With the 5th pick in the Basketball Feelings Feelings Draft, Basketball Feelings selects... STUBBORN

The thought of Stan Van Gundy, furious, vibrating in place courtside, delivers me an immense measure of calm.

From 2014-2018, just about every game the Pistons came to Toronto, I would go to watch Stan (occasionally the Pistons). A distant figure that shifted in angle and grew in size depending on where the cheapest seats were but always planted, arms folded in an eternal huff. I would take grainy, zoomed in photos, in nearly every one he is wearing the same thing, standing the same way, a beacon of stubborn comfort, a small and fuming lodestar.

He is an engine constantly revving. The last split second of a deep breath before it is expelled out in a shout. I liked Van Gundy best for his adamant belief that he should be where he was, always. I liked him even when that belief got in his way, when how he wouldn’t budge was going to turn out much worse for him than anyone else. When Pat Riley, supremely tanned and slightly serpentine, chased him out of Miami and he showed up a year later to the least exotic place in Florida and Dwight Howard. When he left Florida scorched and for good and ended up in Detroit, a place it seemed he should have been coaching in all along if only for how often the mandates of the two matched — something to prove.

The kind of stubborn I draw comfort from is a choice that is reengaged with, made anew often rather than a resting state, which veers more toward ignorance. To commit to stubborn isn’t just to acquiesce with being disagreeable for its own sake, it’s understanding there will be easier, quicker, cleaner ways of doing things that will come along but that a choice was already made. It is a kind of loyalty to an end result over yourself. Stubborn, almost, as a meditative state.

As a coach, Van Gundy was not that stubborn in the sense of sticking to one thing until it worked and hellbent on altering a team’s structure if it didn’t. He wasn’t a coach really used to leveraging present for future, forfeiting useable years for a superstar or one solitary shot. He was happy to abandon what wasn’t working if there was something that could. You can be hard headed and still endeavour to stay soft. Resolve and sense make compassion.

“I’m as lost as I’ve been”, Van Gundy said the summer after the Pistons fired him. “Every other time, I’ve known — or had a pretty good idea — that I was still going to try to coach.”

Yeah, there is a point of privilege his retrospect hinged on. Being in that cyclical whirlpool of coaches that teams plucked their next candidate from, the practice as gross as the hot tub in the analogy I picture. To know moving along never meant leaving, only migrating around the league, and then maybe to media after that. But god, when I read that quote for the first time all I could picture was Van Gundy wandering down to the lake his house sat on (it was for sale this February so now who knows) with his dog, probably wearing that Pistons hat and hoodie he had on in that photo for Slow Roll Detroit — how flustered he was with the separate life the photo took on (“I was just getting ready to ride a bike”) — watching jet skis rip across the water in the same hallowed Michigan golden hour light.

I think where there is room for that sort of stubborn in the league, in life now, and it isn’t much. The world was already so good at grinding down edges, anything that caught, before all this and the fastest way back to that is the ripcord so many are reaching for. Back to a known road, a reliable tract, the breakdowns familiar. But what about holding out? For another step, another few minutes with your heart rate up, a little more discomfort, anxiety, unease, unknown. Even if it is only in your head.

When you think of the most memorable ways you’ve seen Stan Van Gundy screaming it is probably to “Form a fucking wall”.

There’s 0.1 seconds remaining, his voice is almost all the way gone and he’s competing with ‘We Will Rock You’ and his team’s waning attention. Brandon Jennings is eyeing the jumbotron, Andre Drummond is pulling at his lip, rubbing his face, only Greg Monroe is curious, leaning in and looking keenly down at the clipboard where Van Gundy is either making Xs in a straight line or else just writing WALL. It feels unhinged and keyed up anew every time you see it. But it’s stubborn reacting to stimulus versus stubborn imposing itself.

There’s this other, sort of secret feeling clip of Van Gundy doing a drill in Orlando. It starts with him demanding the ball from someone off camera in a deeply New Jerseyan deadpan. He turns to bounce it, nearly as high as he is tall and as loud as he is shouting over it. It’s a pronounced bounce, kind of too much. You can hardly hear him. He races away, fast and slow, throws the ball between his legs and skims it with his left hand, flinging it forward without much grace at all. He spins, shouts “SPIN” to narrate the spin in the act of spinning, his voice tossed backward. Takes four vaulting steps forward, launches a crossover on the last, turns back and is already moving his hands as if haggling with a mechanic on the price of getting his tires rotated.

“Whatever you can put together,” he shouts, starting to come back, one arm cradling the ball to his side. “Okay,” here you get the sense there’s a secret coming, one that’s going to make it all click, “Whatever you can put together,” he repeats as his other hand starts to spin up and up, a metaphysical poet waving away the incomprehensible riddle of life, “put it together!”

That’s it.

There’s not a better motto for stubborn. Not a better master class on how to deliver it. You gather what you’ve got, any trick you have, pile it on, plough forward. The assertion that it’s the right way — forward, spinning, stumbling — is in the action of moving. You generate your own proof.

Finished, he’s already angled his body like he’s leaving, likely he does, that buckshot of a sentence echoing behind him.

Whatever you can put together, put it together.