Exits: Triumph is just another story away
Even the lights camera team couldn’t get a good take out of this season.
The Lakers are dramatic. It’s bound up in their lineage, that you can say they even have one. They take the purple part, its promise of empire, of owed reign, pretty literal.
Because what happened to the Lakers this season isn’t hard, not to figure out. They could not be exempt, maybe for the first time, from the misfortune that wracked upon every other franchise. There was a pandemic and there were injuries. That was what did it in the end. The middle is what’s more difficult.
And why work so hard to go against what you have? A fleet-footed, entirely pestering team of shooters, a ballast of size where it’s needed. Was it too simple? Is that why Rob Pelinka makes the move for Andre Drummond? Pines for him, times his extraction with Santa Anas season to speed him along toward Los Angeles, its sprawl unfurling galaxy-vast, dotted with citrus, pockmarked with whipped up taffeta mounds of bougainvillea, wisteria, wild blooming sage, all of it like tufts of the Milky Way’s wash when you’re somewhere desolate enough to watch it spread scattershot out and on forever — never in L.A.
LeBron James wants to place his guys around the floor, votives for him to light up when he needs them, all of it constructed to fling a very particular kind of ambient light. There was nothing that had to be too complicated about this. This was supposed to be like dinner at the Italian place along the Pacific Coast Highway Rihanna is always showing up at on a Tuesday night. The room was ready, the tables set, the windows let in shrieks from Palisades Beach, salt air at dusk, people have just sat down still sweaty from the tennis courts across the highway, the grit of sand clinging to sweating glasses and in the first sip of anything cold, we were ready to gawk.
But no, even the lights camera team couldn’t get a good take out of this season.
What’s in front of them, though, does seem a hell of a lot easier than what — seven, now? Seven and counting — other teams, and their grapeshot gouged front offices, are facing.
To get well, to stay mostly the same. Surface-level simple.
For James there’s the deeper unknown (and then it’s only really unknown to us, because it isn’t something he’s keen to, or has to, let on) of whether or not he’s started his downhill leg. You can only climb for so long, there’s always going to be just as much distance heading down on the other side. But even if it was always coming, true as natural law, doesn’t make it much easier to picture. James less a certain level of velocity will be like a very large planet slowing, shedding rotations. It’s going to, for a time, throw the basketball system, the NBA’s own small universe, out of step. Things won’t stop but we’ll feel a small tremor in the axis shifting, aligning to a new, as yet unknown centre.
James knows. He’s as self-aware as he is savvy with the product of himself — which is to say, very. Everything about it will give the sense of him as the horizon, gradually receding. None of it will look like him walking away. Assuming he stays healthy — and we do, because he always has, what we don’t assume is how difficult that is — he might just adjust his role every season, easing into less minutes but minutes still made spectacular, blooming like fireworks saved for the finale, all that cascading dust, the enchanting offal of copper chloride and strontium carbonate dancing down the air for so long that you forget the show’s over and that was the ending.
But all that’s years away.
It’s something I’ve noticed, reading things written about the team, writing things myself, that the Lakers propensity for pomp, for drama, readily spreads beyond the floor, fills whatever space you give it, a catching thing. The identity of the franchise more a nostalgia-based oral history than something developed through players when the roster each season, especially with notable roles, works more like a revolving door.
The team took care of its biggest, if a little imaginary, concerns this season so summer moves might look more like quiet departures. If not entirely amicable then about as severe as a chemical peel. Kyle Kuzma, Marc Gasol, Dennis Schroder, Wesley Matthews, Jared Dudley, Montrezl Harrell, Markieff Morris, and sheesh there’s still more, supporting players for a new-look Lakers just gone out of season — perfectly fine, should probably stay, but reminiscent of a couple looks ago. Walking memories of where expectation, glazed with the fecundity of a golden, unending past, didn’t measure up. Like currency gone out of circulation, just a tender of the heart, of memory, and you can’t even buy a tacky keychain at the airport with that kind of promise anymore. I’ve certainly tried.
With so many coaches parting amicably, or else outright ejecting themselves, Frank Vogel seems safe. He has just the right kind of limits to his creativity to conduit what James would like to continue build — the same, but better. Just like the hills in the city, any type of elevation encroached on, razed platforms cut into the canyons and old builds torn down, built-up, bowled over. Houses jutting like crooked teeth out of the hills, each one a little more the same. In a place where the threat of the ground heaving open grows by the day maybe it doesn’t make sense to put anything down as proof, maybe it’s safer to live within memories, where even the sharpest losses are softened and treated to a high gloss. To head for the hills and idle as close as possible to the ocean, to expedite the inventible, to live on the back of disaster with your eyes closed, where triumph is just another story away.