Summer of James

A brief timeline of Harden's summer, in tumultuousness and tandem to my own.

May

James Harden played well. Game 1 against Brooklyn — 13 assists. Game 1 against Boston, without Joel Embiid — 45 points. Game 2 against Boston — 10 rebounds. Game 4 against Boston — 42 points.

He didn’t even hang around half-court. He pushed past Grant Williams, lowering a shoulder and using the contact as a pivot point to slip around him. He caught a steal P.J. Tucker lifted off a driving Jaylen Brown and flung to him up the floor, Harden running to stay ahead and alone in space. Running in a way that jogged the memory, watching it. He was converged on by Jayson Tatum and Marcus Smart, the both of them ping-ponging off the other under the basket after Harden hooked the ball up on the run and made the basket.

The day after the Sixers lost in seven to the Celtics, Adrian Wojnarowski went on ESPN’s morning show and said he thought there was a good chance Harden would be going back to Houston, a place where he was “comfortable”. He didn’t even wait 24-hours after Harden stepped off the floor in Boston, ducked into the tunnel at TD Garden.

“There’s a comfort level in Houston for James Harden. He’s got family there. He’s very comfortable in that environment.”

I write and talk a lot about the accelerated timeline of the NBA. The imperative for news at high speed that feels more needful than necessary. The kind of desperate everyone’s felt in a socially awkward situation (at a party, or bumping into someone) where your brain starts to scramble forward for things to talk about before you realize it’s fine to take a beat. That the beat could just be a pivot point.

Was Harden comfortable in Houston, and should, or can, comfort be a steady sports state? Because in Harden’s case, comfort has at times reached an overripe decadence. Like kings afflicted with gout, an illness of excess, Harden has likewise had his own basketball convalescences. The funny part about this not-news news was that its prompt came in Harden, plainly, trying. Looking, both without and with Embiid, uncomfortable, strained, under pressure. From Harden playing effortful, if at times backfiring, basketball, and the immediate reflection — near prescriptive in its suggested urgency — came out to be: let’s get this guy back to where he’s comfortable.

In real time, I missed the missive. I didn’t notice.

I was in Osaka, wandering around Dōtonbori at night with Dylan and my brother. Watching the surface of the inky dark river go green, blue, pink, yellow, red and more as all the neon signs above it flashed against it, thinking how slow such a fast city could be made so long as you watched its rivers. Wondering how fast the next four months would go, willing myself to put a moratorium on the way I think through entire summers before they start. The way I was thinking on that trip ahead to Summer League, to what seemed, then, the shimmering mass of June, July, August. Immense in their promise, the pleasant scorch in their mantles of heat. Impossible on that trip not to think of September first, the scheduled date for my nephew to be delivered into the world, there in the country we’d all come to. Impossible not to think about because it had been what the whole trip was for. To mark time, the last time, our family would be together as it was. That funny exercise when everyone comes together in the moment to think, happily, ahead.

Anyway no, I wasn’t thinking about Harden.

June

Harden wasn’t going to get comfortable in Houston. The Rockets signed Fred VanVleet when free agency opened.

I remembered a conversation with one of the people who I’d taken a rideshare from around Houston, when I had been there in April. We broached basketball because he’d asked why I’d come to town, and since the reason I did was basketball, we had a lot to talk about. When we veered from the All-American Game (we both agreed, the pressure on Bronny James was the kind it was hard to get out from under) to the Rockets and what had gone wrong. I knee-jerked in defence of Russell Westbrook. He quickly assured me his gripe, really most Rockets fans’ gripe in his mind, wasn’t with Russ. It was with Harden. Harden who, he said, began to go through the motions. Who asked for too much and refused to deliver. I had teased him — because the rumour had legs even then — about the possibility of Harden coming back, and his eyes flashed wide at me in the rearview before crinkling into a smile. Don’t even say it! He shouted, laughing. My god, don’t even say it.

I wondered if he was feeling relief.

A month after it was reported he wouldn’t, and a day before VanVleet signed with Houston, Harden picked up his $35.6 million option. Maybe because he didn’t know VanVleet was going to Houston, maybe because he did. My favourite thing about the reporting around it was it mostly being framed like Harden invented a new kind of contract, one where he could just take the money and leave without having to play the year it denoted in Philly, or anywhere else (so much so that I texted Blake to see if it was a new kind of contract). The semantics were all assurance on the money as signal and conduit instead of on the burden of what was outstanding.

Wojnarowski wrote it was “expected that Harden has played his last game for Philadelphia” and the opening line in a Shams Charania report for The Athletic said Harden was “opting into his $35.6 million deal for next season” in order for him and the Sixers to work together on a trade. Almost as if the money was a begrudging necessity, like remembering to pack a toothbrush.

July

James Harden went to a 4th of July white party in the Hamptons. Harden wore a long white jacket which he later took off to dance in a white tank top, alongside Embiid and Tobias Harris. He posed with clasped hands and a toothy grin as Tom Brady, lacking what looked like any moisture in his body, made the encapsulate gesture of a rich, sad, divorcing man in his late 40s — a smarmy smiling double bird. Later in the month, Harden skipped Embiid’s wedding to eat burgers at a music festival in Miami with P.J. Tucker. He wore the same tank top.

