnson, to grow into themselves. Experiments can be exciting, compelling, but very soon, mid-November after taking a hit from every big name team in the East soon, it was evident this one was flagging.

There are small things you do for your friends that you wouldn’t have the urgency to do for yourself. Taking Steph’s glass bottle of cola in hand and angling it against the sharp edge of a wood bench, knocking it once, twice, watching the cap come cleanly off and handing the bottle back to her was the most useful I’d felt in weeks.

I start crying in the street, between bites of already cold pizza and trying to explain myself. It was bound to happen but with Steph, seeing the mirror of myself in her own eyes welling with mine, it was like one of the eager birds hopping closer and closer for crumbs. Eager, intent, ready. I think, briefly, about how this probably looks but with the wind whipping down Bloor Street and the way most people’s passing attention is glancing I know it doesn’t matter. It also doesn’t matter. Behind us a man plays a steel drum along with top 40 hits blasting through a small speaker, the cheer of it gusting around us with the wind.

Sometimes the best cover, best help, a city can give you is by making everything else around contextually bizarre, emotionally surreal, suspending the potential severity of a moment in distraction and diffusing its weight. Sometimes the best thing is having another person to sit in that with.

What we’ve been watching for most of the season is a team struggle to come to grips with its own mortality, if a basketball team can be assigned one. The doubly difficult thing is watching James come to grips with the lifespan of his career at the same time. He’s known for a while he was closing out on it, he’s too smart not to see the optics shift and has known his body as a machine for so long not to feel it, but he’s been too compelled and compelling as a storyteller to expect it on these terms. Terms not entirely his. Well, that isn’t true. These terms, from the outside anyway, are near hyperly his. But the terms themselves have turned into a wall, an undertaking to impart, a formula made into last rites.

What is strange, near dreamlike to watch, are the Lakers postgames after each new, obscure loss. Because these losses aren’t crushing, not to this group, only bizarre, growing stranger with each abstracted finish. Westbrook, James, Davis, Frank Vogel up on the podium, they look like they’ve been asked to make sense of dreams. I don’t know about a lack of ambition, or competitiveness, a lack of want as what’s afflicting this group, but there’s a palpable disconnect. A sleep walking, a separation of the reality they think they’re in, or supposed to be in, and the one playing out on the floor.

There’s a trick to lucid dreaming. To ground yourself just enough in the dream with something that will help you recognize yourself as asleep, but not so much as to pull the dream apart, send yourself conscious. I’ve used counting backwards from ten, but I tend to be able to just look around and know. In dreams, I am never so caught up as not to recognize walls. Maybe because the options for encountering them don’t stop at the wall, they carry over or through, and because if they are the symbolic manifestation of something in your subconscious then there they are, plain and made physical. This is a wall, you tell yourself, dreaming. It never occurs to you that it could be there to protect you, like the emotional walls we hit in waking life.

The Lakers can look at this season the same way.

Ground themselves in the obscurity, the disbelief, the impossibility of what’s happening, but instead of trying to cobble together solutions out of the etherial, wake themselves all the way up.

And what if James leaves? Well, what if he does. The Lakers, the organization, are suddenly forced to seek out some help for the narcoleptic tendencies they’ve turned habit. That market is too big, too vocal, and too unfamiliar with long periods of forced self-discovery to buy-in on a middling and unexciting team. One is okay, but not both. Vogel could decide to stay or go, the decision may not end up being his, but the blame for this season in any waking scenario can’t fall at his feet. How do you coach sleepwalkers? As the adage logic has it, you leave them alone, but really what else could be do? He can’t coach through Davis’s ankles, James’s discontent, or Westbrook’s ongoing distillation any more than he can persuade Pelinka away from his propensity to cherry-pick, to see the team’s next best hope in the silhouette of players identical to the same he has now: adept bigs, underutilized; hyperbolic shooters in need of some decent spacing and as a result, limits.

I don’t want for the Lakers but neither do they, and that’s the problem. Theirs is a team, a franchise, a lucky and well-funded fanbase, that could do with a little wanting. Not hardship, or desperate and lean years, but a pointed, collective, underscored desire. The irony is that out of their decadence, their glut of choice and the luxury to vie for what’s newer, to keep choosing, they have landed on what it is to want. The desires are not even so ambitious — consistency, a win percentage that tacks to .500, and James’s ambitions to veer from being the fulcrum of the franchise. The latter doesn’t need to be a parting, but so long as James’s timeline imposes itself over that of the franchise’s then there will always be a wall bigger than want to contend with. The psychic, impossible to deconstruct confines of somebody else’s want.

This is the first season it really feels like James’s wants, his ambitions, have become circumspect. The persona of James wants what he always has, to be the winningest. James’s person, however, has emerged in brief glimpses as frustrated, confused, looking up at the wall, looming. The disentangling of James from the franchise would serve him, too. This team, right now, is the abyss. It’s been fine for him to stare for a season but look too long and he won’t be able to exist outside it anymore. It happens, it’s happened, with the Lakers. The gravity is too great, eclipsing entire careers and absorbing them into lore divested of whatever came before purple and gold.

Eminence can be its own wall. To scale something always getting higher, bigger, better, even Sisyphus only had to cope with the same hill, its pockmarks and footholds maddening, but by heart. It’s a strange test for James, not one he or if we’re being honest, any of us saw coming. To find the only wall taller, more grandiose than your own legacy, the one you’ve been forming up and reinforcing brick by brick all this time, almost 20 seasons, is the one you now find yourself in front of and made by decades of the people ahead of you doing the same. This one’s vanity, this one’s greed, this one’s Showtime, this patch Kobe Bryant and his false wall of persona, but one by one, every brick is only making taller, more imposing, the very thing you’re going up against.

My friend Jesse, who is one of my favourite artists (whose YOU’VE CHANGED mural on a wall on Queen West in Toronto you’ve probably seen) used to make pins. He’d give them out at his shows or in passing, quippy short statements rooted in punk and subverted political themes that eventually everyone had on their jackets and shirts and became signature to him. I have a bunch, still carefully moved from jacket to jacket, they’re all rooted in time, place and who I was in each, but my favourite is one that reads to me as a shouting non sequitur and glib acquiesce.

To me, it’s been a reminder that hitting walls, while inevitable, can still feel surprising. That you can greet them with abjection, genuine shock, overzealous fervor, or eye-rolling as if to say right, you again, and that the walls will stay solid, stolid and impervious, but the choice is always yours.

I put it on my jacket this week.

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