Universal currency in an unreliable landscape
On sacrifice, Mike Brown's firing, and time as reward.
The notion of sacrifice in basketball, adjusted for scope and scale from the wider world but not very, not by much.
The idea that athletes will suffer for their craft, suffer through it, for the Sport. In service to it. That they will spend early mornings, late nights, long hours, many of them solitary, working to refine their absolutions. That they’ll give up their bodies.
Coaches, monkish and hunched over desks, meditative in front of replay screens. In transit, on pilgrimage to cavernous halls where the motions of all this devotion will attempt to stir thousand to rapture.
All sacrifice doesn’t need to come automatically twined with religion — a bit difficult to detach though, when its Latin roots affix to the word ‘holy’ and the first record of the word came in religious context — but there’s love, and its pliant, occasionally painful urges toward sacrifice. The hope there that devotion will be returned in kind, even if the hope never entirely fuels the action.
If not for money, then it’s love we hear often as the driver for basketball’s requisite sacrifice. Love for the game. It’s love we hear, too, as a reason for failure, the lack of it. Without the right kind of love — ardent, desirous, still somehow pure — then the sacrifice will be in vain, or worse, made false. When someone loves the game but the game, we’re told, doesn’t love them back, we immediately wonder on the quality of their sacrifice for it. How long did they labour silently and without want, for recognition, notoriety, power? Without wanting to reap a little of their endless devotion? Not long enough.
Rarely do we think of basketball’s failures in relation to timing, circumstance, in relation to support or its lack. Or how, for a game played in teams, within the entire ecosystems it takes to support those teams, devotion’s diligence must be performed alone. No one calling shotgun.
Sacrifice, a solitary driver.
Mike Brown was fired by the Sacramento Kings this week, apparently on his way to the team’s flight to Los Angeles. He took the call from his car. Brown had run the team’s morning practice and spoke to media for nearly 20 minutes, then presumably sat down with his assistants to go over any adjustments for the game against the Lakers the next night. The team found out on the plane as they waited for Brown to board, then lingered on the tarmac, waiting to hear who would lead them through the weekend, maybe the rest of the season.
I mention these finer points to paint a picture of the complete mundanity of the day, and because of that, its requisite shock. Team facilities, post practice, are not supercharged spaces. The energy has largely been redirected and diffused, with intention. Some players and coaches amble over to chat with media, waiting off to the side against the gym’s walls or in hallways. Others trickle into treatment rooms, grab snacks, or continue one-on-one work with assistant coaches. There might be music playing but the mood is contented fatigue. I’ve felt it.
I’ve been in the Kings’ practice space — a futuristic mini-compound squirrelled away into a section of the Golden 1 Center — after team practice and felt it there. Guys were stretched out or being stretched out on treatment tables, were greeting me in the hallways with shy smiles and polite bobs of their heads, were ribbing one another in a hybrid mix of practice and summer street clothes. It was early September 2022 in Sacramento, impossibly sunny, the Kings had just drafted Keegan Murray and were starting the season with Brown as their new head coach. There was an undercurrent of excitement from the team, everyone from athletes to comms staff, that things were turning around.
They were, they did. The Kings made it into the playoffs for the first time since 2006, and Brown was unanimously named, for the first time in NBA history, Coach of the Year.
I mention these finer points because in the reactions that have been aired by other coaches around the league since Brown’s firing, these details are what his peers are fixating on. Behind their genuine shock — or perhaps lending to it — is the bone-deep knowledge of the quiet mundanity, comfortable reverence, and complete ordinariness of these spaces. That after drilling through practice, chit-chatting with colleagues, planning the slight variations that will come in the next practice and leaving the building, somewhere in that span, it could be them having that well-worn rug yanked out from under them.
That and effort. That Brown went through these motions, arguably way more important for a struggling team, expelled the effort he knew it would take to right things, and was cold-called when the day’s work concluded. The effort on Brown’s part, and the lack of it from Kings GM Monte McNair, and Assistant GM Wes Wilcox, who reportedly joined the call late and on speakerphone.
“At first I was really shocked and surprised, and then I caught myself and said, ‘Why am I shocked and surprised?’” Nuggets coach Michael Malone noted of Brown’s firing after Denver’s game Friday night. Malone was fired by the Kings less than two months into his second season as head coach, in the same shoddy fashion, in December 2014.
“What really pissed me off about it was the fact that they lost [Thursday] night, fifth game in a row, I believe. Tough loss,” Malone continued. “They had practiced this morning. He does his postgame media, and he's in his car going to the airport to fly to L.A. and they call him on the phone. No class, no balls. That's what I'll say about that.”
Sacrifice, its implied honour.
