This was probably the most emotionally and mentally fraught series we have seen in a long time. I don’t mean by this that the series was incredibly intense, dramatic, what have you. Often the games shaded into the boring, even the depressing. But those are emotional, mental experiences too, and a case can be made for how psychology played more into this series than any of the others in the current Playoffs.
Nothing would provide greater evidence for this than the fact that there was only one home game win in this series. And that win, Indiana’s Game 2 at home, itself occurred by a slim margin of victory. Quite simply, Indiana and Washington played better away from where they were needed most, got the most attention, and received the most care. They looked better as teams. They operated more efficiently. They even ran the court faster.
All this points to malfunctions going much deeper than anything mechanical in the workings of the teams. Away from their comfort zones, where they were pushed outside of the space they usually operated in, and where the air now seemed freer, brisker, no longer thick and heavy with expectations and demands, they could succeed. In hostile territory, where adversarial relationships are clean and external, simply between their teams and the opposing crowd, they were fine. But when they came home, things were too much for them. They looked sullen, slower, as if struggling underneath the burden of the history of their own gyms and practice facilities, filled with banners on their walls and all the friendly paraphernalia meant to encourage and excite, but which now only seemed to oppress and demotivate.
On Indiana’s side this dynamic has been apparent for some time. Indiana fans by the end of the regular season were booing the team—not out of impatience but simply out of exasperation. In Game 5 there were people yelling, “GET A REBOUND! C’MON!” Never a good sign. Not because it really affects the players so much as it indicates something about the general atmosphere surrounding the team. It’s a reaction to the attitude the team is giving off, if anything, which is a product of purely internal tensions. And the attitude is one of frustration. In the end, no one seems at all clear what this team is about anymore, or what it will do, eventually. They still don’t look like they have their focus completely on winning any game, let alone games in the playoffs.
My suspicion is that they were overrated last year. Looking back at some of their games late in 2013 when they shot out to the first spot in the East, they didn’t look nearly as impressive as they did in the ECFs the year before. Perhaps playoffs just temporarily elevated their cohesion. Now, this isn’t their fault they were judged so highly; but they subsequently embraced the identity of a Miami-killer when really they were struggling just to be a Wizards-killer. And along the way they keep fooling us enough into thinking they could do both, when really neither has been certain. People are speculating about Miami in 5.
I’m not sure that it will be that easy. First, because Miami isn’t looking too hot either lately, and because Miami may just give Indiana back enough unity of purpose that they start doing amazing things again. Teams can form their identity in opposition to other teams like that. And, if we look at when the Pacers started to have problems, it was largely after they had made the #1 seed such a reality that even their actual screw-ups wouldn’t undo what their hatred of Miami had won them. Could it be they simply lost their motivation, so thoroughly where they defined by what happened the year before? Stranger things have disrupted a season than a false feeling of comfort and security, and a lack of drive and consistency.
One thing watching the games in Indiana that struck me—as it hadn’t before—was just how much and how earnestly the Indiana crowd chants “Seven Nation Army.” Now this song is entirely the Heat’s. I don’t care if Indiana used it first—though I don’t know the origin of the chant, who used it when, and what not: it’s thoroughly the Heat’s at this point, and to use it bespeaks either a) the possession among Indiana fans of a wonderful ironic wit, thoroughly focused on its target (which I don’t put beyond them), or b) a preoccupation with mocking the Heat that is quite simply excessive. In either case, too much of Indiana is concerned with South Beach. And whether that has crushed the Pacers during the end of the season too much to actually have any success against Miami—well we’ll have to see.
On Washington’s side, there were similar homecourt pressures. The place hadn’t seen success at all in three decades, so while there was much excitement, but also the crowds seemed scarred by so many years of losing. This happens sometimes—to a degree I think it happened with the Blazers too this year: a fanbase sort of re-enters genuine contention but has forgotten what it is like to succeed. They become more nervous and anxious than enthused. Instead of support, they simply are concerned with their own levels of enervation and their appropriateness. Everyone is still waiting to see if this is the real deal, if they can really put their hopes into a team. No one knows, anymore, how to cheer, and when there is cheering, it is not as selfless or self-forgetful enough, not genuinely about the event. The worry about the inauthenticity of the object for which they have some desire, strangely makes their own efforts to root on the team that much more inauthentic.
But the degree to which Washington’s fans embraced this fatalism was genuinely surprising. Even worse was the way the media kept stoking it. Immediately, people were not looking for how far the Wizards could go, but when they would return to their old underachieving selves, so fans could get back to their resigned acceptance of mediocrity.
Every story written about the team seemed to center around how much they could handle: it was never assumed at all that they could handle things well. While beat writers closer to the team seemed to sound like they thought this underestimated them, nevertheless the work was accomplished and injected concerns into the conversations surrounding the team that were unproductive for everyone to hear.
Not that the concerns were unfounded. The team suffered from serious weaknesses. Among the young, it was a question of just how much pressure John Wall in particular, but Bradley Beal too, could withstand. Already Wall had the position of leader thrust upon him way too quickly, after coming to a franchise in such turmoil and with no better person on the roster to step up bring things along. Like Kyrie Irving—as Chris Ryan pointed out—Wall had to become yet another point-guard-savior who would lead the team to the promised land. In many ways he did—not only did they Wiz make the playoffs with him, but they made it to the semifinals. But it’s not clear everyone understands just how tall an order this actually is.
