Levity, while it lasts
The release and relief of the playfulness in these NBA playoffs so far.
Tobias Harris, easy and teasing to start his postgame after Philly took Game 3 in Toronto, starting with Embiid’s last shot. All the poignancy of it, a shot so poetic you could read it as the definition of iambic — short (the action, turning and letting it go) and then long (the arc, the drop, the clock running out) — and Harris only treats it as shrugging reality.
“They’re not what many basketball people consider the greatest shots,” he winds up, and you can tell he’s winding up because his smile starts to unfurl, blooming as he concludes, “but they always go in.”
Other than all the adjustments, how dynamic they’ve been, the pouncing bounce-backs, the steady hanging in, it was the Sixers having fun that felt the biggest indicator to where their series with Toronto was headed. Joel Embiid and James Harden bounding to Tyrese Maxey and trapping him between them when he got off one of whichever shot it was that added up to 38 points in Game 1, everybody grinning. Harden delighting in a rookie, how novel it feels. Harden delighting, downright engrossed in, all his handles, walking the ball forward and back, pressing and smirking. When someone is so good at something that they revel in the action of it. The domineering levity of Embiid working the floor the same way someone would a room when they know they’re the most popular person in it.
In the pool the day after Game 3, body tired and a muted flat side of aluminum foil sky blanketing the big windows, thinking about forced levity.
A joke getting away from you, like something that falls into open water and you expect to float but instead sinks slowly down, made deceitfully close by water’s magnification so you swipe once, twice, trying to take back hold of it but it’s sunk out of your grasp. A slow-motion exercise in a loss of control.
Or how, in water, my clumsiness disavows me. Stubbing toes, tripping up stairs, tangling my own legs in a hurry, fumbling with and dropping things. In water, with its lull of gravity, its eager softness, the edge comes off, curving like a body arching to touch.
Swimming while worn out. Five hours of sleep and mind moving slow. There’s a pleasure in it, a gentle handing over. Knowing that when I get out I’ll be more depleted, but my blood will have wound forced courses around my limbs, my lungs, my veins, and will be buzzing awake for a while. I can’t imagine running like this, or hopping on a bike, but in the water the dutiful rhythm of breath and stroke is not that much and plenty to focus on.
I go when I’m tired because there’s something about knowing that later, succumbing to stillness and weight as my body warms back up after being in the water, and much later past nighttime routines when I let go of the day and the degree of forced levity each one takes, it’ll be an even greater relief, being so fully wrung out.
What I’ve noticed is the playfulness in these playoffs. Some of it, jokes as a release valve for tension, for nerves, for stakes clarifying in realtime. Some of it, I think, is relief.
Relief in a return to rhythm, in a sense of normalcy no matter how feigned. We are by no means post-pandemic, I’ve been banging this drum for a long time, but I wonder if playing on the elaborate stage — jammed arenas, depending on state masks ranging from optional to outlawed, freedom of travel for players within their team travel, the now colloquial shorthand of “out for health and safety” — the NBA has set up all season eventually sinks in as reality. This isn’t to lay that alternate reality, or treading ignorance, at any one person’s feet — these guys have been navigating all the physical, mental and emotional tolls it’s taken for the show to go on for three years now. But even false burdens being shrugged off will bring some lightening up.
I remind myself it’s early, this is only the first round. Then I watch Marcus Smart get a buzzer beater off with his left hand and hoist it up like the holy grail. Watch Jaylen Brown tune into the joke so fast, like it’s weather coming in quick, rush over and wrap his arm around Smart’s shoulder, his hand around Smart’s wrist to pull it closer to both their faces for examination, his eyes widening in a perfect caricature of awe. They walk the entirety of the court like that, hugged close together with their legs synced up in marching stride. They breeze past Jayson Tatum and their teammates at half-court and keep the bit up until the rest of the roster swallows them up on the way to the locker room.
