the peach basket

it is not that it ends, it is that it happened

These playoffs, and the Finals match up they produced, have unveiled for me a truth I did not previously understand about myself regarding how I align my allegiances. When I do not have a particular affection for either team in a match up, be it geographical (Boston) or roster-based (the Warriors), I find myself cheering for the underdog. 

This is not new information. What is, though, is my reasoning. It became clear to me, especially as the Pacers outplayed my highest expectations of them, that what I am cheering for when I cheer for the underdog is for that team to tap into a well of potential I could not possibly have noticed. I want to see a team not only play at their peak (or my idea of what their peak is), but to break through the ceiling of my expectations into some sort of mythic attic. I want to be able to say later that I was watching when it happened, when that team we all thought was pretty good but overmatched transformed all its potential into kinetic energy. I want to re-engage with that fluttering in my stomach whenever I think back on that game when I saw the underdogs finally put it all together and become the substance of legend. 

It almost never happens that way. Usually, not only does a team not draw from a deep, unseen well, they don’t even perform up to the expectations we have assigned them based on previous performances. As I’ve written about before, this is the danger of getting sucked in by potential; it is a deceptive and addictive draw.

Which is all to say that in the Finals that is unfolding in front of us, one in which I do not have predetermined allegiance, I cannot fall back on my usual means of deciding my rooting interest. The wells have been tapped. This is something other — two teams not just executing near flawless basketball, but near flawless ideologies as well. 

The Spurs are a utopian offense whose results make heroes of role players such as Danny Green and Gary Neal. As Rafe Bartholomew writes about here, the Spurs are striving towards an ideal that strips away the expectations history, statistics and logic force upon basketball to reveal the perfect anatomical structure of the game. James Naismith would weep.

The Heat are a team that can mutate based on what position the best player on the planet plays. And he can play all of them. In fact, Lebron has played in the frontcourt so effectively, with such impressive results, that it looked like, despite always being a big man’s league, the NBA was trending toward small ball. It was in fact an aberration created by the singular talent that is Lebron James. No other team can get away with not having a true center.

In these playoffs, I have not been cheering for either of these teams. Because they are not my hometown, yes, and because my favorite players are not on these teams, yes. But more importantly, these teams are not underdogs. There is no potential left here, it’s all on the floor, and on the floor what there is to see is truly exquisite basketball, and this is what makes it as hard to cheer against them as it is to cheer for them.

Their exertions have created a kind of parity. It feels like any team could win at any time and for almost any reason. The blowouts, and there have been many, are part of that parity. These are offensively brilliant teams. Watching them attack each other feels like watching two alpha male elk locking horns. It is a complete deadlock until the moment one gains traction.

The Finals might end tonight. It will definitely be over by the weekend. I, for one, will be sad to see it go. This has been special. For the first NBA Finals in longer than I can remember, I’m not cheering for a narrative. I’m cheering for basketball.

—Frank Basket

the best spurs article you will read during the nba finals

The best Spurs article you will read during the NBA Finals was just written by Bethlehem Shoals (whose former website, Free Darko, is the second biggest inspiration for The Peach Basket, only slightly behind the game of basketball itself). 

Check out this gem of a paragraph, which keeps running laps through my head, then go check out the whole thing:

The Spurs offense used to run through Duncan even though he wasn’t the primary playmaker or a high-volume scorer. It was almost metaphor: Duncan’s play, selfless as it was, had a feel to it that was passed on to his teammates. Methodical-yet-effortless, thoughtful-yet-unfeeling, he inspired those teams. If basketball teams can often be reduced to some version of individual vs. society, Duncan and the Spurs were a highly evolved social contract. He gave himself over to the team so the team could all have a piece of him.