There’s a scene at the end of the new Nosferatu — and this will spoil something pretty big so skip over if you haven’t seen/aren’t familiar with the 1922 original — where Nicholas Hoult, Willem Dafoe and Ralph Ineson barge in on Lily-Rose Depp’s dying character, Ellen Hutter, with a real-time decaying Count Orlok on top of her. She’d sacrificed herself to reverse the plague Orlok inflicted on the city, and to stop the other pretty gruesome things he was getting up to.
A good chunk of the theatre’s crowd started laughing.
There’s a lot in the film that skews funny. Dafoe’s brazen, shamed alchemist character, the winking to the audience way characters deliver lines referencing women’s bodily autonomy — or the blatant lack of it. Even the perennially menacing Orlok gets some good jibes in. This scene though I was sure wasn’t supposed to be funny. It was essentially the ending of the film, and it ended on one of the only independent choice’s Depp’s Hutter was able to make in the story.
It’s not that I was offended, people are free to interpret films as they like, but as the lights came up I was confused. Still am. Was it the concept of sacrifice by Depp, or the way it was portrayed through her performance of Hutter — a woman with sexual impulses she was shamed or diagnosed as mad for? Was it the grotesqueness of the scene, Orlok reduced to a skeletal, frail demon whose lack reveals Depp’s prone body, pinned underneath? Was it all these dudes, running in too late?
Whatever prompted it, the punchline framing it gave sacrifice has been on my mind since. Mostly that, whatever your reasons for it — killing an ancient vampire or something more mundane — will at some point need to stand on their own.
“What they did there is really hard to do,” Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said of Brown’s tenure with the Kings. “If you’ve been losing for 15, 20 years, since Rick Adelman was there, and to change the culture and make the playoffs — you stick with it. Some of our best moments have been when we’ve lost or we struggled with things, and you all get in a room, and basically the organization says, “Figure it the F out. There are no changes.’”
Warriors coach Steve Kerr sounded almost winded, “When you think about where that franchise was before Mike got there, where they’ve been the last couple years, the job he and his staff have done — it’s shocking.”
Kerr also touched on what Spoelstra had, the concept of continuity and trust within a franchise’s struggles, saying he felt fortunate to work within an organization that “allows our team and our staff to get through the rough patches."
You don’t need to read too closely between the lines to take Spoeltra, Kerr and Malone’s comments as critical digs of the Kings overarching ownership. Vivek Ranadive has shed seven coaches in his 12 seasons as team owner, with now interim-coach Doug Christie being the eighth newly named. But what the three were circling goes much deeper, down into the bedrock of sacrifice, and certainly sacrifice within the NBA.
Sacrifice has no face value. It’s not supposed to. It’s in service to an idea, or a person, or people, to a method of living. To continuity. Strictly in an NBA sense, where there can be no promises for longevity or security (Brown signed a three-year, $25.5 million extension with the Kings in June), time becomes the sacrifice. Time spent weathering the storm of slumps, the collective gloom of a roster in disarray; time spent on the road, mapping out the season, time spent putting out one small fire after another. Time spent answering to mercurial billionaires, mercurial stars, mercurial fanbases. Very little time, it turns out, spent coaching.
In return, the hope is they’ll be rewarded with patience. A safe harbour with no clock ticking down, where time isn’t considered wasted if it isn’t accelerating toward competitive relevancy.
Within the NBA, time runs in two directions. For athletes, it’s always running out. They’re mature at 25, geriatric at 30. Time’s finite nature is what drives career decision-making season-to-season, makes it reasonable to consider forfeiting the physical strength and reliability of their bodies in relation to the rest of their lives outside basketball for the few years spent within it.
For coaches it can be stockpiled and stored. It can mean as much when they have none under their belt, be presented as almost progressive in its lack, as when they’ve held the same title for decades. I’ve read a few stories that note Brown is in a good position now because he can “bide his time” until his next gig — partly because of the $20 million he stands to be paid from his remaining contract, but also because his time spent with the Kings is readily transferable. A universal currency in an unreliable landscape.
In the end we all reason with time. Make our sacrifices to keep it at bay. In basketball, like in life, they’re still only ever handshake deals.
This reminds me of the Giannis speech about how there is no failure. There are only journeys towards success. Much like car or plane journeys, not all of them reach their destination, but just because they haven't reached it today doesn't make it a failure. The only failure is to quit before you've seen the whole journey out to its logical conclusion, which the Kings have a consistent 20 year history of doing.
This is why some organisations will always be losers. I hope Mike Brown catches on at a real NBA team sometime soon. He deserves it.
Both De’Aaron Fox and Mike Brown, after and before the firing, mentioned his salary within the context of the pressure filled landscape. Two less wins, from 23 to 24, and a slow start were enough to make his seat scorching hot while Fox swipes away extension talks.
No grace from the front office, Fox and ownership that added a non-3 point shooting bucket getting all star to the mix. Ultimately, process becomes a product itself. C’est la vie.
Incredible story about sacrifice, time, and patience