Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Be Like Brandon, not Mike






So, a few weeks ago we all heard the shitty news that Brandon Jennings will miss the rest of the season after suffering a ruptured Achilles tendon during a perfectly random middle of the season who gives a shit Detroit loss to Milwaukee. It was a personal tragedy for Brandon and his family, a possibly pivotal setback for the Pistons who were in the midst of mounting a supremely rare redemption story, and a sucker punch to the gut for anyone who puts stock in the unrepentant and wild 80s LA hardcore punk ethos of the playground baller amidst the staid machine that is the National Basketball Association.

There are much better talents and way better players than Jennings, but the 25-year-old point guard was always unmistakably himself, and he didn't market his brand for Republicans who also bought sneakers. His journey from basically a cast-off to a sorta leading man wasn't quite the stuff of legend, but it would do. It was the crossroads where pathos skull-fucked bathos and made a human seem like a person.

Brandon Jennings spent the first four years of his NBA career in Milwaukee, before being traded to the Detroit Pistons in the summer of 2013. At the time, Detroit had lost its way in spectacular, almost super-human fashion. They were routinely clobbered in almost every manner you can be clobbered, accumulating a straight-up cornucopia of painful losses. Teams win and then they lose. No recent team has done the latter more strangely and suddenly than the Detroit Pistons.

The Pistons have tried a lot of different things to improve their talent level since ceding the mantle as the Eastern’s elite team to the Big 3 Celtics back in 2008. [The gory details include: Michael Curry’s plodding big-ego compromised version of small-ball, Lawrence Frank’s ghostliness, the mutiny against John Kuester, the helplessness of Mo Cheeks, the gamble on Allen Iverson, the false prophet of Rodney Stuckey, the contracts of Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva, the broken down TRACY MCGRADY playing point guard, the return of Old Ben Wallace, the continued prominence before a merciful exile of Tayshaun Prince, the rookie promise of Jonas Jerebko, the hair of Kyle Singler, and finally, acquiring Josh Smith and Brandon Jennings for the Great Ball Hog Renaissance. ]

Detroit lost and lost and lost some more. To forestall more losing, their new owner reached out to Stan Van Gundy and made Van Gundy a veritable Grand Vizier of Basketball Operations, putting the entire campaign in his hands. And then they kept losing, starting this season with a dismal 5–23 record. Another lost year, it seemed.



But then something happened. Highly-paid chucker Josh Smith was waived, and almost instantly the Pistons started winning games. In a row. Call it addition by subtraction, call it an exorcism, that’s how history will no doubt see those few magical weeks when the script was flipped, burned, torn apart and re-written from a tragedy to a triumphant underdog story. There was suddenly hope in a town that had subsisted on crumbs since 2008.

On paper, resurrections look inspiring but largely shapeless. But in reality they tend have faces, and the two guys that the pundits were eager to bestow the credit to for the remarkable turn-around were Van Gundy and his spindly starting point-guard, Brandon Jennings. The team put together 12 wins in a 15-game stretch, beating the league’s lowlifes and giants alike. Brandon was winning again, averaging 20 points and seven assists per game. He was making a last stand against being typecast as an inefficient and perpetual loser, the type of guy that seems always on the verge of becoming a journeyman, even though he hasn’t done much NBA-journeying.



The nice little run the Pistons made after jettisoning Josh Smith, a run very much led by Brandon Jennings, was supposed to be the first step in reversing our perspective on the Pistons. Teams that far in the hole don’t come back with a vengeance. They just accept their fate, wait for the lottery, and give it the old college try next year. For whatever silly reason, these Pistons thought they could be the exception to the rule, and sneak into the playoffs and possibly even make some noise once they got there. For a while that seemed probable, and — given the torpidity of Brooklyn and the myriad of setbacks in Miami — perhaps even likely. One torn Achilles tendon later, and all that hope in Detroit was cruelly extinguished.