Find the rest here

For Better Taste

As your stereotypical 26-year-old American male, I consume about one package of ramen per week. (Actually, I don’t even know what the ramen consumption of the typical American male is. I bet the answer would depress me. I hope I’m on the high end, personally. I bet Frank Basket would live off ramen, frozen pizza and awkward guffaws if the government would let him. I digress). Sometimes I try and gussy the stuff up—adding soft-cooked eggs or kimchi, or swapping out the powderized soup flavoring for something that probably won’t give me brain cancer—but most of my ramen intake is of the ‘dump all of the things in the hot stuff’ school of cooking.

I’m a big fan of Samyang Ramen, not necessarily for their noodles (too skinny in my opinion) or their packaging (although I do like their friendly, oddly anglicized little mascot, dressed in a white chef’s jacket and toque). What I like most about Samyang is their semi-defeatist modesty.

The Samyang cooking directions have only two steps. The first is pretty much boilerplate ‘freeze-dried  semi-edible dinner’ instructions: put all of the stuff in this package into some boiling water and wait.

It’s the second step that gets me: “For better taste, add fresh vegetables and scallions, if desired.” 

Better. Samyang knows its ramen tastes good, but it also knows that it’s not quite there. There are superior options. Experience superior enjoyment, if desired.

And this brings me to Frank Vogel. Due to a variety of circumstances, I’ve had to observe a lot of the Pacers-Heat series from the periphery—reading recaps, watching highlights, obsessively checking ESPN on my phone. I tried to stream Game 1 through one of those mirror sites from Europe, but that was a disaster (if I could write an Onion article, it would be “Area Man Complains About Unreliable Performance of Illegal Video-Streaming Website”; also, I moped my way to a fancy cocktail bar with my girlfriend after assuming I had missed a game-winner at the end of the fourth quarter, only to find myself sitting right in front of a TV for all of overtime and one of those Legendary Moments™ that you always hope you’ll get to see).

Which is all a long way of saying that I think I’ve become something of a connoisseur of the post-game wrap-up. And so, if you’ll allow me a truly stupid metaphor, Frank Vogel sure seems like he knows there’s a tastier soup out there. 

       

Look at these post-game comments!

““I don’t really know,” Pacers coach Frank Vogel said, when asked if there’s anything a team can do when James gets on a roll like the one he had in the third quarter. “He was pretty special tonight. There’s no question about it. This whole team is special. It’s one of the best teams that this league’s ever seen and we’re enjoying competing against them. We know we can beat them, but we’ve got to play better than we did tonight.

He doesn’t seem overwhelmed or pessimistic about his chances against LeBron and Company. Nor does he seem defensive. “We’re enjoying competing against them.” He knows his team is good (they’re very, very good), and yet it also seems like he knows the Heat, or at least LeBron-and-whoever-else, are better. And that’s rare in a postgame interview.

There’s usually some blustery refutation of another team’s supposed superiority, or there’s this disingenuous fawning that’s clearly meant, whether consciously or subconsciously, as a sort of “cover your ass” maneuver (this only shows up, obviously, after a series has ended). For the record, Pop usually answers these types of questions by just staring and staring at you until all of the flowers in your yard wilt and turn to ash and the only sound in your house is a teakettle failing to boil.

I wonder if Frank Vogel is gun-shy after that whole ridiculous “war of words” with LeBron in the run-up to this series. I wonder if he knows that you don’t want to prod LeBron. Maybe Frank Vogel is just nice? I kind of wish it was his version of “game recognize game,” but Frank Vogel, simply put, does not have the bozack for that type of statement. Frank Vogel looks like an actuary, and I don’t even know what an actuary is.

I think Frank Vogel thinks the Pacers can win. More, I think he believes they can win. I expect this to go to a seventh game. (I’ll find a television if that happens). But I do think Frank Vogel knows his team is outmatched. 

—The Dream Shake

Holy Shit You Guys

             

Holy shit, you guys, if the Pacers win game five tonight in Miami, they’re going to be up 3-2 in a best of seven series with an opportunity to close this shit out in game six in Indianapolis. Miami’s lost like four games in the last twelve years, I think, and I think three of them were against the Pacers.

