Letter To A Friend

Dear Jordan,

How's it going, buddy?  I know we haven't talked in a while, but I wanted to check in and make sure you hadn't gone entirely catatonic after last night.  Ever since we met, we've been bound inextricably by two shared loves: music and basketball.  We've gone through things, you and I.  Members of three (four if you count senior recitals) bands together.  Geeking out over things like phase cancellation and built-from-scratch synth patches.   Having generally ridiculous nights.  We once crammed a four-piece band WITH GEAR into a single, regular-sized cab to make a radio appearance on time.  We've played the dingiest, crappiest dives imaginable and some pretty great venues as well.   We've sweated out half our body weight in that claustrophobic, non-air-conditioned practice space that smelt like a combination of day-old Subway, garbage, and PBR.  We've made wonderful records, even when we had to re-track most of one because the initial engineer was a complete moron.  And we've talked hoops.  A lot.  You are the only other obsessive basketball fan I know, which is why we spent so much time discussing, arguing, and joking about the NBA.  I mean, I'm a Hawks fan and you're a Cavs fan, so the alternative to all that constant discourse would probably have been to just break down in tears, right?   

Anyway, I saw your facebook status last night and the vitriol and sarcasm were practically seeping through the screen: "Hooray Lebron. You and your super team won, with the help of Stern and the refs. Just like you were supposed to."  I knew you were probably headed towards the darkness.  You know, like the night after your breakup when it was you, me, Hannah, and a super-sized bottle of Jack Daniels.  (To your credit, I've never seen anyone play bass that well after getting blackout trashed and falling down the stairs.)  So please don't be too mad when I say this: LeBron has a ring now, and he deserves it.  It was time, and there's a lot of silver lining here if you want to see it.       

Ever since the finals matchup was set, we knew someone was getting kicked in the teeth.  Either Cleveland or Seattle was going to wind up feeling collectively more embittered, depressed, and outraged than they already did, which seems quasi-impossible but is true nonetheless.   Unfortunately, Cleveland drew the short straw, for which you have my deepest sympathies.  But HOLY CRAP DID YOU WATCH THOSE GAMES?!?!?!  You realize what we're looking at, right?  We have seen the future, and if the gods are kind, it is going to be every bit as beautiful and intense as Celtics/Lakers in the '80s.  The Thunder and Heat are poised to dominate the NBA for the next decade, clashing time and time again for the championship and creating the sort of long-form narrative drama that makes basketball so damned fun.  Sure, our teams will probably be languishing in mediocrity while those guys hog all the glory, but I am always in favor of profoundly gorgeous basketball being played.  Always.  And we are about to watch boatloads of precisely that for a long time to come.

(Also, you have Kyrie Irving, so chin up, right?)

I know that you, like many Clevelanders, will always despise LeBron.  The Decision was an incorrigible and vomit-inducing bit of lunacy, and I completely understand that there's simply no room for forgiveness and atonement when you've been sucker-punched in the crassest manner imaginable on national television.  Not for a city whose sports history has been as nightmarish as Cleveland's.  LeBron left Ohio to fester as an unmitigated sports wasteland, to which Colt McCoy added the coup de grace of more-or-less sucking as an NFL QB while the Indians were and are themselves.  Again.   So LBJ has earned your everlasting scorn, the native son and last hope jilting you at the altar.  Fair enough.  But as a basketball fan, what are you gonna do in a situation like this?

LeBron played at a patently ridiculous level all playoffs.  He stomped on the gas midway through the Pacers series and never looked back, with game 6 in Boston and last night's virtuoso 26-11-13-1-steal-2-block masterpiece serving as indelible capstones to a breathtaking season.  It is your inalienable right (and maybe even your mandate) as a Cavs fan to hate him for eternity with the wrathful passion of a thousand firey suns, but you can't possibly belittle or demean the brilliance he has exhibited over the last two months.  And it wasn't just him.  The Heat, collectively, learned how to operate perfectly within their insular context, alloting LeBron the bulk of the heavy lifting while simultaneously asserting themselves at crucial junctures.

