The second time the Raptors beat the Cavs at home was nearly unbearable. The back and forth of the second half, the way the two teams traded baskets like some grim show of generosity, was excruciating. Sue texted part way through the game,
“How are they looking?”
“A good barometer might be how I’m looking — I’m sweaty and I have a stomach ache.”
The Raptors won and I hardly slept that night. Work started early the next day, but there was enough residual adrenaline coursing through my system to get me through the entire morning.
It was awesome. Then it wasn’t.
Wednesday night, game five, was terrible. I didn’t make it to the bar until part way through the first quarter, I saw the Cavs go up 61-39 and went home early. A chicken move yes, but the damage was done. It was like being dumped and leaving before having the “let’s still be friends” conversation.
I hadn’t considered that the high I felt from those wins would be matched by the low of their next loss.
I came home and talked about it with a friend, a long time Jays and Canucks fan.
“It’s crazy what this does to you,” I said.
“I know,” he said, and I felt a lifetime of suffering in his words.
We talked for a while and I realized part of the reason I’m ill equipped to deal with the emotion of caring about sports is because of how I consume them.
I tuned out of basketball after Jordan’s Bulls won their last title in 1998. Five years ago I got back into it. We don’t have TV so I turned to reading as much as possible about the game. The way sports are analyzed has changed big time in the past 15 years. An ocean of data is available and this data is the template for a lot of sports narratives. Stories are decorated with shot charts, clips of plays and other graphics. It treats the game as an algorithm. And there is some value in that, those stats matter.
But it’s not everything and I blame these robotic narratives for the total despair I felt after Monday’s loss.
I’d been reading about the games as if it were all strategy. As if losses were because of poor planning by coaches or malfunctioning pieces on the playing surface. But when I actually sat down to watch the games — which didn’t happen until the playoffs — I watched them in the most primitive way possible. I’m guilty of what I’ve heard sportswriters call “ballwatching” that is, paying attention to what’s happening with the person dribbling and not much else.
Ball watching can be useful though, it reminded me of how much of sports is still chance. We can explain a lot through stats, but not everything. I didn’t play sports at an advanced level, but the emotions that stick with me are simple: sometimes if you tried hard, you’d beat the other team. Other times, you’d try hard but the other team shot really well, you’d lose. Basic stuff.
But sports journalists are watching every square foot of the court. Then they’re watching games several more times while consulting advanced stats to paint a picture scrubbed of emotion like an operating room scrubbed of germs.
The Raptors lost the series. The advanced stats said they would. But many people predicted a sweep, that didn’t happen because for a couple games the Raptors tried harder and the Cavs made less shots.
As the clock would down in game six, Cleveland began hitting a series of dagger threes. While this was happening one of the Toronto beat writers took to Twitter repeating a simple message:
“It’s a make or miss league, it’s a make or miss league, it’s a make or miss league”
It’s true, every ballwatcher knows it