This weird thing happens in the playoffs where you consider what will happen before it starts based on gigantic heaps of data. The Heat were really, really great pretty much all season long, and the Pacers had major issues coming out of the gate. The Heat won 27 games in a row at one point; I don’t know if you remember that, but it was a really big deal. Coming into this series, it just seemed impossible that the Heat could lose four times in seven games to anyone.

But then you start playing the games, and the thing is: someone needs to win every game. Let’s say the Heat have like a 75% chance of winning every game. Still, that means that in any one game there’s a 25% chance the Pacers will win, and when the sample size gets small, like it does in a playoff series, well, you get the idea. On top of that, it seems like this series is a tad more even than we thought. If the Pacers are going to rebound like this, all they need is to have another game or two where they don’t turn the ball over as much as usual, and they might be going to the finals.

Game 5s are, of course, enormous. This is the most important basketball game that has happened so far in the 2012-13 NBA Season. The Heat probably will win this game, but maybe they won’t.

—The Buzzard

Narrative Gold (& Blue)

There are about a million ways to frame the hotly-contested, currently tied up (2-2) series between the Indiana Pacers and the Miami Heat: the atrocious officiating, the egregious flopping, the height differential, the unexpected religious experience that is Lance Stephenson, the coming out party of The Monocle a.k.a. Monopoly a.k.a. Uncle Pennybags, a.k.a. Roy Hibbert, the strange descent of Dwyane Wade into villainy, the incurable sadness of looking at Ray Allen, watching how much of a burden Lebron can put on his back before it breaks (if it can break), this sublime block (to quote the Buzzard: “What did Hill think was gonna happen”), the lack of emotion on Pat Riley’s catcher’s mitt of a face, David West’s bug eyes, Paul George’s Lebron impression, the serious anonymity between these teams — all of these and thousands more are acceptable entry ways into an understanding of this series, as well as current fodder for countless analysts and basketball blogs dissecting this incredible series.

I don’t think I have anything to add that isn’t being said in better ways all over the internet. All I’m making here is a plea. If you love basketball as narrative, this is the time to tune in. We might be watching Lebron’s equivalent to Michael Jordan leading his team past the ‘92 Knicks or the ‘98 Pacers, true greatness going through the most rigorous testing to be assured of its legitimacy. In the next few days, Lebron might complete his ascension into the upper echelon of basketball greats. By the end of this season he may cement his status as one of the five best players to ever play the game — and he’s only 28.

That is, if the Heat win. 

If the Pacers win, and who would have thought that was a possibility a mere week ago, the narrative shifts drastically. Not only will it mark the emergence of Paul George as an elite player, one whose only legacy we are watching get constructed, but, with their emphasis on team defense and their embrace of the slogan “Blue collar, Gold Swagger”, the Pacers have every opportunity to become like the ‘79 Pirates — fan favorite anti-heroes. They will be mythologized for their team-first ethics, and for slaying the dragon, and their jerseys will be worn by the culturally aware for decades to come.

I know it’s dangerous to hurdle into an assumption of the future just to look back on the present. It’s a fool’s errand. So, I’m a fool. But goddamn, I’m not going to miss a minute of this series, and if you love basketball as narrative, you won’t either.  

—Frank Basket

Patterns

A couple weeks ago I saw Timothy Donnelly read at Flying Object. “You know what is going on in your head most of the time,” he said, “if you’re lucky. But you can never be sure about what is going on inside anyone else’s,” or something like that.

A few days ago, I was watching a new episode of VEEP, which is a show about a female vice president, and she (the vice president) turned to an aide who had just complimented her on what he had seen as an impressively crafty political maneuver, and said, “No matter how close you get to my ear, Dan, you still can’t see inside my head.” 