Sticking with Smart, who arrived to Game 2 wearing a boxing robe he had made in a day or already ready with DPOY arcing in gold letters over embroidered roses between his shoulder blades. Serious until he wasn’t, until the big hood that draped his face in shadow couldn’t hide his smile.
Levity like: you take this so seriously that you happily meet yourself at the other end of the spectrum.
The Grizzlies dancing in that strange, perennial in-between space every sports arena has where gameops keeps all the props for timeouts (placards with instructions for the audience, those big cut-outs of players heads, myriad height basketball hoops, literal gongs) mops, stacked chairs, pallets piled with boxes of every giveaway shirt from every season since they’ve been doing giveaway shirts.
The Grizzlies howling at the heels of the Wolves to come back twice in Game 4 just because, like everything can feel with this team, they could. Karl-Anthony Towns, revved and mic’d up, said Memphis was in the Wolves’ house now, and the Grizzles made themselves at home. Memphis was levity and light all season, there’s no way they were going to turn stark, especially somber, just because the stakes are higher.
At first it’s fair to wonder if the presence of teams like the Grizzlies, the Pelicans, and back to the play-ins with the Cavs and the Hornets, were what was responsible for shaking everything up. Mostly young teams, all effervescence and fizz, riding only on momentum and low to no expectations. Though the Celtics, Sixers and Warriors, postseason weathered, cap some of that spillover, and even with their young players — Maxey, Jordan Poole — showing out, it can’t just be green fervor. Patrick Beverley knows this territory well and still got up on the table.
Maybe it’s the sense of the standings breaking open at several points this past season, teams jockeying with each other from October right up until April, that lends to mood. There was no iron grip clenching who clinched, even the Suns seemed satisfied delighting in playing nothing but quiet, perfect basketball. Parity as possibility, and possibility turned tangible.
It’s weird to put the Warriors with their history, or the Nets with their roster, next to some new blossoming parity and the raw joy of it. But it’s also hard to watch Klay Thompson piggyback his whole body onto Poole during his post game, start screaming, “IT’S A POOLE PARTY! IT’S A POOLE PARTY!” as he pogoes on the spot, see the glee in Poole’s face (they were moving too fast to get a good still, believe me, I’m sorry) and not register the frequency of promise and pride he’s been humming at. See a whole team of guys who have been there before, who sometimes hold too tight to that adage of acting like they’ve been there before, let the mask slip.
And Kyrie Irving giving a bunch of Celtics fans the finger in pretend secret ways, like there weren’t and aren’t tens of thousands of pocket-sized cameras ready to be pointed at him any given second, was pretty funny.
It’s not a passing of the torch, not yet. But seeing these superstars delight in the guys cutting their teeth on playoff basketball is a nod in that direction. The feeling of time tangled up in that, can’t help but be affecting.
Will it last? Does anything? The playoffs tend to whittle down goofiness and unguarded emotion, at least the more vulnerable versions of it, into a sharpened point of determination. In part because that does best with a wide, wide range of fans, anything else deemed “unserious”, like we’ve all never broken from staid stretches to heave a sigh that can’t help but come out as a laugh, and partially because for some athletes there is the sense of celebrating too soon as inviting a jinx. Ironically, both the self-inflicted jinx and heavy bearing of the funereal fan take their cues from the same feeling — fear. Nerves, anxiety, pressure, but fear as their mother tongue.
For that alone, and knowing there is plenty more fear and severity coming whether your team charges ahead or falls out, there’s good reason to value and tuck the sweet, light and less trying moments away. To not treat them as distraction or anomaly, but elements necessary to make this weird, insular world of basketball work. To revel in them, at least, while they last.
Katie, I needed that. With so many "serious" articles about playoff basketball, I really enjoyed looking at how these guys in the goldfish bowl put some of this in perspective. Good on Brown jumping in. My old robe looks like something from the Technicolour Dreamcoat so I passed on Smart's Bathrobe Day.