When Kevin Durant came out of halftime and buried that 26-foot bomb, it looked like we had the makings of a comeback for all of about 2 minutes before Miami slammed the door again with brutal finality.  Which is what they've been doing since April to anyone in their path.  It was so much more than D-Wade recalibrating his game to accomadate his injuries and LeBron's dominance, or Chris Bosh quietly dismantling Oklahoma City in the paint.  I mean, everyone expected Shane Battier to give the Thunder fits with his hyperintelligent brand of old-dude-gritty defense.  Randomly turning into Ray Allen from behind the arc?  Not so much.  (61% 3FG for the finals, Shane?  F**KIN' SERIOUSLY?!?!?!)  What about Mario Chalmers exploding for 25 in game 4?  Or Norris Cole demonstrating a phenomenal amount of poise for a rookie on the game's grandest stage?  And you know who really clinched the title for Miami last night?  Mike Freaking Miller.  The guy was literally hobbling around for the entirety of the playoffs, and his one useful NBA skill was nowhere in evidence.  Dude left the clip for his sniper rifle at home ... until last night when he went 7-8 from deep en route to 23 completely unexpected points.  Like the Mavs last year, like most NBA champions in fact, the Heat repeatedly got serious help when they needed it from the unlikeliest of quarters.   Also, Juwan Howard has a ring now, which kind of makes me happy.

And let's not forget that OKC beat themselves to a degree, too.  James Harden evaporated so badly my grandpa wouldn't have feared the beard in a game of one-on-one.  Russ Westbrook was exactly what we expected: a mercurial alchemy of unadulterated genius and head-scratching flaws.  Trouble was, the flaws were unfortunately on prominent display at too many of the wrong times.  Scott Brooks either didn't recognize that Nick Collison needed much more burn this series (and Kendrick Perkins needed much less) or he was simply too reluctant to tamper with the rotations that had gotten the Thunder this far.  And Kevin Durant, for all his offensive wizardry, is simply not physically strong enough, mentally eff-you enough, and defensively skilled enough to handle LeBron on both ends of the floor for extended stretches of time.  Not yet.  But he'll get there.  His ceiling is still miles away, and watching him reach it while going toe-to-toe with LeBron James for the next ten years is going to be a phenomenal experience.

I know you're hurt and angry and more than a little depressed that you had to watch the guy who sold out your city win a title, but try to look on the bright side.  We get to watch a league full of young, transcendent talent blossom for the foreseeable future, bookended by two incredibly entertaining teams who couldn't have set up a better collection of story arcs and interchangeable hero/villain personae (depending on where you stand.)  As basketball fans, what more can we really ask?

Take care, and I'll try to visit Boston sometime soon.

Your pal,
Trav.

Chosen.

"So that's everything, huh?  No weapons, no friends, no hope.  Take all that away and what's left?"

"Me." 

-- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, "Becoming: Part 2."

One of the most appealing facets of basketball is its inherent lack of artifice.  Basketball is elemental; it's a primal thing.  Wood court.  Metal rims.  Glass backboards.  Twine nets.  Rubber ball.  Ten guys essentially wearing clothes that anyone might wear to the gym, albeit with matching colors and logos and higher thread counts.  There are no illusions and no concealment on a basketball court.  The game and its participants are laid bare. 

Perhaps no person on earth would be more qualified to give a symposium on that aspect of the game than LeBron James.  The cumulative effect of everything from his disappearing act in that last game in Cleveland to The Decision to The Laser Show Fog Machine Pep Rally Thingy to last year's NBA Finals to Haslem-Bouncepass-Gate has been an accrued level of pressure unlike anything we've seen an athlete experience before.  Every iota of his being gets dissected and analyzed and turned into a referendum on Global Iconography or What Greatness Means or whatever.  At this point, people would probably label his dental hygiene "unclutch" if he forgot to floss one morning.  The thing about pressure is, you put an element under enough of it for enough years and apply the requisite heat, and eventually you get a diamond.  Which, aside from its monetary value, is a beautiful, purified bit of rock hard enough to cut through damn near anything on earth.  Last night, LeBron James was the world's most expensive and spectacular engagement ring.

The situation was all too familiar.  An elimination game in the Boston Garden, high stakes, backs-against-wall, win or go home.  He's been there ... and failed.  He's been there ... and let Dwyane Wade carry the moment.  And now, he's been there and done that, submitting his latest superhuman (meta-human?  supra-human?) entry in a playoff resume that, despite lacking the all-important rings, is still resplendent with several nights of sheer brilliance.      

We talk about athletes going into "video game mode" whenever they appear particularly unstoppable during a given game.  While he certainly played as such, LeBron also turned that concept on its head, appearing literally as if he were controlling his body from some distant remove, munching chips on a couch as he guided a catatonia-eyed avatar through an impossibly flawless game.      