A month ago, The Buzzard, Rachel Turquoise, Lunatic Johnson, and I were watching the NBA season wind down. Any enthusiasm had been sucked out of the room. We were talking. We couldn’t understanding why people were standing in the street chanting “USA” after the Boston Marathon bomber was captured. Things seemed more somber than that. The Buzzard said, “We can never understand how other people experience trauma” and the incontrovertibility of this fact settled the room.

The similarity of these messages, which arrived through poetry and TV and events both local and national, convince me I have found the kind of pattern that is proof I am noticing the larger framework that holds everything together. 

But then, just as quickly, I am convinced that because this is the kind of thing I spend a lot of time thinking about anyways, when I hear it from someone else, it stands out to me, and I remember it. So it might be a type of confirmation bias. I’m not convinced there’s anything else. We see only the patterns we’re looking for, and none of the patterns we’re not. 

If I am conjuring it or simply noticing it, whose to say, but as the final embers of the second round of the NBA playoffs were mercifully snuffed out over the weekend, and I looked back on what had transpired, I found the pattern again. Three cases in particular stood out: 

1) Nate Robinson appeared to be impervious to pain. He bounced up from the floor after every hard, occasionally flagrant, foul, doing his best impression of an indestructible child’s toy. He didn’t let the physicality intimidate him. Despite his diminutive size (he’s 5’ 9”), his most fearless expeditions into the lane often came after the hardest fouls. 

Nate’s expressions of celebration were rather reserved compared to the manic way he bopped around the court. In those moments, such as game one of the second round, where Nate had reason to celebrate himself, I liked to imagine he was succumbing to an interior joy that only grew more ecstatic as he hid it from us. (I can not know for sure, as the pattern demands.)

2) What I know about Zach Randolph is that we call him Z-Bo and he loves contact. I am certain of nothing else about him, or even what I mean when I say contact or love, or Zach Randolph. Over the past couple weeks, Z-Bo has physically humiliated some of the biggest, toughest guys in America. When they pushed back, he nodded his  head in respect and pushed harder. He was unreachable. Also, this happened:

When it happened I explained it to myself in terms I would understand: Z-Bo is dismissing all possible anomosity between him and Matt Barnes. 

But as Lunatic pointed out the next day, in the immediate aftermath Z-Bo actually looks totally out of control. He charges at Barnes and goes head-to-head with him the way boxers do before they beat the shit out of each other.

Which Z-Bo are we seeing?

The more I watch it, the more it’s both.

3) Steph Curry in particular, but also the Warriors as a whole, embodied in this postseason a coolness beyond my understanding. They danced like cool people in the tunnel before games. They pushed the ball in transition and played fast and loose and their shooters nodded coolly at the green light from Mark Jackson and scored in bunches. They played like they didn’t know they could lose, not in the way that we imagine Michael Jordan acknowledging and then steeling himself against the possibility of failure, but like they didn’t understand it was an option.

Curry moved up and down the court in a saunter, dismantling the Spurs one or two quick steps at a time. Klay Thompson’s facial expressions were all just variations on the same facial expression, and that expression was called Klay Thompson. Jarrett Jack, relegated in my mind to the role of ‘guy who gives Steph Curry a breather’ during the regular season, came out and hit big shot after big shot, proving he contains more than one multitude, final tally pending. The Warriors gave my favorite performance of the playoffs so far. They were like children who don’t yet know life doesn’t go on forever.

—- 

We should be grateful for the mystery of these performances. Most things we look at in an attempt to understand them. We look at the world to see the world. We look at art to see ourselves from a potentially new angle. We just look at sports to freak out. Our inability to understand the internal mechanics that allow the best athletes to be the best is one of our viewing pleasures. Greatness is not something you want to peek behind the curtain to see how it’s made. It’s something you want to gawk at with your friends. 

