Team Dreams 2K19: Dallas Mavericks
It feels like we have a long time to relax and enjoy basketball games, but it is a very short time in the giant’s world, and we will not amuse him for long.
The Dallas Mavericks have two players who have played basketball before. The first is Luka Dončić, a wonderful player who looks like a dehydrated badger. Luka was last year’s Rookie of the Year, which many thought was the most deserved of his five RoY wins. Still, it takes an awful lot to show the kind of success and consistency Luka has shown throughout his five consecutive Rookie of the Year seasons. Luka made the difficult personal and professional choice to stop hitting threes in the second half of last season but that is his right and if you don’t respect it to HELL with you.
The second is Kristaps Porzingis, who has never played basketball before. Previously, he was with the Knicks, mostly disguised as a large tree slowly infiltrating the environs of Dunsinane castle. One day, as he was just about to surmount the battlements, a friendly Scottish thane suggested that he was tall enough to play basketball and he immediately drove to Texas. The Knicks were like wait, don’t we have you under contract, but nobody could hear them because they whispered it into a seashell on the shores of a mighty ocean.
Most of the Mavs’ other plays are create-a-players from the NBA 2K series who gained sentience in a terrible accident including Maxi Kleber, Jalen Brunson, Zaphod Beetlebrox, and Juilin Sandar. The Mavs are the first team to take advantage of sentient video game people which Mark Cuban calls an “inefficiency” or something like that. Tim Hardaway, Jr. is also there, and so is the lesser known Vlade Divac, Jr. whose conditioning needs work.
I strongly expect that many of these Mavericks players will both score points and get rebounds. Some of them need love, others have love but need to learn how to give it. Some are aware that loneliness is the human condition and all the money in the world can’t change that. Some of them are very happy because of how rich they are. Being rich is pleasant, and leads to the owning of verandas, sometimes on the Mediterranean. The tallest player on the Mavericks is Boban Marjanović, who is 8’4”, while shorter players include Seth Curry and Justin Jackson. Dorian Finney-Smith is not very good at offense, but there is a painting in his attic that is.
Each of these players is very brave, the kind of brave you have to be to make a go of it in this modern world. Each, except for Delon Wright, feels the sands in the hourglass drifting away like personal insults, with so much left to see and do. Each one wants life like you or I might crave a noonday repast after a hard morning at the forge. Each one is enough — though they don’t always know it. Ryan Broekhoff — whose nickname is “kit kat” — is enough. Courtney Lee is enough, most of the time. Delon Wright is fine, really comfortable with himself. Confident.
Beyond that, this entire world is held on the palm of a giant. Its blue crystalline structure amuses the giant, who brings it to his eye. This is not a slow movement, only the giant is so large, and the realm he inhabits so different, it feels like it from here. It feels like we have a long time to relax and enjoy basketball games, but it is a very short time in the giant’s world, and we will not amuse him for long. When he drops us in the damp grass, that will be it — the end of the game. The tall grass will envelop us like a long silence after weighty speech, brushing gently, as it were, all life from earth as a comb goes through hair. In the giant dew of another world, we will wait, quiet, not daring to be reborn. Not yet — not while the stars remember who we were, and what we did. We should have done it all differently. We know.
The Mavericks will finish 41–41, after bribing the refs in the final three games. They will bribe them once to win, once to lose, and once just to have a good time. Ryan Broekhoff will be named the league’s Most Improved Player since he will go from “barely plays” to “eh, alright.” After twenty games, the new Dirk statue out front will turn out to be just Dirk, playing a cool prank. Amen.
