There is a certain type of loneliness that comes with watching a basketball team try to defend someone who is seven feet tall when they themselves are not. It reminds me of the time my uncle tried to move a sofa by himself in 1998. He had the spirit, but physics is a very stubborn thing.
Currently, the Toronto Raptors are engaged in a similar struggle with the concept of height. It seems we are collectively realizing that being shorter than 6 foot 10 is a disadvantage in a sport where the basket is ten feet in the air. People are calling for a trade, as if centers are just sitting on a shelf at a Hudson's Bay closing sale.
The Barrett Effect and the Math of Winning
RJ Barrett has been playing quite well lately, which is nice for him and generally confusing for the rest of us. When he is on the floor, the team has an offensive rating of 120.6 and a net rating of plus 6.7. These are the kinds of numbers that make you think everything is fine, even when you know it probably is not.
The team wins about 70 percent of their games when RJ plays, which is a significant amount of winning. It is almost enough to make you forget that the opposition's center, a man who is usually described as having the physical presence of a wet paper towel, suddenly looks like Shaquille O'Neal. It happens every time.
Immanuel Quickley and the Guessing Game
Immanuel Quickley exists in a state of quantum basketball lately. He has played in exactly half of the last four games, but the way the games look, it is often hard to tell which ones those were. One moment he is there, the next he is a statistical ghost.
I saw a photo of the boys chatting it up pregame, and they looked very calm for a group of people about to be outrebounded by someone who rarely jumps. Perhaps they were discussing the weather. It has been very grey in Toronto, which matches the general mood of a fanbase watching a backup center from 2007 (in spirit) dominate the paint.
The Longing for Height
The conversation always returns to the 6 foot 10 threshold. It is a specific number that people have decided will fix our problems. We need someone tall, someone who can stand in the way of other tall people so they stop scoring. It sounds simple when you say it out loud, like deciding to finally go to the gym or eating a vegetable.
But trading takes two, and the other team usually wants to keep their tall people. So we wait, and we watch the offensive rating go up while the paint points leak out like a broken faucet in a Scarborough apartment. We are 16 and 7 with RJ, and yet, I feel like I am still waiting for the other shoe to drop. It will probably be a size 16 shoe.