It wasn't just the numbers either, though certainly they alone are enough to dizzy the mind: 45-15-5.  That's Wilt territory, if you're scoring at home.  Much has been made of the efficiency with which he scored those points, but LeBron had an economy of being last night that I don't believe we have ever witnessed before.  Jordan played with a contained fury and a calculated destructiveness.  Kobe has his trademark bulldog-lipped menace and god help anyone, even his own teammates, in his way.  This was an entirely different thing.  To all appearances, LeBron didn't have any teammates last night.  There were also no opposing players, refs, coaches, crowd, TV cameras, or even a building.  Heck, there might not have been a court.  He was alone without being lonesome, separate without seeing there was anything to be separated from.  LeBron's world last night had borders so tightly-defined that they ended where his fingertips touched the ball.  For all the acknowledgement he gave anything else, his feet may as well have been traversing negative space in a howling void.

LeBron wasn't a blank slate; then we would at least have been looking at the slate with the knowledge that something might be drawn on it at some point.  He didn't have a thousand yard stare, because that would imply that he was in a state where distances have meaning and can be measured.  It wasn't a zen calm, and he wasn't dialed in.  If anything, he was tuned as out as possible.  Forget radio silence, he was simply gone.

We can't know for certain, obviously, but if I could hazard a guess, I'd say that LBJ, out of sheer desperation and need, discovered within himself a completely new way to play basketball.  Faced with the possibility of once again crumbling in the same arena where so many of his past catastrophes have played out, and the full, brutal knowledge of what the fallout from such an occurrence would be like, LeBron James elected to shut down.  He retreated from the weight of the moment by becoming weightless, sliding down an infinite spiral further and further into himself until he struck the middle of emotional and cognitive nowhere, which was his essence as a basketball player.  Away from the glare and clangor of being Chosen, detached from even the most rudimentary of interactions, he was precisely and only himself in all his myriad gifts and instincts, devoid of any context save that which he allowed.  Which was not this game, but The Game of Basketball, actual and pure.  It's been said and written innumerable times that LeBron can sometimes seem as if he's playing a different game than everyone else.  Last night was the first time he transcended "seeming" into the realm of truth.

The question of LeBron replicating such a performance is easily answerable.  Yes, he'll have more games like this one in his career.  No, Game 7 on Saturday night probably won't be one of them.  But if LeBron has figured out some sort of meditation/alchemy/transubstantiation mental trigger by which he becomes a 100% hoops-by-volume distillation of basketball, if he can duplicate that Nowhere Man dream state with even semi-reasonable frequency ... watch out.  LeBron James is the best basketball player in the world, but last night he became something more, different, and rare.  When you strip away everything else and you're left with only him, that's when you see greatness.  After the hammering and thrashing he's received in the court of public opinion, last night LeBron proved that we are all still, and always, witnesses.   

Steve Nash Is Already Free

As the NBA season unspools in a denser-than-usual hail of characters, story arcs, and speculations, it's difficult to maintain a clear focus on the periphery. The subtleties in the background of this painting still in progress, however obvious they might be to the astute eye, blur into formlessness behind the center stage glare of Jeremy Lin or the latest Dwight Howard trade rumor or whatever. The warp speed nature of the season distorts all but the most immediate headlines, and they vanish faster than they come. In an age where memes can be created, live full lives and die meaningless deaths in the space of a few hours on Twitter, transience is the new norm. This renders consistency an almost undesirable attribute; it's a negative quantity if you want to be noticed and appreciated. We fail to notice sustained, high-level performance if it transpires without the requisite hype and fanfare. Enter Steve Nash.

At age 38, the Suns point guard is somehow improbably still in his prime and having himself a hell of a fine season. This is going almost completely unnoticed because of a plethora of flashier, more interesting talking points around the league and the fact that Phoenix is a terrible team, but Nash is doing some phenomenal work out there in the Arizona desert. He's started 29 of a possible 32 games, played 32.1 minutes a night, is averaging 14.6 points and 11 assists per game. To give you an idea of where those numbers stack up, he's just a point per game shy of the totals that earned Nash his first MVP. That 11 APG mark also has him leading the league in dimes, 39 ahead of his closest competition. For a point guard with Nash's experience and passing acumen, being the assists leader might not strike anyone as particularly surprising. After all, he's been dishing the rock at a remarkable level for a long time. Consider, however, that atrocity of a team he's playing on, and those numbers become a near miracle. To give you an idea of how impressive Nash has been: the Suns are 5th in the league in assists but 18th in points scored, meaning he's been extraordinarily deft in his execution and getting the best possible results from his vastly inferior teammates. Leading the league in assists when Marcin Gortat is your best offensive option is a Herculean feat indeed. And oh yeah, that 14.6 PPG makes him the Suns' second leading scorer to boot.

