Blame Game
On the Nuggets near-disaster and the state of the male mental health crisis
Tuesday, April 28th
Yesterday, one of my teammates, JT, blew up at us for not playing up to his expectations. A few times, actually. The biggest and final outburst came because nobody had crashed the boards for a big rebound but him. He swore at the top of his lungs, punched the mat on the wall under the hoop, then stormed off the court in the middle of a crucial play.
It was the final game of the day (always the most important one, like Game 7 for guys with beer bellies and back problems), and we were tied at game point. He eventually collected himself and came back into the game, which we promptly lost on a deep 3 after a miscommunication on a switch. He stormed off again, this time all the way out of the gym without changing his shoes or exchanging a dap.
If you’ve read this newsletter you know this is a fairly regular occurrence. Guys get pissed at their teammates all the time, myself included. But of all the ways someone can lose their cool on the court, firing verbal shots at your own team is probably the most difficult to process in the moment, or after the fact, whether you were the one getting yelled at by your own teammate or you were the one doing the yelling.
I’ve been on both sides. Experiencing either one could leave a stain on your entire day, even multiple days. As you replay the events in your mind, you’ll be left wondering either “What is wrong with me?” or “What is wrong with him?” Even if you’re justified, turning on your own team rarely leads to anything good. If you haven’t lost already, you probably will soon.
It has not been a peaceful week of basketball in Denver, either for its professional team, the Nuggets, or its rec center warriors.
As a result of their poor collective performance, Denver’s hoopers from Nikola Jokić on down are caught in a storm of frustration and finger-pointing. In the case of the Nuggets, who dropped Games 2-4 of the first round of the playoffs to the dreaded Timberwolves in calamitous fashion, there’s not a single person on the court or the coaching staff who doesn’t bear some responsibility. Except for Aaron Gordon — he gets a pass due to his kleenex-soft hamstring and his beautiful soul.
I have never seen the Joker look as stunned and hollowed out as he did at the end of Game 4. He looked like he’d spent several sleepless nights battling a malevolent wraith who had taken the form of a 7-foot Frenchman called Gobert.
I’m sure there was plenty of finger-pointing in the Nuggets locker room after those losses. I suspect it came to a head after Game 4. On the media side, the shitstorm of blame has been apocalyptic. People are talking about Jokić like his entire “legacy”, whatever that actually means, is suddenly on the line. The walls are closing in on green head coach David Adelman, whose demeanor in recent press conferences resembles that of a bank robber caught in the act of a heist. He’s gonna have to shoot his way out of this one.
During Games 3 and 4, my armchair psychological assessment was that the Nuggets were turning on each other in the face of adversity. After going to Game 5 last night and seeing them rally together for a dominant win behind Joker, I have some hope I was wrong.
In the hours after JT flipped out on us yesterday, the WhatsApp group chat for the pickup run started blowing up. The details aren’t important, but the big takeaway was JT apologizing for his outbursts. He said he’s gone to therapy for this type of thing in other areas of his life, and that he has limited his meltdowns to the court alone. The group rushed in to show their support and to say they weren’t offended by his intensity — which I agreed with. It was a nice show of self-awareness on JT’s part and genuine understanding from everyone else. In my experience, it’s not very common for guys to open up like that, especially after flipping out on the court in a potentially embarrassing way.
But it took a few hours for everyone to get to this point — for everyone to cool off and go through their respective process of reflection. And in our case, there is literally nothing at stake. The only thing that our performance in a pickup game can change is the other guys’ perception of our basketball prowess. That’s literally it.
We expect too much out of professional athletes. Not in the way we expect them to perform in their athletic arena — that’s exactly what we should expect of them, and probably the only thing. But what we expect of them in terms of emotional and mental maturity when they don’t perform. For some reason, we expect them to handle the emotions that come with failure faster or more efficiently than the rest of us, even though most of them are under 30 years old. This is why so many of them act like they don’t have any emotions at all — until they melt down on the court for all of us to see or smash their Maserati into a mailbox.
Part of becoming a better athlete is learning the difference between managing emotions and totally ignoring them. In something like the NBA playoffs, the stakes are so high (even if they’re fabricated for entertainment and profit, which of course they are), the first and easiest thing to do when shit hits the fan is blame people around you.
I think this Nuggets team is less mature than we thought they were. That goes for the coach, too. But that’s not a death sentence for a team, in part because maturity doesn’t actually make you better at basketball, and because it comes through experience and reflection. The gauntlet of a 7-game series offers plenty of opportunities for both. If they turned on each other in Games 2-4, they may have reached the point where there’s nobody left to blame. Sometimes exposing your own idiocy is the only way to move forward.
Professional athletes are just human beings with broader shoulders. Part of why I have always loved Nikola Jokić is that he’s so obviously human. So graceful, so frequently flummoxed. So oddly shaped. His humanity showed through a lot this past week, in the same way JT’s showed when he rage quit on his team with the game on the line.
JT turned his blowup into a chance to learn. I have no idea how it will turn out for Jokić and the Nuggets this year. For now, they still have a chance.
Gg.
-Paul