We can't commit to ghosts
What do your best laid plans and Ben Simmons have in common? A good time to be cut loose.
There’s a finality to the trip that my body, in service to the nostalgic, distinctly mournful part of my brain, balks at. When we planned it, fresh June and thinking of the wild basin of Lake Superior, the Atlantic putting us to sleep every night, we had the whole long sprawl of summer out in front. It felt too far off while still touching on everything I define these brief three months by to seem like the closing, let alone loss of something.
But that’s the thing about the time between making plans and taking them: it happens.
And it happens better, worse, or not at all like you picture. The big parts you guessed at wind up meaning less and the small pockets of space, the things bound in a dozen breaths held, choked, sped up, mean the whole of the time, with the rest of it warping, squeezing to fit around the reconstruction.
We’re leaving with the month barely broke open and by the time we get back it’ll be spread wide, creased and worn, with the waning light casting our shadows shorter then when we started. What scares me more, getting farther from remembering myself the best I have in close to two years or gaining on ground where it will be impossible to forget, I can’t say.
When it comes to Ben Simmons, I thought we’d already covered this. Not what Philly needed from him, but what he needed from the team and hasn’t changed, only grown more protracted, dire — to get out.
What Philly needed from him they had ample time to ask for, why else bring Daryl Morey in? Who isn’t shy, by any stretch, at least not when it comes to making near mathematical asks of his players for how blanched of emotion. And Simmons could’ve used it, the clarity. Instead he got hand-wringing and it’s fine’d into the postseason where it became abundantly clear, real quick, that the lack of instruction was going to cost the Sixers the series plus all the face they were trying to save.
I hope Simmons sits out. Game after game, turning a silent treatment summer into a ghostly fall. Doc Rivers can’t bark at the dude any more than he already has and Joel Embiid’s already shown deaf ears don’t do much to his volume, and why should they? He’s not to blame in the search for Simmons’s identity with the Sixers. He just showed up to work.
Will it be like a haunting? Simmons, always decidedly quiet, walking the catacomb tunnels of Wells Fargo Center, passing wraithlike the trainers and team staff and Tobias Harris, who will later, breaking up through the shallow, soft surface of their night’s first encroaching dreams, gasp wide awake and wonder if they saw him. Will it be like the feeling of a figure just there, out of the periphery, crane hard and quick enough and you might catch him? Andre Drummond and Danny Green, unfamiliar with his shadow spilling around a corner, and jumping at it?
Will it be Simmons, brooding grudge on the bench, sucking up the spark the team has to be hoping to catch early in the season to feign past the disappointment of the playoffs, again? Will it be glowing eyes when the arena lights go down? Smiling teeth in the dark, cold fingers closing around a bare ankle, hair springing up at the back of the neck?
The water will get colder and lower every day, she told me on the pool deck, both of us dripping, towelling off, chests still heaving. We’d become smiling acquaintances over the stretch of mornings where our swims overlapped, arms tingling with the buzzing of the last 45 minutes worth of blood churning in them, reaching for our towels and checking in with, “Good swim?”
On the first morning of September it was like the seasons switched overnight. The air was cool, we all waited on the pool deck a few seconds longer, hesitant to get in the water. When we did, one by one, there were short little gasps of surprise forced from everyone’s lips as they slipped in, started out.
They stop filling the pool, she meant. But I knew what she meant. All week my hand had to travel a little farther to tap the rough cement lip of the pool with each lap. It’s for practicality’s sake, less water to drain when it comes time to do the whole thing, but we laugh knowing how close our bodies are coming to the bottom, how shallow the plane suspending us from the solidity of another.
A few days later she laments to me that there are only two more mornings left, and I tell her, honestly sad, that was my last one, I’m hitting the road. When we get to directions, Lake Superior and the Atlantic — later I’ll think how it seemed natural to navigate by the water at the end of each, and how it seemed to make sense to her too — she points out that the two are in opposite directions. One, then the other, I explain, tracing a finger in the air that goes from shallow to deep end and halfway back, all the space between, four provinces worth, melting there as we squeeze out our hair.
Strange to assign it as symbolic, this hole in the ground having the life gradually emptied from it when really it’s what comes to fill it up that makes it alive and teeming.
Every time I’ve checked the forecast for the one day we’re camping, a sandy site right on the moody, south-eastern shore of Superior, the rain goes up by five millimetres. First to ten, then 15, 20 a couple days ago, yesterday 25, this morning, 30. Driving the farthest west either of us have in this province, up to where the daisy chain of the Great Lakes start, to sit in a soggy tent and stare at the water through a veil of rain and our best laid plans.
What kind of ghost has Morey committed to, and for how long? Houston showed that for all his gifts (grifts?) with numbers, the man’s not exactly adept at reading the pulse of a team.
But I don’t want a ghost, spook or disengaged spirit of Simmons. Neither do you. Because we’ve already seen what that looks like, him locked into this purgatory of pride for so long. It’s boring. It’s also, no matter your feelings on the Sixers, Simmons, Embiid or anyone else, a waste.
We’re spoiled with the NBA, certainly, that we can become gleeful with a team’s crisis of character, knowing full well that within the chugging mechanics of it each front office has an emergency lever they will pull when the perceived wrench gumming up the works, star player or solidarity movement, gets to lagging the rhythm. I want Simmons out not because him staying presents an actual crisis for anyone in Philly, it really doesn’t, I want him out because him staying is just more of the same. We already know that story. We know what conditions are best for this ghost to get up and start walking around, and none of it will be enough to bring your pulse roaring up against your sternum when you watch.
Is that selfish? For Simmons and for you and me, yes. But why else are we watching, why else is he playing? We can’t commit to ghosts.