The superteam is dead, long live the superteam
Have the Clippers finally figured out what it takes to make the perfect superteam?
At first, I felt confused. No, that’s not right — I felt elated. I felt like I was witnessing a secret revealing itself, exploding open in the blue light of my laptop, just for me. Inches from my face, sound muffled by the bunched duvet, Russell Westbrook rolled to the rim uncontested with the same bundled hurricane force he always has. Seconds later, Kawhi Leonard lifted from his toes and leaned back mid-air, obtuse in angle as what watching it did to my brain, and flicked a fadeaway from the arc that fell easy into the basket, whole sequences away. My body was flushed with fever and the relative coolness of their movements — even James Harden stopping solid and short at the top of the key to heft a shot, not particularly graceful but deft, a thwacking bullseye to the basket as exact as a darts player who’s been on the circuit a little too long — like a balm to my aching muscles.
Does anyone know about them? I thought I thought to myself, but then Dylan, a little outside the bedroom, called, What?
The Clippers, I said mostly into the blankets. Then coughed. Then twisted my body to a new position onto a cooler part of the bed. Settling as Paul George slid under the basket and caught a lob from Westbrook, hooking an easy layup.
A superteam, I said, Does anyone know they’re a superteam?
Dylan walked over and peered at the tilted screen glowing a lambent tapioca on a wide pan of the court. Westbrook cut again through blue and white jerseys, getting denied at the rim this time.
He’s lost a little bounce, he said, not unkindly.
But he can get there, I protested, right into a coughing fit. Look at how he got through them, like they weren’t even there, I said when I’d recovered, voice ragged. They might be it, I whispered, weirdly awed and slightly delirious. The last superteam.
It started with Wilt. When Chamberlain joined up with Elgin Baylor and Jerry West on the 1968 Lakers, a team that got to two NBA Finals and lost both. They eventually won in 1972, but Baylor retired early on in that season, Wilt and West not far behind him.
In the construct that we currently understand to be “superteam”, though, it started with LeBron James in Miami.
There existed superteams between Chamberlain’s Lakers and James’ Heatles — Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce in Boston (not so much Brooklyn), obviously Michael Jordan as sole enterprise and Jordan with Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman — but the difference between those teams and the star-stacked creations that came after is, to my mind, the naiveté of what they were. Those were superb teams, to be sure, but superteams as an entity, a shorthand, a loathed and loved conception, there had to be intent.
Sincere intent, spearheaded by athletes stepping into their growing autonomy, developing it further with every demand and personal recruiting effort, even as they leaned toward tampering; ghoulish intent, driven by owners taking advantage of cap spikes and single-opportunity signings, but intent.
James going to Miami, he called the press conference. The Decision was an ESPN television special, 75 minutes with commercial breaks and 13.1 million people watching, pitched to the network by Bill Simmons, who lifted the idea from a (Pistons) fan named Drew Wagner. James didn’t say where he was going until 30 minutes into the show, the Cavs were told over the phone a few minutes before the special started. Taking my talents to South Beach has since become an iconic, heartbreaking, and more successful refrain than found in most country songs.
He didn’t invent the idea that a bunch of extremely talented athletes competing together would yield good things, but James showed what it was — how it could be — to throw your weight around and win. He did it for himself the first time, to make good the second time, and the third time for legacy. That unspoken, presumptive adage that great basketball talent of a particular calibre ought to be cast for a time in purple and gold. If he decides to go where Bronny James does, when he does, that will be for the last legacy, the full-circle legacy, the thing James has always been aware of: his own.
The last superteam.
Hear me out. The Clippers right now are survey version of a superteam. Over a certain age, or hanging around fandom long enough, and what you see are four superstars rising and playing past the sum of their parts. Past, too, the sum of their pasts.
Westbrook is coming off the bench, Leonard is consistent, Harden looks happy, George is the glue guy again. It seems strange to assert that this group of people can “quietly” do anything in a league that their names once ground the very working mechanics of to a halt, but they are — quietly adjusting, quietly competing, quietly developing. Quietly winning.
Beyond whatever’s happening with P.J. Tucker (I don’t like it), it’s the quiet part that’s key because it feels amicable, for everyone, what’s happening there. It’s fine for the fans who fall on the other side of the survey of this team, who are newer or younger or grew fed up and tired of these four athletes at some point, because they can go on ignoring them. It’s fine for these four athletes because two of them (Leonard and George) would prefer the quiet, one of them (Westbrook) has had noise enough hounding him his whole career, and the other (Harden) has made such a craft of clamour that it could be a new gear, this novel idea of getting on with it.