I had just gotten home from nine days in the desert and unlike Tom Brady, was chugging glass after glass of water standing over the kitchen sink. Tap running so cold the steel neck of the faucet had a sheen of condensation.

And Daryl Morey went on Philadelphia sports radio,

“Obviously right now things aren’t looking perfect.”

August

People assume this month to be rabid with dog days. A long, bucolic stretch of not much doing. Dogs don’t deal in countdowns though, don’t notice how time will wend and warp when waiting for something. August is a precipice month no matter which hemisphere, a peak and then sudden speeding down into the next season. August is going by so fast, was the refrain I was hearing all throughout it.

Daryl Morey is a liar.

That was the other refrain of the month.

Harden announced it to a crowd of fans and media in Shanghai, his back to a basket and a giant LED screen of himself looking severe, photoshoot frozen. He repeated himself a second time, hands moving in the loosely emphatic way of TikTok, talking to the gym but mostly beyond it. When he finished there were cheers, then he stood for a few seconds, posing awkwardly, doing a couple “hang loose”’s with his hands (the clip Charania first shared on Twitter cuts off before that part, this one has it).

Three days after that he sold 10,000 bottles of his brand new wine in 14 seconds on a famous Chinese livestreamer’s show. He also teased the idea of playing in China some day, hypothetically accelerated from it being considered just an end of the line option. It wasn’t such a bad trip for him. It was coming home that was the drag.

The NBA launched an inquiry into Harden’s comments, not so much the liar portion, but the part where Harden said he wouldn’t play for a team with Morey in charge ever again. The league found enough to fine him $100,000 (the wine he sold in 14 seconds totalled $300,000, in case you were worried). There were a few stories that cited how unnerved Harden was about the way the Sixers had handled his would-be free agency, and some that pressed how chastened the team was by its forays into tampering seasons before. That was why they took so long to talk to Harden, they couldn’t bear getting into any more trouble. And wasn’t it wonderful, as the new CBA rules made it, that starting this season an incumbent player with an option can talk to their respective team about resigning the day after the team’s season ends? Wouldn’t that have helped Harden and Morey avoid all this?

Isn’t that why August saw them here in the first place? Because whatever long conversations Morey and Harden had in the past were no longer lining up with the way either saw the future? What would weeks more of above the board discussion have done, other than given everyone involved more material to bale up?

You know when you make hay? August.

September

Six days into the month came Ramona Shelburne’s investigative story into the rift between Harden and Morey. In it, plenty of things I’d forgot, or else never knew. The notion of sacrifice came up again and again. That this season marked sacrifice in action for Harden, first in his pay then in his play. But can a two-year salary of $68,640,000 for a 34 year old man be considered conciliatory? Literally, in any field? And not to put too fine a point on it, but when the burden of proof in play was on Harden in Houston, Brooklyn too, that is to be in charge of it, he hated it.

The rest of the story seemed believable enough if you inserted the very loud, unspoken thing, which is that all parties are embarrassed and no one wants to admit it (what was entirely believable was Harden not returning Adam Silver’s call when the commissioner called to ask if he’d play as an injury reserve in the All-Star Game — as the Alexander Pope essay goes: To defer calling one’s boss back right away is human).

I’ve wondered in the past about a league where the athletes, as workers, had a stake that amounted to a say when men like Robert Sarver happen to it. How, or if it’s even possible, to balance collective action in a league as individualized as the NBA. And then, how to balance accountability with human error. Labour Day was as good a reason as any to think about it again, especially with Harden set on withholding his as training camp loomed, a circled date now at the end of the month. The first off-balance step in the rhythm of a new season.

Mostly, I was preoccupied with another kind of labour — my nephew’s scheduled birth date. A September 1st caesarean delivery. On August 31st, as the night came down over me and barred owls took up their eerie chorus in the dense clumps of white pine and cedar on the rocky shores of a lake 300 kilometres from Toronto, my brother waited anxiously for his newborn to be wheeled out for him to see in the nursery room, on the other side of a hospital window, on the island of Shikoku. There, it was a day into September and talking to him was like standing with a foot on either side of the international date line, a line I tend to imagine as a wall calendar projected onto the night sky as a constellation. At 9pm, my brother sent a photo of a ruddy cheeked and dark haired baby asleep in an incubator. I inputed this brand new person’s birth date, time and location on a free website, and read through his resulting astrological natal chart, the whole of his life laid out in a simultaneously absurd and beautiful way. I smiled to myself to see his rising sign was Libra.

The next day, my September, I swam out to the end of a channel that spills into another lake. There’s a tree there that tilts over the water and every year it leans precariously closer to the surface. This summer, it’s sitting at about 30°. When I got there I tread water under it, turning back in the direction I came as if I could see all of the summer stretched out in my wake. There was wake, but it was only tremors of my limbs working through the glassy calm water, seconds before. Still, each ripple went like an echo of effort, the force of it attributable. There it already lapped back against the dock where I started, there it lifted an oblivious water bug skating across the surface, there it would collide with a small tin fishing boat slowly motoring up the channel, and there, unencumbered, it might go on forever.