The semantics of effort
Qualifying effort, JJ Redick rewrites Kristaps Porzingis', and who we want Zion Williamson to be.
What we gravitate toward, what we pull away from. Dictated by everything from personal preference, wants and needs of the moment, and effort.
We prescribe effort to strangers — if they’d only tried harder, wanted it more — without knowing the metrics. We caution friends against overdoing it on effort where it might hurt them the most, like in love. That they shouldn’t look too desperate, that nothing, no one, should be that hard. That they’ll know it’s right when it feels easy.
We’ve all had times where we haven’t taken the same caution to heart. When we felt the strain of our effort as palpable consolation in the absence of who it was we wanted and what we wanted from them.
In sports, in basketball, effort is prerequisite. Even the impression of effort, better than nothing. Effort as brooding glance, a sound forced up out of the throat, dripping with resolve and exhaustion. Effort a pummelling pulse, a head wound, the primeval gore of spectacle, lip split down the middle, red of blood reversed to mean go. Effort a choked off cry, little bluff of terror, froth of spit a false halo around the lips, a wink and a kiss rolling off calloused fingers powdered in chalk, ringing fingerprints so precise they go otherworldly as Saturn.
Yes, effort, proof of the heart and how far out of the body we can get it on any given night. Wringing it out, ringing it in, time on the clock always counting down.
In his postgame after the Pelicans lost to the Lakers in the In-Season Tournament Semi-Finals, Zion Williamson said he was “too laid back”. That the Pelicans lost, were patently blown out, because he was taking it easy.
I don’t disagree, but I wonder — because he didn’t offer many specifics — how Williamson sees himself changing his approach. I wonder how we do, too, in the semantics of effort.
Some criticism came from Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley immediately after the game. Over the din of the crowd, O’Neal looked down at his notes on the travelling Inside the NBA desk and said Williamson “doesn’t create easy points for himself”, “doesn’t seal” and “doesn’t demand the ball”. These are the tangible points, the answers there in the criticism itself. The looser stuff, what gets to the heart of effort, is when O’Neal says Williamson “doesn’t have that look” and “does not run hard”. The running point seems simplistic in that everyone can picture and feel a phantom burn in what it is to dig in and run, but as explanation, O’Neal says vaguely that his higher scoring games came after he “started doing certain things”. As for the “look”, we understand this loosely in the lore of sports. A fixed stare, equal parts intensity and focus. We know what he means and we can rattle off examples, but in terms of qualifying effort, we’re no better off.
Barkley says what bothers him is that Williamson isn’t young anymore, and that Williamson isn’t even the best player on the team. That he’s being shown up by athletes less physically talented. Barkley too touches on speed, that Williamson doesn’t have it, though he qualifies it a little more, saying he’s not using it to get up and down the floor fast enough. So we know in this case speed, and by extension effort, go in concert with response time, but there’s so much tied up in Barkley’s criticism. From the expectations and leniencies that come or fall away with age, to the skill around him on the roster and how that skill is, perhaps, speaking more fluently to effort.
I say all this because effort is so often the baseline for how we talk about basketball. From jokes (“Both teams played hard”) to sincere analysis, effort — synaptic, the process of brain moving the body, to mentally outwitting — is as fundamental to the game as the ball, but we hardly give a second thought to what we actually mean by it.
With Williamson, we’ve been talking about effort for years. We’ve even made it meta — the effort of effort, exemplified best in the way Williamson was re-taught to run, so that his own physical effort would not be undone by the natural rhythms of his body. A trip, to be sure, and a fascination. The hopes for him are so high, have stayed so high, when in the normal cycle of fandom cannibalizing its hope for stars, he should’ve been rendered to ribbons by now. Maybe, because the psychic efforts funnelled into Williamson have been so strenuous — the hope that he represents everything from a completely new prototype of player to renewed faith, with Ja Morant briefly waylaid, that he’s the next generational star — the reluctance comes in letting go with nothing to show for it.
I also wonder, especially when I watch Williamson one-wording answers in a presser after a game where he physically played with the same level of engagement, how long a person can feel compelled in a suspended state of urgency? For so long now, he’s needed to be someone else.
The path of least resistance, we take it all the time. The fastest route, the cancelled plan, the thing unsaid. We move toward what’s easy but never fail to feel a bone-deep satisfaction when we’ve done something hard.
When JJ Redick begins a question to Kristaps Porzingis in a recent interview about his time in New York with, “I think the context is important here”, I hold my breath and feel the brief, hopeful glint that always comes when I think someone is about to do the right thing. That a man in the industry with access and a platform and the ability to hold, even briefly, to account, is about to do the right thing — specifically.
He didn’t.
The question instead goes on to be about team dynamics on the Knicks at the time. The turbulence within the coaching staff, how it affected Porzingis’ budding career and outlook on the Knicks franchise, and whether he had to operate with “blinders on” and “just not give a fuck”. Redick calls it “remarkable”, what Porzingis was able to do.
