Exits: New tan lines, a very long summer
The first in a series on the 2020-2021 playoff exits as they happen, starting with the Miami Heat.
What if this was just how it was? The Heat, swept by the Bucks this season, still made the Finals less than a year ago. What if this unexpected outcome didn’t take away from that, or take anything from that, because it was the culmination of a totally separate storyline? What if the Bubble, and everything that happened in it, wasn’t anomalous, was just the measure of a very specific set of circumstances?
Before he left for a run this morning Dylan pulled me in for a hug and said how proud he was of everything I was doing.
What was I doing? I wondered out loud. One arm wrapping around him and the other reaching to drop cutlery in the sink.
He listed the last few days. I made a joke in a voice several notches more intense than mine like, you’re only as good as the last thing you produced.
Said it as I was already thinking about writing this. That what happened to the Heat isn’t indicative of anything greater than the greater mess that this season already was. Whole stretches where nearly the entire roster was out with Covid or in Covid protocols. Made the self-depreciative joke as I prepared to sit down and write about what a weird waste it is when we’re already dismantling personal accomplishment or accolades to construct the next trophy we won’t even let ourselves touch.
Someone asked Bam in his postgame what he wanted to work on to counter the way teams played against him this season. They mentioned that he’d added a mid-range jumper to improve his game and Adebayo, head bowed so you can very clearly see his forehead, raised his eyebrows at that.
“Let me ask you something,” he responds quietly, “you watch the games, right?”
After a beat, the writer answers yes.
Adebayo nods, “What do you think I need to work on?”
After a longer beat, the writer says he’s asking Bam.
“No, I’m asking you,” Adebayo responds, “You watch the games. You know I’m out there. You know my answer. What’s your answer?”
Four seconds. Six seconds. The white noise of the recording is booming.
Mid-range jumper, the writer answers, quickly correcting “you added that already” because that’s also what he said in his question.
Adebayo’s eyebrows raise again but his face is up, straight on to the camera now, “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got, after watching me for four years.”
Valleys of silence. Adebayo tilts his head like he’s trying to hear better.
“That’s all I’ve got,” the writer answers.
Adebayo gives a deep nod, “Then I'll work on my mid-range jumper.”
What came just before the question was Adebayo explaining the difficulty of getting into any kind of flow in a compressed season. What came before that was him saying there was no excuse for the team.
The push and pull in these moments, out of context, is monstrous.
Asking what a guy is going to fix, asking them to fast forward out of that chair where the weight of a loss hasn’t yet settled, where the clothes they’ve just changed into are probably still a little wet from water that’s clung from the shower, while asking them to go backwards so precisely and pluck out the moments for improvement. I get the seeming necessity of it while writing a story meant to wrap the team’s season, but my brain has trouble scrabbling back to yesterday afternoon, let alone this winter.
The Heat getting as far as they did in September and then ending up here isn’t a mystery that’s going to be solved in forced retrospect any more than it’s really a mystery at all. The Bucks got better, the Heat had a hard stretch they came out of looking markedly out of step, because of both things Milwaukee and Miami ended up facing off in the first round. Toronto and Boston weren’t there as buffers. Can a hard truth also be relatively easy?
Mornings have gotten hazier. If there’s something to do, where it normally would have propelled me from bed, it instead slips away in the dim hours of dawn. It’s not that I lack the motivation, it’s that I’ve lost the notion of what I’m supposed to be doing completely. I come into mornings already having forgotten. My dreams have grown more lucid and it’s work to come out of them, to piece together the bedroom, figure the time by where the light is hitting the walls. I’ve found some mornings that my first thought is of other mornings, in other places, the quality of those memories much more distinct than what I’m actually waking into.
Yanking the blackout curtains open to Tokyo Tower, or a ten-storey tall LED screen of a sneering UFC fighter’s face outside my hotel room window in Vegas, T-Mobile Arena washed a chalky pink in the desert sunrise. The smell of coffee and the screeching of those small green parrots that swing wild arcs around Highland Park. Stones from the ceiling clattering down to the floor in the clean and mineral wash of dawn as a violent North Atlantic storm goes shuddering off Inishmaan. The dry, sharp tang of the stone pines growing out of the dunes in Tarifa hazed over with salt air from the Strait of Gibraltar coming through an open window.
Everywhere I’ve been crowding into my mornings, my mind shuttling me between memories and stalling at, maybe, the reality of there being another one here, now, already.
Trailing behind and pushing ahead, my coping mechanisms for the last year are starting to show me, not unkindly, how limiting they can be.
Jimmy Butler leaving Miami seems the most unnatural of any outcome in all the scrambling and rickety speculative scenarios a sweep will bring. Like time, or the proof of fate, reversing. Butler’s whole career was a process of elimination to land on the system, the climate, the quality of light best suited for permanent sunglasses, the place perfect for him. The best part about taking this season literally is that it makes it possible to just leave it here. There’s nothing you don’t already know to be picked up and taken away to examine later, it’s all there, it just happened. Last season’s fast and glossy run left a kind of glowing imprint, like a deep and perfect tan that you’re loathe to see gradually fade.
This season wasn’t like that but it’s rare to have things sit so plainly, so easily as they are. Adebayo will improve, Butler will stay, the Heat will add somebody, maybe a Lowry-shaped somebody as loathe as my heart is to admit how easy the fit, maybe Spoelstra starts wearing another gold chain. New tan lines, a very long summer. What happens is what comes next.