Nash could also very well crack the vaunted 50/40/90 club (50% FG, 40% 3FG, 90% FT) again this season. There have obviously been far better and more complete offensive weapons in the history of the game, but very few (five players total since the implementation of the three point line in the 1979-80 season) are ever that consistently accurate over the course of an entire season. In fact, Nash has had the most 50/40/90 years of anybody in history (4) and is a single percentage point in his lifetime FG% away from averaging 50/40/90 for his career. You know who else has done that? No one. Ever. Yet here he is, a few nights of streaky hot-handedness away. Ray Allen may have the purest shooting stroke in the history of the game, but if you want to talk accuracy and efficacy, no one knocks 'em down like Nash.

Just to be clear, we're talking about a back-to-back MVP (however dubious those awards may appear in retrospect) who is in a shooting percentage classification all by his lonesome; a man who, in an era stacked with talented point guards, is still one of the best in the game at an advanced basketball age that suggests he has no business being so.

You may have heard something about the "Free Steve Nash" movement that's been making the rounds on various social media platforms, but for the uninitiated, here's a quick rundown:
Steve Nash has never won an NBA Championship. This has not happened for a variety of reasons; the leaving-the-bench playoff suspensions, a maddeningly unfair litany of injuries and bad breaks. Mostly, the galling fact that the Suns' ownership has been shamelessly, inexcusably penny pinching in a manner that has failed to ever forge a truly competitive squad. Since Nash is a nice guy who is fun to watch and most importantly is a great basketball player, most basketball fans would love to see Nash traded posthaste from Phoenix to a contending team so that he can chase a championship ring before his body eventually breaks down. Of course, that would mean leaving the Suns' famous "Warlock" training staff which might accelerate that breakdown, but you get the idea.

More so than in any other sport (unless you're an NFL quarterback), we demand hardware of our elite NBA players before we consider them to have achieved their outermost limits of greatness. Just ask Charles Barkley how much crap he's taken over the years about it. We absolutely kill the guys who, in our perception, ought to have hoisted the Larry O'Brien Trophy but didn't or haven't for some reason or another. We did it to Dirk for an eon before he finally put that incessant humbugging to rest last year. We're still doing to LeBron, and we will in perpetuity until he wins the last game of the season. It's a pathological reflex. To be reductive for a moment, it goes like this: No ring? Dude can't ball. Ring? Dude can ball, and ball don't lie.

Steve Nash has always been an exemplar of two things: Newton's First Law*, and a fierce, absolute sense of loyalty. Which is why he's still stuck in Phoenix playing for a lackluster team with an even dimmer future. He's had multiple opportunities to extricate himself for greener pastures, and he has passed up those chances at every turn. He can't bear to turn his back on the fans, or the organization, or his teammates, however inept they may be on the court. He'd certainly never demand an out. J.A. Adande already detailed the Nash's sentiments vis a vis a trade and the reasons why it won't happen, but the upshot is: Nash isn't going anywhere this season. The sad thing is that next year, when he's free to pick a destination, it's difficult to look at the NBA landscape and see a place where Nash might land that would enable him to mount a legitimate championship campaign. (Unless he winds up in Dallas, which would make a sort of poetic, cyclical sense, but the chatter seems to indicate the Mavs will be in hot pursuit of Deron Williams to man the point next year.)

And so it seems likely that Steve Nash will end his NBA career sans championship. "Free Steve Nash" is falling on deaf ears, even Nash's own. But I think the perception of his legacy is going to play out differently from that of Chuck Wagon, John Stockton, and the other greats who never summited the NBA's Everest. If he winds up ringless, it won't be because he didn't have the killer instinct, or he wasn't clutch enough, or he didn't care enough about winning, or he was too selfish, or any of the other tiredly angry tropes we heap on players whose career arcs disappoint us. Nash's only fault (besides being lousy at defense) lies in being a consummate teammate, as unselfish with his best years and contract negotiations and even his own aspirations as he ever is with a basketball. His unwavering loyalty is his tragic flaw, and you don't deride Achilles simply because his heel was never dipped in the waters of, in this case, impervious self interest.

Every time someone brings up the shaky and questionable nature of Nash's MVPs, it's a discussion you can have. Every time they bring up his massive defensive liability, that point has to be conceded. But if anyone ever tries to argue that Nash couldn't have been that great because he never won a title, the rejoinder is easy to make: a ring was less important to the man than giving himself over completely to loyalty, even when his team failed spectacularly to reciprocate that level of devotion. That's unimpeachable; and that's why I suspect Nash will be largely exempt from the historical beatings endured by the other members of the Tragically Ringless Society. We want to free him, but Steve Nash has already freed himself.

* "A body in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force." Nash is living, breathing evidence of this. The guy dribbles and dribbles and swoops and drives and resets and dribbles and dribbles and probes and prods and dribbles and dribbles until either a pass or a shot presents itself. Steve Nash = physics.