Good gets you oblivion
Gaining grace with the middle ground and competitive parity expanding, a lot, the NBA's middle standings.
It felt impossible, at first, to be taking a photo of the cafe’s wifi password, scribbled on a little slip of paper kept in the till, so that I’d remember it for all of the three steps it was going to take me to get back to my laptop. But as I slipped my phone out of my pocket and apologized for what I was about to do, said My brain, these days, I see something and then it just—
Goes, she nodded, I know. She held the paper up for me.
There is no accounting, certainly not now or for a long time, maybe ever, for the ways I feel I’ve lost parts of myself in the last few years. Not quite phantom limb syndrome, more unreliable limb. A tallying where I’m continually losing count because I can’t even settle on what it was I’ve decisively lost, though I feel the absence at times as a weight in itself. Memory, most definitely, being one. Certain elements of spontaneous joy, and the bodily understanding of what it is to metabolize it, how joy courses through the limbs and nervous system, effervescent, being another.
I trust, first assumptively in a new year, and then with a belief I want to work to actively reinforce, some of it will come back this year. I don’t know exactly what prioritizing joy looks like in a tangible, practical sense, beyond pseudo-psych Instagram posts the algorithm pushes to me because I looked at a picture of a plant once. In a regular, habitual way I know that for me it will need to factor in connection, movement, planning things to look forward to while getting better at being appreciative of the moment and its realities. Grace, in other words, for the in-betweens.
The middle in the NBA is so stickily, stubbornly here. This week every team hits 41 games — halfway to 82 — and the standings are at present a multitude of the middle. In the West, from five through 12, in the East, trying harder to clarify itself, the middle stretches six through 12. It’s parity that has given us more of the middle but man, what a wash.
And the wash is the game, mostly. The volume of basketball from such a big range of perfectly good teams. Parity means you can have your breath stolen from you on a Wednesday night the same way you’d be willing to hand it over primetime on a Saturday. You find yourself inundated, without pressure to keep up. The dominion of the middle is so considerable this season that you can sleep-watch through games for weeks and not see the standings budge beyond win-loss streaks. You come up blinking, sure considerable ground has shifted, squint at the horizon only to see it hasn’t moved. Nothing is any closer.
Ah but the middle, now that we’ve hit halfway through the season, is starting to creep into team identity a little, isn’t it? This is something I’ve been turning over. That for teams to stay firm in the middle requires a grind that can rob identity, collective or individual.
It’s only the franchises flourishing in either conference — the Nuggets, Celtics, Grizzlies, Pelicans, Cavs, Bucks — that have lately given us undeniable impressions of personality. Memphis’s tandem tunnel routine (that’s not the music — ardent Grizzlies media member, Keith Parish, set the clip to an accelerant banjo, but I would argue the same freedom for easy pops of playfulness in moments of team identity are made more accessible, right now, to media within those same markets), Jamal Murray and most of the Nuggets besides Mike Malone feeling unhurried with another rim adjustment the other night, Donovan Mitchell’s 71 point game — excellence, and moreover an excellence better than anything before it, frees up room for fun.
New Year’s Eve, cold but not cutting. The rain that had been coming for two days straight had finally let up, left the streets slick and glittering, catching headlights and streetlights and leftover Christmas lights. The wind swishing my dress against my bare legs, glittering fabric holographic in the lambent light.
Rich, Dylan and I walking to the party from the restaurant with 15 minutes to midnight. The kind of walk where the walking is a roil of churning energy, everybody talking at once, and it’s the same for each cluster of people we pass on the way. We’re all rushing to tomorrow, to next year, to mark excitedly, for once, the passing of time.
If Halloween is when the spiritual barrier slips, then New Years is when the social one does. I think of all the parties I’ve wound up at over the years, chasing the new one. Nights that started quite warmly and sophisticated, celebrating at the parties of friends parents, moved to watching that friend tumble laughing down a steep flight of stairs as we stood at the top with lit sparklers, ended by banging on somebody’s window. So many parties walked in and out of — friends, and friends of friends, and friends so far removed from friends that they were, in fact, strangers — somebody hearing of one, getting wind of another, treating it like sport, like quarry.
Halfway down the block we pass another house and I stop dead in my tracks like I’ve been yanked by a cartoon cane just off stage. Blaring from the party: ‘Rasputin’. We can see straight into the giant front window, lights flashing in kaleidoscopic primary colours and a huge group screaming along, ducking and dancing in something loosely Russian. I’m frozen on the spot by the urge to run up to the front door, throw it open and join that shadowed tangle of people inside, so much so that standing there I’ve already played out the scene in my head for how it would go — initial surprise, light confusion, but feeling the cold from outside shedding off me and seeing my cheeks flushing as I quickly did two or three deep bends and kicked my legs out, spun, rushed back out of the house laughing, surprising sure, but also reassuring in that broad social reknitting New Years can bring. A night where, for all its pointed awareness, the collective goal becomes loosely the same. The in-between of it suddenly rife with every last ditch possibility, broad-minded altruism in the final hours.
