Opening and Closing Windows: Spurs-Suns

A beach does not wash a way all at once, but is taken one grain at a time.  The ice caps have been melting for decades, but it’s more of a slow trickle than a rushing torrent.  In an age where “let there be light” occurs with the flick of a switch and the Transcendental Oversoul has been reduced to the internet, we have come to expect change as if it were a bullet launched out of a gun, that it passes through us, shredding us, leaving us ultimately different than the moment before we tasted lead, and so we fear change.  We fear change like an earthquake, terrified of its suddenness, and we run from it like a tidal wave, but change is never so sudden as a flower pot leaping off a shelf into the shattered fragments of a clay suicide.  No, gears cranked and turned deep inside the Earth’s bowels, inching that flower pot, pushing it, guiding it to the edge, and so it is with basketball teams.

A window is not open and then shut; panes of glass are eased downward inch by inch, at times so slowly the transparency of the glass tricks the eye into thinking the window is just as open as it ever was.  But it’s not.  The moment that window starts to slide with gravity a team shifts from a champion to an also-ran, so what we find is that our perception, or reality, is always a few seconds behind what is actually occurring.  We do not recognize the window as shut until it is shut, rarely do we recognize the descent, and if we do, it catches us off guard, and we waver on it, not knowing what verdict to place on subtlety.  How many times have we judged the Spurs’ window as closed only to qualify the statement with “but I wouldn’t want to play them in the Playoffs ’cause you never know what they’re capable of?”  Then they lose in the first or second round, and we act surprised, when we spent the whole year declaring the window shut.  So know this, the San Antonio Spurs are done, and they have been done since a delayed flight and Manu’s ankle kept their 2008 effort to repeat grounded on the runway.

Our refusal to accept a shutting window as already shut is an admission that none of us want to accept that our narratives may already be written, that we are merely time’s wheelbarrows.  How else can one explain why so many sports fans and basketball analysts, who have always viewed  San Antonio’s black and gray uniform as a rain cloud over the NBA, have ignored the signs of decay, wedging two by fours, named Richard Jefferson, between window and sill?  In some way, Tim Duncan’s plummeting hops and inability to guard the pick and roll as effectively as he once did must remind us that our own memories escape from us, that one day not only will we not be able to run and jump like we once did but we may not even remember the speed with which we once traveled, so we make statements after the Spurs victory over the Mavs in the first round, in which Tim Duncan scored a total of 32 points in the last three games of the series, that the Spurs have a chance to win the title if Duncan’s their third or fourth best player, when in reality, if Duncan is the Spurs third or fourth best player, they probably have no chance of contending.  In the Dallas series Duncan showed his age on the offensive end, but against Phoenix he increasingly looks older on the defensive side.  A younger Duncan would have denied Goran Dragic so many easy drives to the basket.  Those who identify with San Antonio as a barometer of excellence must keep up the illusion that this San Antonio team is of championship caliber, and this creation of pretense is done not just by silver and black loyalists who want to keep hope alive but by Suns patrons who want their 3-0 margin over these doppelganger Spurs to be a definitive slaying of the minotaur in their own narrative.

Narratives are mirrors.  We do not all see the same story from the same side.  For a Spurs fan, this story is about watching windows close, mortality, and self-denial.  For a Suns fan, this story is about waiting out an eclipse, changing history, and George taking it to the dragon.  This story is an epic of Steve Nash’s tortured soul coming back to Ithaca, but here’s the thing: if the Suns want this story to read that way, they will have to lie.  They will have to tell themselves that San Antonio’s window is not shut.

No one wants their hero to be a reactionary being.  No one wants their hero to be a tool or a device.  Heroes are supposed to be creatures of action, and, to make those actions heroic, heroes need to be creatures of choice–otherwise, their actions carry little to no courage, and heroes become puppets.  Several basketball analysts (too many to name) want to make the impending end of San Antonio’s dominance over Phoenix simply a matter of choice, that Alvin Gentry simply chose to preach defense and toughness and that Steve Nash and Amar’e simply chose to accept the word, but that’s not how grace works.  Depending on one’s religious doctrines, grace is either given or it is earned, but never taken.  If a Phoenix victory over San Antonio is indeed the sun coming out from behind the clouds, then the Suns were always meant to come up just short in the past until grace was given, and if this rise is indeed an act of will, then the act needed the inspiration of an Horry hip check and the three-headed dog of Duncan, Ginobili, and Parker weighing souls.  Either way, the Suns moment that was to be in this rivalry is and always was now, no earlier, no later, which leads Suns fans into a very strange internal dialogue, in which they must accept the past as the natural plot of their narrative–the way things were supposed to be–and, for this series to become a redemptive moment, they must tell themselves that the Spurs are still what they once were, when are clearly something less.

While some will argue that the rise of Phoenix should have come much earlier, claiming that they always had the faster and stronger horses, what horse charges without first having the rider’s heels dig into its flanks, and what is a phoenix without the ashes?  The Suns needed the Spurs for this moment to happen, all of the torment, all of the anxiety, all of the worry that their own window was shut, when perhaps all this time it was merely being pushed upward, passing the Spurs’ own window, like two ships in the night, and the leaving of Joe Johnson, the exile of Shawn Marion, and the burden of Shaq were simply the pains it took for the reflection to eclipse the reality: tectonic plates forcing a flower pot closer to the edge.  The Suns underwent tedious efforts to mold themselves, or be molded, into a reflection of the Spurs, and now, as basketball fans, we have gone down the rabbit hole and passed through the mirror because the reflection is now more real than the foil that once mocked it; but keep in mind the change was not sudden–no, this fall and rise was a long time in the making, written on stone tablets, in some dead language of the gods.

In short, the whole time the basketball world  fixated on the slow descent of the Spurs, the Suns were rising, and now we want to rewrite history as if a window’s trajectory could be reversed and that this series is proof that what happened in the past between these two teams should not have happened, when what happened happened, and now would not be so if it had been any other way.

This post in some shape or form was inspired by Matt Moore’s brilliant work over at the Hardwood Paroxysm and by some of the comments made by the ESPN announcers during last night’s game that insinuated the Suns should have beaten the Spurs in some of their past series.