The greatness of Nate and Z-Bo and the Warriors in the second round (in failure and success and failure, respectively) form the DNA of the second round, and are their own pattern, one we will remember and read into and recite again and again in the years to come (probably for as long as we live, for some reason) in order to prove a current pattern we think we see emerging or to disprove or prop up a pattern another sees forming or simply to reminisce fondly about when we were all there and the strange thing happened in the basketball game that defied easy explanation and as it happened we saw it for what it was, one of the many incredible things we would embrace that year. 

They were small but we paid attention.

—Frank Basket

Who We Thought They Were

Sports are all about speculation and potential. A foundational appeal of being a fan is evaluating all the possibilities of a team as constructed, then watching the extent to which that team either subverts or butts up against the fan-imposed ceiling of potential. Usually, expectations are not met. But occasionally, a team plays up to our wildest expectations. In rare moments, they push past it.

Late in game 4 between the Thunder and Grizzlies last night, the refs missed two pretty obvious fouls calls, one on each end, that should have put Kevin Durant on the line with his team up one. Instead, Marc Gasol was put on the free-throw line, made one, and the Grizzlies went up two.

Down two with 10 seconds to go, those two missed foul calls suddenly felt pre-ordained. Durant would be given the ball and the opportunity to hit the clutch shot that would force overtime in a playoff game. This was a moment that great players step up into, an iconic moment. The basketball gods had writ it, it must be so.

Despite Durant’s sublime shooting stroke, despite how awesome it is when he dunks, his lay-up might be his most impressive shot. Durant caught the ball, despite Memphis’s attempt to deny him, took one dribble and started his drive from outside the three-point line. His two steps covered like 15 feet. He used his height to get his shot off over a couple help defenders. Because he has such an amazing touch, he got a couple rolls on the rim, and the ball went in. Tie game. Cue the music. The whole thing took less than five seconds.

The Grizzlies offense is not meant to function in spaces of time as small as 6.5 seconds. They are methodical about their shot selection, and patient, and this often takes most of the shot clock. With that amount of time left on the clock the Grizzlies got the ball to Z-Bo at the elbow, and he attempted to create space for his own shot. It got blocked. The ghost of Rudy Gay hovered over the court.

Everything felt mildly inevitable, like a movie I had seen before but could only remember as it was unfolding in front of me. Then overtime started. Durant went ice cold, missing all five shots he took. The game slowed to an ugly churn. Derek Fisher became an elemental part of the Thunder offense, like cutting off an appendage and replacing it with a mop. Tony Allen hit a jump shot. He stole a pass that must have given Sam Presti an aneurysm. The crowd chanted Tony’s name. 

Did anyone expect that? Did anyone expect to hear Tony’s name chanted at the end of overtime last night?

The Grizzlies are exactly who we thought they were, and the Thunder are too, if we were paying attention. We just weren’t. We were too busy speculating. 

—Frank Basket

Bad Manu, Bad

Bad choices are usually only bad juxtaposed with good ones. They are conditionally bad, probably not typically intrinsically bad. I’m talking about small things we do and regret doing, like going to a job interview with a mustache versus without a mustache. Sometimes you have to make a bad choice for no other reason than to make a bad choice. In college, for an oral report on The Time Machine I took drugs and told the class that I was the time traveller. The other morning I breakfasted on a lonely hot dog that had been floating overnight in the tepid water its brothers and sisters were boiled in the evening before. Last Friday, I met up with my ex-girlfriend to watch the Celtics-Knicks game, which was necessary, not necessarily bad, complicated. But I’m withholding final value judgement on my decision to do that, and, for that matter, every bad choice I’ve ever made, because what is bad now is not necessarily irreconcilably bad, possibly, even, instrumental to a greater good. You sober up, you take some pepto bismol, you get drunk and feel better. If you’re Manu Ginobili, you hit the game winning shot.

