Floor and ceiling
What’s the appeal in setting limits for any person, especially the ones who are practically oxidizing promise every night on the floor?
Stepping out onto the pool deck, I’m an amateur again. Not amateur as in I was ever a pro at this, but green at this pool, its regulars and their customs. Even the water, neat between four long, precise lanes, three of which are taken up by swimmers in motion, will be new.
Water is water but water is also a mirror so accurate that it absorbs light, air, the entire mood of a place. This water, compared to the flung-wide aquamarine of the outdoor public pool in the middle of a park coming alive every morning in summer is monastic by comparison. Darker, a serious blue, the tang of chlorine sharper boxed into this vaulted-ceiling hall. Rhythmic strokes of these solemn swimmers and their deep, controlled breaths the only sound. The lifeguard in the tall, austere steel chair at one end of the blue tiled deck not sunburned or hungover, but sitting straight with an impassive expression, watching some middle distance. Even the lap clock on the wall, big enough to read while glancing at it in motion, swings silent and strict.
Wet from the shower, my skin prickles in the chill of open air. I walk around one end of the pool to the other side and set my towel down, tuck my mask into a fold. Later, in the water, I’ll see the gleaming stainless steel studs sticking out of the wall between the sunken change room doors for hanging towels, notice at the end of each lane there’s a white plastic tub with clear plastic bags to put your mask and slides in while you swim. Green. I feel so green again in all that blue.
The only bit of flare are two strings of blue and white sailing flags hung at either end of the lap pool. This is for lessons, for knowing how close you are to the wall of the pool so you don’t go crashing into it on a backstroke. I count six strokes from the flags but still smack my wrist against the lip of the wall a couple times.
In the water it’s easier to remember. To situate my body in the rhythm of a stroke, organize my limbs to move in tandem, feel the easy awareness of my body with gravity gone away from it. My breath is trickier. A few times I have to stop in the middle of the pool, switch from front crawl to breast stroke, force an exhale underwater to empty my lungs, come back up and start again. I pick beams in the ceiling to track my eyes along when I’m on my back, goggles fogging against the flush of my face. Underwater I watch the floor silently dip away as I cross the invisible line from shallow end to deep and every time there is a small surge in my stomach at how the water instantly darkens, at all that space underneath me.
I’m so focused I don’t notice when the three other swimmers have gone, only that the pool is empty. Stopping to rest at the ledge in the deep end I ask the lifeguard, who has come down from the chair and is walking along the deck away from the lap pool, to confirm when the swim is done.
I push off the ledge and spread myself back into water. My breath, in my ears, sounds louder, a little rushed, my body feels rosy, clear, warmed up. I’m out of practice but the green is going. I’ve still got ten minutes.
It’s always been strange to me, the floor and ceiling rhetoric in basketball, but especially when it comes to rookies. Besides being arbitrary, it’s such an instantly diminishing method. What’s the appeal in setting limits for any person, especially the ones who are coming at you glowing, practically oxidizing promise, every night on the floor? Maybe some gross human compulsion of seeing a yet unmarked field and being the first to set foot on it, even if it happens to be the imaginary future of another person.
I get the rough basis for ceiling in watching a rookie’s college tape, or the weird metrics of knowing a stranger’s bodily measurements and deciding from there what their limitations might be, but it’s still, like in the banal way you or I picture the week to come and all the things we might do in it, imaginary.
I don’t watch Scottie Barnes and give a shit about his developmental arc. I watch Scottie Barnes spring one, two, three steps in the paint like he’s pogoing on stilts and decide oh you know what? I’m actually going to do a hook shot from this impossible 40 degree and backwards angle and get floored with joy because there’s something in the way he can orient himself in space, tilt his torso and swan his arms to do that, fluidly, that only belongs to him. I don’t watch Evan Mobley and think wow, when this guy gets his strength development up he’s going to become a scaleable player. I watch Evan Mobley block shots at the rim like he’s gone apple picking, watch him sail over Steven Adams to gently set the ball in the basket because by then he’s level with it, watch him take the ball in two hands and even with LeBron James hanging off it, get up for a dunk.
I don’t want them to validate themselves, or the numbers they happened to have their names called at. It doesn’t change anything for me, there’s no debt owed here.
There is an urge to contain not just promise, but potential. If I stretch, I can give that urge the benefit of the doubt because I assume in attempting to contain there’s a desire to understand, to map out the whys and hows so that promise can be turned tangible. If we, collectively we, understand how Barnes moves the way he does, or why Mobley works like bottled lightning, then maybe there’s an applicable way to render that knowledge down to coach or train with it, or even get our dumbstruck brains around it. But I also don’t really think that’s where the urge for containment comes from.
Because the baseline for analysis in basketball is still to treat a person as an abstraction. All the proof I need comes from being in rooms where the questions are being asked to coaches about their players, or to players about themselves. Where the questions come in the third person even if the person is right there, still catching their breath from doing the things in reality they’re about to be asked about theoretically. But if you need more proof, read anything. Read this:
Mobley’s floor is far lower than Cunningham, for example, because NBA big men are so fungible. And if Mobley doesn’t add strength to stay on the floor, or shoot well or add a scoring touch, then he’s just a useful rotation big.
Or this:
Although he is lacking quickness and overall burst, he is a disciplined and reliable team defender with plus length.
Here:
He’s far from a finished product but the upside is tantalizing.
Or here:
He is certainly powerful, but lacks athleticism, so his defensive impact is a question at the moment.
I’m stopping not because there aren’t more — this sort of stream is endless — but because the more of these I read, I start to disassociate.
Take the names out, the already lean, last name markers that prove we’re talking about a person here, and we’re reading about a vehicle. Which is essentially the point in this kind of speculative analysis, this make-believe prospecting — a vehicle for stats, a vector for wins, something easily taken apart and examined so that you don’t feel bad about the person part dropping away. You barely notice the shift in how you’re referring to a grown man’s body, the leverage it might lend to win percentage, as fungible, as tantalizing.
It isn’t that no criticism is warranted. Watching or consuming something and wanting to take apart the experience of it now that it’s gone is kind of the human condition. We never come into anything without expectation and that expectation in turn is going to colour what it was that just happened to us. Whether we feel let down or understood by the moment, whether we’re reflected back reliably (reliable to who is another question, because you certainly don’t see yourself the same as anyone else does) or feel warped like a funhouse mirror.
Basketball isn’t above this. I think sometimes the visceral experience of fandom has more in common with visual art, with the physical entrancement or revulsion of taking in a body of work for the first time, than the brute “good/bad” reactions it’s reduced to.
But the language for basketball doesn’t line up as easily because of how emotive, wrenching, or repetitive the game can get. Is there anything more arbitrary than draft predictions? When we lose the flourish of language, become engineers instead of architects. Set the floor, define the ceiling.
To assign current players as best and worse case comps for a rookie before they’ve even played their first NBA game makes it easier on our lizard brains to understand what it’s seeing, like deciding whether an athlete’s contract is an overpay or under value is still the most comfortable way for some people to assign worth, signal importance, know how much and how often they should be paying attention.
Oversimplification in the face of something confusing, overwhelming, momentarily challenging or unfamiliar — another human condition.
In the water, the best part is time slipping quiet out the side door, like a good house guest who senses you need some rest and will go take a walk, maybe come back with coffee or cut flowers. That and perception, of the limits of the body, where my arms and legs stop and the water starts, how I feel long and lean and strong and unencumbered. Floor and ceiling vanished, I cut and glide and become the most formless I’ll ever be so long as I’m living.