And that’s a fucking shame. Because there aren’t too many Brandon Jennings’ in this league. Guys with the sense of humor of a doomed poet carved into them. Complex guys who exist in mirth and in darkness at once. Watch his scenes in Adam Yauch’s “Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot” and tell me Brandon doesn’t have a certain gloom to him, even in his ebullient moments, that feels rare in his particular cohort. The way the camera lingers on him during a quiet moment, the stenography of his silence. This is a young man whose father committed suicide. A person written off by so many people it must seem almost blasé. This is a guy who had decided at a very young age to give David Stern’s cynical paean to the sanctity of college hoops a middle finger, and go overseas to play in Italy, thereby denying himself of a mandatory year of being enrolled at a university before declaring for the draft.



Brandon’s stunt at the 2009 draft is the stuff of legend. Hearing rumors of his draft stock plummeting, Jennings took the novel approach of not even being in the building instead of risking embarrassment in the Green Room. When the Bucks drafted him at No. 10, David Stern was forced to keep the show moving before Jennings eventually arrived on the scene. He took the stage with an excess of bitter swagger, waved to the crowd, and only then offered the Commissioner a perfunctory handshake. It’s brilliant, nearly art.

And then the 55-point explosion. In just his seventh career game, Jennings went absolutely bonkers, but in the most beautiful and dangerous way. It was a fantastic display of moxie and desperation and spoke to his irritability vis-à-vis losing. It was those playground handles, relentless drives, crafty moves under the basket, daring tip-ins amongst the trees, and one trebuchet-looking three-point attempt after another. He looked immortal, like a goddamn superstar.



However, as is the case with early critical acclaim, outliving his great moment took a toll on him. Never again would he even sniff 50 points. The Bucks made the playoffs in his rookie season and lost in the first round. Turns out he wasn’t a superstar, and the Milwaukee fanbase slowly turned on him. His tenure with the Bucks was more underwhelming than terrible. His shooting percentages were never great, his individual impact on the game was often in doubt. He was the leader, but not a leader. He was a serious person, but played like a joker. Brandon’s trajectory did not seem to be a happy one.

After the Bucks sent him to Detroit there seemed at least the possibility that things might turn around, but the Brandon Jennings/Josh Smith Pistons were a complete disaster from the get-go. The guy who had dared to not even show up to the NBA Draft was now going through the motions. Then suddenly the team’s fortunes reversed, capped off by a blistering stretch that confounded supporters and detractors alike. The Pistons as a whole looked strangely great. They played like a team, as if they knew each other's names and favorite spots, played as if they've even shared non-silent meals with one another from time to time. And no one on that Hoosiers meets the Bad News Bears squad played better than Jennings, the scrawny kid who certainly gave a damn, but perhaps not a fuck.



Since Smith was cut loose and before suffering his season-ending injury, Jennings had posted the seventh-best PER in the league — his name alongside Harden, Curry, Klay Thompson, Durant, LeBron, and Anthony Davis. Although by itself such a small sample size proves nothing, to people who have been watching him all along it reinforced what we already knew. He belongs. He’s not those guys, not a transcendent talent, but he damn-well belongs. I don't know how to feel about Michael Jordan, other than I don't want to be like him. Brandon's more accessible and sympathetic to norms like me. There’s something to be said for a mid-tier terror, a menace that lurks and waits. Brandon has that 55-point masterpiece inside him always, timing its escape.


The Pistons may very well make the playoffs without him. They may not. It’s the luck of the draw and fortune’s shitty caprice that dragged him down this season, of all seasons. But the unlikely and all too short Phoenix (the bird!) like rise of the Detroit Pistons is the latest example of a life’s worth of mounting evidence that every now and then we get the chance to see the mathematics of certainty fucked with. Sometimes it's beautiful when that happens.

A now deleted tweet by Jennings read, "Not being able to play basketball is the worst thing."

Depressing. But just like Detroit, Brandon Jennings will rise again. Then he can have his revenge and eat it too.