Ginobili played terribly on Monday. He knew he was playing terribly on Monday. Everyone knew he was playing terribly on Monday. With half the shot clock remaining in the second OT Ginobili jacked up a contested three that clanked. Calling that shot ill-advised is wrong because I’m pretty sure not a single rational human being would have advised Ginobili to take that shot. Ginobili himself was probably like, don’t shoot, don’t shoot, don’t shoot—dammit!

But, then, the last moment of the game comes down to an inbounds play that is meant to get the ball into the hands of pretty much anyone in a Spurs jersey other than Ginobili. Yet something went wonky, and Ginobili was wide open with no time to choose. He set himself, didn’t hesitate (not to be mistaken with setting himself), and sunk a rainbow so arcing the ball was momentarily lost in the smeared backdrop of the arena. It’s often easier to shoot over someone who’s running toward you. Suddenly, everything he did leading up to that moment became a footnote to this one heroic shot. Now he has a seat in the Pop family breakfast nook.

On Monday Ginobili’s shot was a reminder that things get better, nothing is forever. We all sometimes temporarily sink below the crust of Being In A Good Way. His shot shifted the conversation to his overall horrid performance topped by a flash of excellence, casting him as this bumbling protagonist who ends up doing the right thing, and away from some very, very good overall performances by other players. I’m trying not to turn this into some feel-good, redemption story. I’m trying to be bitter. I want San Antonio to lose. It has nothing to do with the players or Popovich, all of whom I respect, I guess, because they continue to win when they should have stopped winning by now, and because they continue to be in a conversation that would otherwise be dominated by Stephen Curry, the most exciting player to watch in the NBA bar none (sorry KD, your crossover was good, but Curry does that shit every game). I just want the Spurs to lose is all, Ginobili be damned.

—Gerald Honeycutt

GHOSTS

One’s hairline recedes, but one’s jokes, I know, get better, which is only to say that even where the issue is certain, it certainly is not. “I will never die,” wrote Ted Berrigan, and then “I’m only pronouns, & I am all of them,” so even in the contest between life and death maybe you maybe never know. Maybe.

It’s always tempting (for me) to make more of sports than needs be made, but Joakim Noah’s first half in Brooklyn in game seven and (to a lesser extent) Kevin Durant’s fourth quarter in game one against the Grizzlies reminded me of the possibilities of a life that exists outside of the parameters of fate.

I have been saying for almost one calendar year that no one is beating LeBron James in these playoffs. I have said it with such fervor that its inevitability has begun to take on the qualities of death, but there is a ghostly image hanging in the meanwhile of space and time, and you would be a fool to shout out loud, “I know I know the outcome!” Daniel knew that the writing on the wall was a voice. I see what you are doing down there, and I don’t like it. I will turn this car right around.

In the meantime, what does our behavior reveal about us? Take this, the ninth stanza of the “Contemplations” of early American poet Anne Bradstreet:

I heard the merry grasshopper then sing.

The black-clad cricket bear a second part;

They kept one tune and played on the same string,

Seeming to glory in their little art.

Shall creatures abject thus their voices raise

And in their kind resound their Maker’s praise,

Whilst I, as mute, can warble forth no higher lays?

This is about how impossible it is to do anything right. If only your effort could fix itself on the most important thing. The idea is to be a falcon caring for an unhatched egg. Charles Barkley said that the trick to rebounding was desire. You had to want to “Go get the damn ball.” In the above photo, where is Larry Bird’s finger pointing? How much of this is artifice, and how much serves to praise something we can’t quite understand?

I think we are only ghosts and that the traces of us slowly vanish after we are gone as generation after generation proceeds to forget that we existed, but the experience of being alive is not like this at all. People die, and I think about them all the time, and I remember that when they were alive, it felt like they might always be that way.

Even now, we are in motion, and it is hard to get a good look at us, and who knows what we were thinking when we were doing that thing, pictured somewhere by someone else, mistakenly believing they saw us, and not just light glinting off a surface and disappearing somewhere far away. Nothing is decided while the ball is still in the air. 

 

—The Buzzard