THE NBA’S SECOND SEASON

The upper echelon of teams in the NBA are now poised to make that final push toward the playoffs to assert themselves or at least take their best stab at contention for the championship. There’s somewhere around 23 games remaining for the Los Angeles Lakers and amid criticisms that they’re aging as fast as Bemjamin Button grew younger, they appear to be competing afresh. The missing link that is Ron Artest showed up on Wednesday against the Portland Trailblazers in Portland, a place the Lakers have not had much success of late. At any rate, the hope of not only a second season but a third consecutive championship is some kind of carrot.

The All-Star break serves as a checkpoint for teams to evaluate their potential and retool. The break is also where players like Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan and the likes begin to see the illuminate end of the tunnel. And wouldn’t you look for that marker if you had all those miles on your legs? Until recently, I never realized the lengths one has to go to to remain a viable professional athlete what with the countless surgeries and rehabilitation. To say the least, it’s a career just to stay healthy but the motive for competition is the driver. Whether it’s the money that accompanies the longevity which spurs the athlete or not I can’t say assuredly. What I do know is that not every one will fair well in second season or in their career for that matter. I know guys who play and played in the NBA in relative obscurity. And there are greats who never amassed the success they sought which makes me wonder if there’s something more to the second half of the season than just the hope of contractual bonuses that promise more money the farther the team goes in the playoffs.

See, after the high school team I coach was eliminated from California’s sectional playoffs, I started reflecting on how we finished up and I realized that the guys performed more than admirably. However, I could feel the impure motives revealing themselves as I rehearsed what I could have done differently in the final 20 seconds of the last game. I wasn’t reflecting on the season from a panoramic perspective but rather was consumed by feelings of regret and the hindsight 20/20 vision. I got lost in how easily the team could have moved on to the quarter finals. And it wasn’t until parents, my athletic director, random spectators, etc. began to offer insights that I realized how cheap my motives can actually be. And that’s the rub. Try as you might to have pure motives, to say that what really matters is what you’re learning through any given process, the truth for me is that it took losing 10 winnable games this season to show me what the competition really entails. I hate to admit even now but losing is not in my control. There I said it. And whether it’s the second season, the playoffs or some other portion of the season, I now understand that fear is what lies under the obsession to win. I fear failure, fear ridicule and fear being a laughing stock. Consequently, I didn’t immediately value all of the character that my guys developed this year the way I should have. Now it’s starting to sink in; fear is some kind of stimulus but it makes a horrible god.