What did he do? From this interview, if you hadn’t followed the jagged line of Porzingis’ career from being drafted to New York and traded to Dallas after three seasons, you would think something remarkable happened, that Porzingis averaging 22 points per game on a roster that’s best adjacent firepower came from Tim Hardaway Jr. and Enes Freedom (née Kanter) was a marvel. The Knicks still finished that season with a 29-53 record. A record that, given the frequency of New York’s wins to losses before Porzingis was injured in February 2018, probably wouldn’t have looked all that different if he hadn’t been hurt.
The best I can tell from what Redick offers is that Porzingis was given the nickname of “unicorn” by Kevin Durant. Yes, I remember that. Otherwise, I test what’s being implied in the clip against my own memory, against the Knicks fanbases’ penchant for tacking great swells of hope to any athlete who shows promise, against what was a regular amount of upheaval for a chaotic franchise, and can’t understand what the fawning is for beyond how well Porzingis has been doing in Boston and a way to root that in a new narrative of resiliency.
Easy roads are one thing — veering from a conversation that might feel uphill or bumpy at points in the process of being responsible and accountable in favour of an unchallenged, gushing gab. Bulldozing over the past to landscape it to easy neutrality is completely another. You might not be making things up but you are, through omission, reconstructing the landscape of collective history. That is, what is held as background and context and why it’s important. Why that feels even more pressing here is because Porzingis’ assault allegations just… dropped off. I have combed through every report, blog, social media and message board post I can find and for the most part, any new information or active reporting stalled out in spring 2019. A Reddit user claimed the FBI had ruled it as extortion, but the case had only been recommended to the FBI by Porzingis’ representation and referred to as such by Mavs executives. Because there has’t been a public resolution doesn’t mean it wasn’t resolved, but no one has asked Porzingis about it since his first spring in Dallas.
Resolution in this case, in the NBA’s lexicon, is not going to be very meaningful. Anyone paying attention to how these things go already gets that. But at the barest, why not ask? There’s a 99% chance Porzingis would say it’s in the past, or it’s been resolved, or he doesn’t want to talk about it, but we would have at least a spectre of acknowledgement and consolidation of the past that fell off a cliff and the present.
The hesitancy toward resistance is a preemptive response to friction. To the idea that something might be uncomfortable. What’s unfortunate is that the discomfort here, in the very low stakes of NBA media when compared, especially now, to the wider and tragic world, is most certainly not wanting to be embarrassed. To look, for a second, foolish, or to have the person across a table look at you at you in a way that prompts it. It is so, so trivial, and would be even more trite to write about if it didn’t reflect back our current state of passivity perfectly. The reluctance to act, to speak up, to incur anything that might appear as pushback, to even question as a means of processing information in the moment because it could be misconstrued as misunderstanding. When we yield at the barest touch of external pressure it doesn’t speak to a quality of affability, to not wanting to rock the boat. It’s fear, and the farther into it we go, the farther we get not only from resolution, or the good strain of empathy, but from each other.
It’s why I wish Redick would have just asked.
It’s strange, to see Williamson being buffeted around under the basket. His body ping-ponging off Jarred Vanderbilt and Rui Hachimura, or seeing Trey Murphy backing and bumping into the paint from the corner, unsettling Hachimura enough to make a pocket of space for a pass to Jose Alvarado in the opposite corner while Williamson hangs passively back behind LeBron James, who only has one arm held loosely out to hold Williamson away from the action of his teammates and where they could use him the most. Later, end of the 2nd quarter, Williamson flailing by Taurean Prince, going leaping into the corner and then turning to reach back like the doomed subject in a Renaissance painting, eyes-rolling, too late, way too late, ball already up on its arc to the basket. The whole game, he’s chasing.
What’s effort when it comes a breath past impactful? Blood’s still going through the body, feet still have to hit the floor. Williamson said he only needs to be more aggressive, that if he’s “more aggressive that energy will definitely carry over”. Bound to the first law of thermodynamics, to life in general as the rest of us, he’s right. Effort, as in energy, neither created or destroyed but carried over, changing form. To think, all the effort Williamson’s ever shown, the energy he’s created, out there for the taking.
Amazing as always. The analogy of tough questions and running and effort is so good. As a runner, or someone who, uh, tries to run, the first run after a break is always so tough. But like the question Redick didn't ask, taking the first step is going to be awkward and maybe painful, but all of the steps after get easier, or at least the next run or the one after that is less of a pain. You draw this out so well. We shouldn't look for answers from guys like JJ (though I wish we could), but if he, or others, take the the first step, it makes the next step, or the fourth or fifth run, easier. I don't think this is solely a KP issue, but one that is true for general coverage. I say this in at a time when all Wizards media is basically locked up behind the monopoly of Monumental Sports Entertainment; when the coverage is not only not taking any steps, but pretends like where already running.
No way is JJ going to ask Porzingas about an unadjudicated case. Nor is the corporate media going anywhere outside the narrative. The NBA may reap the benefits of social media and gambling but the league derives no benefit from taking moral high roads.
The eye test is important on and off the court. Zion is going to be seen differently than Ingram, or KD or any slender wing player, regardless of effort or results. Basketball players are expected to look and move a certain way, even though this is disproved by the Andre Drummonds, Kyle Lowrys and Nikola Jokichs. In their own way bears and penguins are just as just as graceful and magical as unicorns.