It’s not that Wall is up to facing them—it’s just that the load of pressure has to be better distributed than the any point-guard-savior would admit to having to bear, in order for the team to actually pull off what needs to happen. The role of savoir has to prove—materially—somewhat of a myth, and the team has to do the work that it doesn’t believe it is capable of doing without his help. Whereas with the Wizards, if Wall would have been successful, he truly would have been a figure out of fantasy.
And this brings us to the pressure on the veterans of the team. With Wall carrying such a load, they were expected to show up and help him bear it. They were supposed to be smart enough, to know enough, to understand that the youngin' couldn’t do the work all by himself. And so it became, each game in these playoffs, constantly a question of whether they would show up. Especially Nene. Success seemed to hang on his purely emotional investment in the games. Everything in this manner centered not on physical capabilities but just his mental determination.
For a large part, though, they did. Andre Miller played amazingly well, and Drew Gooden also played a hugely successful role. No one however helped quite enough to really contribute—no one, that is, except Marcin Gortat. He rose to the occasion throughout the playoff run, and most visibly in his frankly amazing Game 5 against Indiana—something I don’t think many people will forget, and shouldn’t. In his after-game speech, he explained what motivated his massive night on the court was indeed a desire to take some of the pressure off of Wall. But while the selflessness was impressive, what was clear was that this also was something that seemed to work within the game. Gortat clearly established something like an emotional tone that the rest of the team could follow: a tone that said, let’s simply set our house in order, and not make sure we play a good game, and try and contain the internal pressures that have been dogging us. It was a frank acknowledgment that the pressures they had been facing were mostly psychological, and a conviction that such problems can be overcome through dedication. Truly I don’t think I’ve seen a better example of leadership from behind, as it were, than in that game. By knowing what to do, everyone suddenly got direction. Teams need this sort of player: maybe people were waiting for Nene to fill that gap, and Gortat simply had had enough of waiting.
In the rest of the series though this sort of support only made its appearance at certain unpredictable moments, and the team became the insecure thing the media and fans had worried that it was. In Game 6 any focus at all was quite absent. The Wizards looked like a team overcome by fatigue, by confusion as to how to deal with all the stress. Rebounds were hard to come by, no one took the ball to the hoop, jumpers were hoisted up at the end, when there was still a chance of coming back and challenging the Pacers, with the same lack of confidence seen in the third and especially the fourth games.
In general though they seemed to be too concerned with the burden of the past, trying to prove that this was indeed the good team people should have gotten their hopes up for—rather than winning the game and moving on to the future. Sports—like life—isn’t always about having the best and most coherent identity: it is sometimes simply about success and effectiveness and winning. You can be a poorly constructed team and still beat a better one, and do so legitimately and with pride, because what in the end matters is not character but, quite simply, the results. It is a disturbing fact but also a merciful one, because it means that character can be produced by one's efforts as much as expressed by them. Simply a win over Indiana might have done the work of giving the Wizards an identity which they seemed at times to want to pursue, bizarrely, at the expense of being beaten by the Pacers.
In a remarkable moment, you could literally see Wall replaying the past on the court, as if to try and convince everyone that it didn’t happen the way they thought it did. It was towards the end of the second half, with the Wizards in the lead, and the Pacers looking like they might well have to play a seventh game. There were several seconds left on the clock and there was time for a significant pick and roll play, or a pass into the inside, or something, anything other than what Wall eventually did, which was run slightly off a screen directly to the wing and throw up a long three.
Now, this may have simply been misguided from a shot-selection standpoint, but the intentions behind the shot seemed to lie deeper and play out a fantasy even more misguided. For this was exactly the same spot that Wall stood in when, on the very same court in Game 4, he was passed the ball in the closing seconds of the game with the chance to bring the Wizards back into it. Then he got the ball, and was left wide open. The homecrowd yelled, everyone saw the opportunity to take the shot. But Wall froze with it, looked. George Hill was still stuck behind a screen about two long steps away: there was still time to take it. But instead Wall swung the ball--another three was put up and missed, and the last opportunity to beat the Pacers seemed to be gone. Now, in Game 6, Wall rushed to the exact same spot and threw the ball up in the air half-contested. It hit the front of the rim and slammed into the floorboards.
If he would have made the shot, it is interesting to speculate on what would happen. The Wiz would have gone into the half with Wall’s poor decisionmaking in the previous game at home completely avenged. Wall would have undone or redone the past to show that he is capable of being as in command as everyone expected him to be. But we have to ask—would this have been enough really for the Wizards to win and force a Game 7? The Wizards had the lead anyway, and ended up blowing it. Would one three, even if it did erase something of that past shot, actually carry them through the rest of the game? Or did it show that this was a player and a team that had let the past take them over, and that, unlike the Pacers, they were concerned more with the righteousness and genuineness of their cause than the result on the scoreboard at the end of the day?
Of course, the Pacers were unlike this in this particular game. It remains to be seen whether they will show up with the same forward-looking mentality to a Miami series which they have been trying to replay all year.
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