At first, it seemed antithetical to the concept of the superteam to be demure, even forgettable. Every modern iteration has been loud, flashy, brimming with bravado that threatens to and ultimately does boil over and turn caustic, leading to a slow dissolution or drawn-out demise but a definite perishing, in the end. That’s been the “natural” cycle of the modern superteam. There may be seasonal renaissances, like roster retooling or fresh coaching that keeps a team going for another year, but the strain of all that star-power is plain from the outset and will eventually rupture. Even the most successful, like James’ make-good Cavs and these Dubs-era Warriors, succumbed, are succumbing.
We’ve seen it go so full-circle that the last and biggest version, the Durant-Irving-Harden Nets, a superteam formed entirely from athlete-driven autonomy (and deep-pockets ownership), failed so spectacularly that it became the death knell for the superteam. The white dwarf of the NBA’s cosmically loaded landscape, still smouldering quietly as a cautionary tale for any players who might still want to give it such a publicly presumptuous try.
But I wonder, just because that’s been the model in what we refer to as the modern NBA — and as much as these things are hyper-cyclical in basketball — do the current Clippers signal what a postmodern NBA superteam could be? A take-it-or-leave-it entity that’s very definition — that is, a superteam or not — rests in the eye of the beholder? The first superteam that doesn’t need attention or constant reaffirmation of what it is (“a superteam”) to behave like one? Endless freedom in obscurity, in probably more than 50% of the league’s active fanbase considering them to be, basically, washed.
There’s still a natural expiry to this team, but having all already gone through career ego deaths, it won’t be the strain of one star eclipsing another that causes it. Assuming none of these four are traded away, this could be the last team any of them wind up playing for. Better yet, that could be their choice.
It’s like if a tree falls in a forest, but instead of a tree it’s Kawhi Leonard tipping like one on a fadeaway. Or James Harden refusing to sprint back in transition knowing Russell Westbrook will cover the ground for him, or that Paul George will cut unhurried from the wing because defenders are ignoring him. All sequences which don’t require our active perception of them to happen but hum along, because of the cumulative years of experience bound together between the four of them, like the natural world.
The car was stuck.
Greg had made it about 10 metres down the 40 or so that we had to to get from the snowy, narrow tract of the cottage drive to the wider, plowed cottage road when the car’s wheels caught and started to spin. The snow was so deep that the front of the little SUV couldn’t clear it, and had been pushing it all forward and under itself in that brief burst of movement, effectively aiding in its entrapment.
Germain and I got out and started to shovel around the wheel wells. Greg made it one tire rotation before the same thing happened. We realized we’d have to clear off the rest of the way up, both a track for the tires and clearance for the car’s height. Germain moved to the end of the lane and I started from the car. We got to work bridging the gap, swinging out heavy shovelfuls of knee-high snow into the rising banks of it on ether side.
The towering pines hunkered down on either side of the drive stood sentinel, their shaggy boughs brought low by the weight of snow. I could make out the flush in Germain’s cheeks through the falling snow, feel my own blood going clunky through my arms and my lungs, not used to this kind of exertion after a week laid low, catch and shudder. When Greg reversed and tried again every few minutes the high-growling spin of the tires cut through the stillness, otherwise the world was muffled quiet. No sound came from the bare woods or down on the lake chain, frozen solid. The silence here in winter is absolute.
While Germain finished his section of the lane I trudged back down to the cottage and dug out road salt, stomped on the bag to break up the rock solid congealed clumps, and brought it back up to the car to sift huge handfuls in front of and behind the snow tires. I’d never had to do this before but laughed to myself, thinking how growing up in a place where this is common you just hold certain seasonal maxims in your brain for your whole life.
Greg, I should note, had done this before. In the vastly rural stretches of the east coast where he grew up and on this same road, several winters ago, when he managed to rally car a sedan rental with no snow tires and no four-wheel drive up and down the steep and winding highland hills in deep snow. This time, when Germain and I moved a few feet back behind the car, Greg gunned it and kept gunning it as the tires got traction, kicking up a spray of snow and revving over what we’d cleared.
Germain and I went hooting and hollering after him, voices echoing through the trees, slipping and regaining our footing in the flat-packed shiny snow of the tire tracks, all the way to the road where we threw the shovels in the back and piled in, breathless, with only each other to talk about how puffed-up proud it made us feel — getting free.
Kawhi, George, Harden, and Westbrook bundled into a Western Conference Trojan horse in a time where no is surprised by what’s in a Trojan horse anymore (we’ll see).
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