How can you know in the NBA if something’s real?
If a team really is on a sustainable upward trajectory, or if they’ve overachieved? If a player whose name has become synonymous with trade talks really wants out (or in somewhere else, depending on how you’re looking at it)? How can you tell the difference between talent and development, and when does it start to matter? And how do you know that regular season dominance will translate into postseason competence, let alone contention?
I’ve been thinking about NBA mirages, the things we will ourselves into believing over the course of a season, as a few of the league’s prominent storylines play out. What constitutes an NBA mirage is that it has just enough staying power at a distance, but like the real thing, when you start to interrogate it up close its corporeal outlines vanish.
Trades are a huge generator of NBA mirages. I hate to think how many ESPN’s NBA Trade Machine tool is pumping out per hour as the trade deadline approaches. Jimmy Butler’s request for a trade out of Miami is one of the reasons I started thinking about them, specifically, where they shift from fantasy to reality. The prospect of a trade, for Butler, is as solid as the car he gets in to drive himself to Heat games. For Pat Riley and the Heat’s front office, the trade’s an illusion (delusion, maybe, if you asked Riley). What’s real to them is Butler’s behaviour, which they emphasized by suspending him for seven games.
Does Butler, since then reported to have asked both the Bucks and the Grizzlies not to trade for him, make his potential trade more real by narrowing its scope? Or is he limiting himself and his chances of an exit — any exit — from Miami?
Shifting from trades to returns, Zion Williamson’s back on the floor in New Orleans. Williamson’s dunks, like his first in-game slam last night since early November, have a knack for calling to mind immediately the contours of the earth under your feet. I tend to curl my toes against the ground, checking it’s still there. Why then, does he make me think of mirages? The hope for Williamson, since he entered the league, has been consistency — in his health, his game, his career.
Things have been anything but.
It’s difficult to know the shape of a career (and from there, how it will develop) when you haven’t spent enough time watching it. We still don’t know Williamson’s upper limit, where he could stand to improve even in the workaday elements like shot mechanics and handles, because we’ve yet to see him play through a full season. We’re in a perpetual holding pattern, waiting for the solid lines to emerge, image how Williamson must feel, constantly asked to explain how and why his career is a legitimate one.
There are NBA mirages easier to parse. The Lakers lacking athleticism despite their recent trade, or that the Timberwolves’ real regression is largely due to a front office unwilling to spend money to keep last season’s overachieving core together, thus clipping the momentum on an accelerated competitive timeline.
Watching Nikola Jokic recently face off against Victor Wembanyama and not so much see but feel the outlines of the latter’s capabilities and skill pushing Jokic around as Jokic, always expressive, felt the same strain. Or that the Cavs and Thunder — who face off tonight in what, by standings alone, is your Finals preview — have pushed through the early season claims that their blistering pace of stacking wins was unsustainable, or in any way tenuous. That they’re wholly for real.
