With the 2nd pick in the Basketball Feelings Feelings Draft, Colin McGowan selects... CONFUSION
Colin McGowan is on a short list of not just my favourite basketball writers but my favourite writers period. He is honest, achingly funny, and his writing, whether player profiles or team analysis, are vignettes of a specific set of moments, handled so carefully, that take into account everything from mood to the existential weight of being human to quality of light, with a sharp eye to actual gameplay that will knock you on your ass. He’s the one I trust most to gauge the league in any given moment, a basketball barometer.
It is hard to know what to do. This is true all the time but perhaps you feel it more acutely in this moment, when you are, just as a hypothetical for instance, devoting an unreasonable amount of psychic energy to deciding whether or not to text a friend with whom you are no longer particularly close but who does mean something to you—you have known her high and low, asleep on the train home at two a.m.—who’s working as an ER nurse, and you’re not sure what to say, if it would be helpful, or read as the kind of blithe felicitation that annoys soldiers waiting in airports. This is not the only thing you don’t know what to do about, nor the most important, but it’s the one that’s consumed this particular afternoon.
Anyway, no one cares about this, which is a relief because if an audience were to observe your daily decision-making, they would be appalled. They would hate you for how bent out of shape you get when presented with the most minor conundrums, and the frequency with which, despite all your chin-stroking deliberateness, you choose the worst available option. The press would call you weak for telling a chipper sideline reporter that, in your defense, your consciousness is like a faraway clock on which you can only ever read approximate times, and that it is not in fact the case that you live your life as if intentionally stepping on a walkway of rakes you’ve laid out for yourself, one after the other, until you are bleeding and crying, though obviously you understand if it seems that way to other people.
No, that level of scrutiny wouldn’t be good for you at all. Gatorade might pay you not to consume their product in public.
LeBron James hadn’t really done anything yet by 2007, except win Rookie of the Year, and average over thirty points per game, and make three All-Star teams, and carry a pair of bone-deep mediocre Cavaliers teams to consecutive fifty-win seasons. Relative to what LeBron James would go on to accomplish, he hadn’t really done anything yet. The Pistons were still bosses of the Eastern Conference, a squad of long-tenured professors and salty barkeeps with rifles stashed above the Jim Beam. It was expected that LeBron would topple them at some point. The 2007 Eastern Finals seemed maybe a titch early.
Game One, twelve seconds left, Cavs down two. LeBron rejects a screen and drives left. Does he get half a step on Tayshaun Prince? It seems so, though who can say for certain when you review it in your memory, or 240p? He swings it to Donyell Marshall, lone citizen of his own sovereign nation in the corner, who loads and fires and clanks it. The Pistons take a 1-0 lead.
That LeBron needed to defend this decision was on the one hand laughable—he was at the tail end of a poor shooting performance, Tayshaun has the arms of an elm, and Marshall had just a few nights ago hit six three-pointers in the series-clincher against the Nets—and on the other hand, he probably could have scored, and it sort of looked like he wanted to pass.
LeBron’s most perfect gift is his lucidity. He handles crunchtime possessions in late-round playoff games with more poise than most people have parallel parking on a quiet street. But he was twenty-two here, already a basketball genius but green in ways nobody can overcome, with diverging ideas about himself. He wanted to be a killer, and he wanted to be smart, and he wanted to win, and he wanted, perhaps more than anything, not to blow the layup. “I go for the winning play,” he said after the loss. “The winning play when two guys come at you and a teammate is open is to give it up. It's as simple as that.” Which is true enough, but also, faced with a similar situation in Game Five of the same series, he blew past Tayshaun, threw it down, and then scored every single one of his team’s points in overtime. The Cavs won by two.
It happens to the best of us, is my point. The getting caught in between, the not knowing what to do or who you’re trying to be. If it can fell LeBron James, at least temporarily, we can forgive ourselves for not being able to conquer it either. Whether that forgiveness penetrates, or is even useful—I am, to be clear, still workshopping the text I’m not sure I’m going to send. It’s dark out now, and I’m giving up. Confusion claims the day. It’s a strong pick at second overall.