Whittling away what we want
If Daryl Morey is a fraud, we probably are, too.
There’s a piece of performance art that was rattling around my head as trade deadline week wore on. It started with the Kings and a knee-jerk joke I made, because whatever the Kings and Vivek Ranadivé are doing don’t seem or feel particularly rooted to the terrestrial concepts the NBA, even really loosely, requires.
The piece is called I Like America and America Likes Me, by German artist Joseph Beuys. In it, Bueys is brought, veiled, from the airport to a West Broadway gallery in New York City via ambulance and placed in a wide open room with a coyote in it where the two of them stay for three days.
Beuys alternates between wandering the room in circles and watching the coyote, which is doing the same thing. He leans on a shepherds staff he’s brought in, which the coyote comes over and nips at. He removes the leather gloves he’s also brought in and tosses them to the coyote, which gnaws at them. He’s sometimes wrapped in a giant felt blanket, which the coyote eventually tears to shreds. They both sit in piles of straw.
At the end of the third day he hugs the coyote, familiar enough to him now that it lets him, and he's taken out of the room on the same gurney he came in on, loaded into an ambulance and brought to the airport. The premise being he never set foot on American soil and never saw anything of it, besides the coyote (I mean, he does look out the window at times).
I don’t want to draw too strong a correlation between that piece and the Sacramento Kings, believe me, only that it came to mind and has been circling since. Bueys said he wanted to insulate and isolate himself by doing it, and the Kings, stubbornly and with pointed determination, seem to be doing the same thing. But unlike Bueys, who didn’t care if people saw, the Kings seem to have forgotten that people are supposed to be watching them.
What I always wonder, and feel no small measure of doleful choked dread at, is what happened to the coyote?
I was asked a few times this week whether I was worried about the trade deadline, but being on no fewer than five deadlines myself and pushing through a migraine I felt forming, I wasn’t. I really wasn’t thinking about it. I would dip in and check, like when I saw that CJ McCollum was trending and had to scroll back four hours in timestamps through Woj’s tweets to find the details of the trade.
I was late for every bit of transactional news and whether it was a better way of doing it or not, it did make each trade I found out about feel fully formed, in that I didn’t have to think about what I thought about it. It had already been collectively responded to and processed, I could take the details at face value. Probably most guys were already in the air and on the way to new cities by the time I found out they were going. Nickeil Alexander-Walker had already made it to one, only to find out when he landed in Portland he should be well on his way to another.
After hanging up on a call I walk to the kitchen window and let my eyes glaze for a second out of it. My headphones are still in and without prompt, without touching them or saying anything out loud my phone on the table behind me could catch and misconstrue as a command, ‘Season of the Witch’ starts playing. The first gangly guitar snap instantly squares my shoulders. I sit down to work again but let the song play through before I shut the app for quiet.
If it’s an omen it feels like an accident. Like being out for dinner and getting someone else’s desert, but eating it quickly, surely, eyes not leaving the space in front of you.
Is Daryl Morey a fraud? It’s possible.
There have been a lot of things written about Morey and the long-con, genius engineering, the game of chicken or even the squirming fleecing of the James Harden and Ben Simmons deal, depending on what you’re reading. The details vary but the main point that shoves unabashedly through is that Morey had wanted Harden back on his basketball team the moment he had one again. Why, when or how were secondary. Pining, I would like to call it.
What I did want out of this deadline was for Simmons to be out of Philadelphia, and that is done. It didn’t matter where, and the Nets, with their individualized collection of guys more like actors walking, waving, smiling slow across a red carpet, seem fine. Patty Mills is there and I read that he said he’s been looking out for Simmons for years from afar and is happy now to be able to do it up close, and Seth Curry is the only person poised to be immediately impactful in a way that will help the Nets and hobble, pretty badly, the Sixers, but the rest of the trade is a wash.
Simmons and Harden essentially blot the other out, slip into the shadow still stealing away on the team they’re arriving at, pull it around themselves like a cloak.
Joel Embiid has a fire lit under him and for the first time in a long time, he’s done it himself. Harden will want to be the one ringing the big Liberty Bell and Morey, no matter what you’re reading, seems to have promised to give it to him, and the rest of the team with it. The thing that worked with Embiid and Simmons, maybe the only thing, is that Simmons never clamoured for the noise. It shrunk him more with every passing season, as anyone who has endured a bad, mentally and emotionally hollowing personal or professional situation can understand, but he could play in the echoes of somebody else. That’s what enduring asks of a person.
Harden isn’t. It didn’t even take until spring in Brooklyn.
How Morey might be a grifter isn’t in his job qualifications, or how good he really is in a position that requires you to be not just excellent, but like a muse on the phone, pouring ambrosia into the ears of agog league executives. His con is hiding in plain sight that he got this deal done for anybody other than himself.
I can read between the lines but I don’t want to. Valentine’s Day is coming up and I want to picture Morey with cartoon hearts for eyes, bugging out of his head, when whoever it was on the Nets let slip that Harden was, after the shortest cold war, on the candlelit table.
I went to Eataly this week to try and find blood oranges from Sicily. I’d read about them in a book on citrus. Shining ruddy globes that grow in the shadow of Vesuvius and from cooling in its looming shade have a specific protein that stave off cancer, plus a bunch of other things. I want them because I buy a lot of citrus in winter to trick myself out of the season, through the pop of their skin against the blue ceramic bowl on the kitchen counter, or because when eating them, all you can think about is the sun it took. I want them because while indulgent, and way too specific, I do.
Everything’s just from California.
I wandered around, novel to be in there, and pick up two pink lemons. I get in trouble at the self checkout because I don’t know I have to weigh them, or where the scale is. I hand the citrus over to a sales clerk, get them handed back with a printed sticker bigger than my hand with a barcode on it I scan and have nowhere to put after. Sticking it along the inside of my purse where the lemons dully glow all the way home.
Is Morey a fraud? Maybe. But he is in the same way that you or I are, when we whine and whittle away what we want, make bare desire obscure.
The trade deadline is the last opportunity for teams to make bold, covetous, completely aspirational decisions that have a slight chance of getting them a little farther, straining to that perfect point where luck and preparedness catch and cinch. A day of breaking, dissecting, undoing, securing, taking apart and reforming. There aren’t many, perhaps any, other days that offer up that kind of consequenceless chaos, at least for those of us watching. So much of it is tidied and turned tortuous around cap qualifiers, the concept of returns, gaps to fill. What’s funny is that the Simmons and Harden trade was the big blockbuster that everyone was waiting for, but felt, immediately, flat.
To pretend you’re pleased when the team you like has made a “clean deal” with “optimum leverage” and “good grades”, dutifully poring over the numbers as if the front office had missed something, is the most joyless way to treat something that already treats people like assets.
Just want the thing you want, and be happy when you get it.
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