Exits: This team was sweatpants
P.J. Tucker worked like a mirror in Milwaukee, and really wherever he goes.
There’s a tremulous shade of green somewhere between muted pistachio and watered down mint, like if a glob of mint chip ice cream melted down on the sidewalk, close to sea foam but less bang you over the head when your brain registers “sea foam” or its approximation out of water, and I’ve only seen two people pull it off. One was a woman in an old Mercedes SL convertible, not so much driving the car as the colour, and the other was P.J. Tucker. But for the frequency Tucker is also driving convertibles, they could both be P.J. Tucker.
Tucker is, right now, in Venice. He was also in Venice a couple days ago, leaning back against a metal railing along the canal, the water behind him in the squared off frame of the photo roiling with five motorboats — seemingly too many for such a tight section but in an ordered allotment automatically assigned by such close quarters — and the same colour as the suit he’s wearing.
Finally, we’ve come to it, the suit he’s wearing.
Brocade, silk, another kind of fabric you’ve for sure never touched. Draped and fitted, all at once, cut exactly for Tucker’s frame. The pattern, like poppies coming to bloom at the end of tall and soft tipping stalks, tendril leaves long and curling, rendered in a glossy, pearlescent indicolite, some rare tourmaline, embossed gently into the base, a felted sage. Tucker has his heavy and gold custom initialled chain on, khaki sneakers, and a thick black framed pair of his own sunglasses, this model flecked with cobalt and part of his line that sold out in less than a day, I looked.
Venice, you’d expect, is hot in August, but Tucker looks like he’s tapped into what the city would have hung up for him that morning in his armadio, if you could somehow commune with its submerged and secret heart.
Tucker dresses the same way that he plays basketball, with steady pleasure. A quiet maximalism. It’s never as procedural as putting on a uniform, instead it’s a slow, jarringly intimate experience. In his clothes, like his game, you can see how he considered not just the staging, the backdrop, but how he pressed a collar, the fabric, rows of stitching between his fingers. How tactile he plays. A bullying manoeuvrability that only comes when you understand how you look, moving through the world. Tucker has watched all the tape, he knows what he looks like.
He can be a destabilizer, the guy who pump fakes from the corner to draw bodies away and easy to him, cuts a clean pass to Giannis Antetokounmpo, about to be airborne. He looked, and looked, and looked for James Harden, on behalf of and in earnest, even when Harden could hardly be bothered to try and see the game that closely in Houston anymore. He never got out of — on any team, in any series — Kevin Durant’s face.
There’s always a sense for anyone playing against Tucker that they are about to be in for it, that it might be a Tuesday in November, a Thursday in March, a Game 6, but to Tucker, narrow-eyed watchful motor that he is, the night is going to take however long it takes. This is like dressing, you don’t rush it.
I’m roaming, but I think that’s right for Tucker. Drafted by Toronto, an entirely different country, four seasons overseas. I read that he wouldn’t eat borscht with the team in Donetsk, made a point of stopping into any designer store there was in Kiev when the team went through. Was it a way to manage homesickness, or that molten sort of long-range longing, along with expectations? To turn down a team meal and instead have Snickers for dinner, to idle in the racks of a future you were aiming for? Making melancholy work for you.
He got to Phoenix for something like a tryout, played for four coaches in as many seasons and alongside two strange sets of brothers. It wasn’t until he neared what would be the end of his time in the desert that Tucker got to try on the role that would be best for him on any of the rosters he’d, never complaining, land on.
When the Suns drafted Devin Booker it clicked — Tucker as a pusher and taker, as a mirror that’s multi-faceted, pulls apart and angles so a guy gets to see himself from all sides and in that understanding, becomes better equipped, even safer, for any scenario on the floor knowing, essentially, how to dress for it. Tucker as a protector, then.
He gave Toronto some badly needed teeth. Positioning himself as the proxy pinball paddle between DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry when anyone got too close. It’s not that Tucker ever threw his body around, or even did much talking back, but he made easily understood the kind of conditions there were to playing against his team, first, and then him, second. Or condition, just one — he would be everywhere. So that if something happened, if something looked about to start, he’d be there to finish it.
Houston seemed great, for him, at first, because it presented only one mercurial man to look out for. Harden would never ask for help and Tucker would never want him to — class, in the chivalric sense, only ever offers. For a while Tucker could read Harden like a heat map, knowing where to insert himself to offer room, rebounds, outlets, cooling. Offer notes a little different than Harden’s one tone drone. If the Rockets didn’t quite get a song in those seasons, then they at least got some rhythm. Russell Westbrook and Chris Paul coming in split Tucker’s attention and with Harden and them pulling so hard in different directions, Tucker wasn’t able to be the same unflinching mirror. Not for both.
I always had the sense that he carried his time in Houston a little more tenderly than some of his other stops, maybe because despite himself, nothing worked. It wasn’t up to him to make it, but when you handle the court night in and out with care and precision, the tidy, close ministrations (the amount of cuff that shows, shoes worn once and just for this) might feel like effort for the first time.
In Milwaukee, ok, this seemed weird. The Bucks needed to move, faster, all the time. Needed to get away from themselves enough not to stall and idle in their well-worn, comfortable slumps. This team was sweatpants.
Maybe it was Brook Lopez there to be the necessary, obvious (won’t say ugly) muscle, and Bobby Portis as a force occasionally less clamped down than chaos, but the important thing is where they left Tucker: essentially free. He could zero in on Giannis and Giannis only, make one life easier while synchronously, with satiety, make it hell for Durant, Trae Young, Booker (that terrifying possibility of the mirror one day winking back), Jae Crowder. Tucker was, maybe finally, dressing for himself.
He is also a player’s player. Nobody gets mad when he leaves, because everyone got better when he was there. In Miami now, with palm greens and dreamy, misty turquoises muted by the haze of heat and salt, there are so many beautiful outfits to try on. Alongside Jimmy and Bam, on the floor nothing but rigour but off it, casual enough for the top three buttons to be left carelessly undone on a raw silk shirt. And with Kyle Lowry, two mirrors coming up alongside each other to give the effect of forever, fittingly, out behind and even less limits to the way they might see themselves forward.
So, do we settle on pistachio?
Or does sage make more sense?
Neither. Like Tucker, smiling smug in Venice, a simultaneously crumbling and reconstructed history at his back, why limit to one or get stuck in a fad when the wealth of texture, pattern and form are what, eventually and with enough practice, make style.