They had to drag me to the right party.
Here’s an identity refresher, at last consensus, of the teams making up the amalgamating middle: The Lakers, in denial, the Wolves, formless, Jazz, untenable, Warriors, midlife crisis, Blazers, Groundhog Day, the Suns, dynamically flat but on paper impressive as da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. The Clippers, metaphysical, the Hawks, directionless, the Wizards, a bit dazed, Bulls, morose, Heat, digging in and still losing ground. Pacers, frenetic, Knicks, freeform, and still dipping a toe back down into the middle’s quagmire murk depending on the day because to finally be out of Process as purgatory is unfamiliar, the Sixers.
Standing at the bus stop, that time during winter here when 5pm is somehow darker than midnight, I hear a voice pointed enough not to be in passing. A woman in a jeep in the long lineup of cars waiting to turn left has been shouting something, is mid shout, when I take an earbud out.
Sorry? I call.
There’s a raccoon, right beside you. She yells back.
I squint around.
To your left! She yells, Beside the bus stop!
I still can’t see it. Instantly I think of Greg, because I’m going to meet him but because for one summer a raccoon broke into our apartment from the roof most every night when he and I and Julian were out, helped itself to food and left things scattered enough around that for a while, too long, we each thought it was the others, coming home wasted.
The advanced green goes and she’s off, waving out the window with emphatic direction.
I take two steps to the edge of the bus shelter, peer in, picturing the chubby bandit inside and solemnly waiting. Nothing. Walk to the end of the shelter and see something bumbling up the skinny trunk of the tree just beside.
Hi bunny, I say, reverting to the pet name I have used for all the animals I’ve cared for.
It stops, paws clinging to either side of the silvery trunk, and slow as a cartoon pokes its head to peer around the edge at me.
A woman is walking fast toward us on the sidewalk with her Pomeranian as the bus pulls up beside me and shudders to a stop.
A raccoon, I point, careful!
A raccoon? She smiles, looking everywhere but the tree, just like I did.
It isn’t enough to be good anymore in the NBA. Good is what gets you oblivion. Still, this isn’t a problem that requires, or can even have, an immediate solution.
In Toronto, for example, what makes it hard for me to doomsday the situation the Raptors are in, sitting 12th and 11 1/2 games behind, is that the franchise has, to a degree, willingly chosen this undefined space. Two seasons, Masai Ujiri mentioned last season and again at the start of this one, that’s what the front office wanted to take in order to actually see what it was they had. An exploratory stasis, in other words, and of course the implied silver lining would be if the team formed itself up as the future version of itself, expedited, in that time. Things are still pretty formless, but this is, at face value, the plan.
At a very pragmatic level the solutions for most of the teams in this mix are discernible. The Warriors haven’t given the necessary time, effort, money and energy into a meaningful system of secondary development, so their young players have not developed into ready replacements for the dynasty on its way out. The Lakers, like most things rich and famous in L.A., have too much money and too little substance, and the day-to-day isn’t, as a greasy casting director might say, sexy enough to care about. The Blazers haven’t significantly changed anything in going on five straight seasons, to the point where amnesia bleeds into routine, like Damian Lillard having to publicly confirm every six months he’s not going anywhere.
What the middle presents is most often the longest and most practical way forward. The NBA rarely works like real life but this is one case where incremental changes are going to be the thing available to most teams presently trying so hard just to stay stuck. Some will get a superstar, will vault themselves from the chasm of just fine, but most will have to make in-game, game to game, gradual roster retooling adjustments. The equivalent of one foot in front of the other. Otherwise, they won’t move.
Otherwise, make room for a bigger middle.
My parents come over for dinner. It’s their first time in the place since we moved in. There was a reason in my mind, why they couldn’t earlier, but once they’re inside and I’m taking their coats, my dad putting down the toolbox he brought to fix the record player he gave me years ago and my mom handing me a bag filled with leftovers from the New Year’s Day dinner I was too sick to go to in person, it makes no sense.
I take them room to room, show them what we’ve done, but realize in doing so that, because they saw it empty, helped us clean it before we moved in, anything would’ve been a dramatic change. Something like regret, even in the moment, pouring them wine and handing them glasses, watching my dad bend over the receiver and the old Bose speakers, fiddle with the dials for balance and quickly realize nothing was wrong with the wiring, nothing needed soldering, the connection was just dusty.
You just have to turn it up, he said, putting on a Motown record he’d also given me ages ago and cranking it.
Suddenly the apartment, however in the middle it still is from finished, replete in bright stereo.
This made me feel a lot. Thanks.
The identity refresher was perfect 💀