Open letter to players who go unselected in June’s NBA Draft

You’re going to read a lot of stuff in this spot about the players who will be drafted. You know, that’s kind of what this site is about – you came here for upside and by god you’re going to hear about upside. Is that too much for you?!?!? CAN YOU NOT HANDLE THIS MUCH UPSIDE DISCUSSION? GET OUT. JUST GET OUT.

Anyhow. I’m going to start my career at Upside & Motor by…talking about players who won’t be drafted.

Man. Can you even imagine what it’s like to be so close to good enough to making the NBA that you fall just outside the bubble of being drafted? Or of making it up through the D-League? Can you imagine if, in a world where 500 or so people in the entire world (population: way more than that) can play ball in the NBA,  you were maybe the 600th most talented? And you’d spent your life hoping for anything, just anything, to propel you 120 spots higher?

I don’t know if it’s more heartbreaking than never being anywhere close, but it feels like a special kind of heartbreaking.

Imagine you wrote great poems but not quite great enough poems. Imagine your watercolors almost had poetry enough themselves. Everybody talks about life having purpose and if you were that good at anything it’d be clear what your purpose was. But the gods weren’t kind enough to give you just enough more to achieve it. One more inch, one more burst of quickness, and your life would have the denouement it seemed your body had always planned for it. If you were a solipsist you might end up feeling the universe was literally created to mock you.

You know what though, we’ve all been there. Most of the people I know who consume sports in the way we consume sports – blog, podcast, stats breakdown instead of reading the recaps in the newspaper – are between the ages of let’s say 17 and 35 and they are children of the new economy. The new economy’s most prominent feature is a weird mix of independent boot-strapping and hyper-accreditation where you either climb over the fence by doing the indie thing big or storm the citadel with the right degrees and certificates.

In that world, so many of us are squinting ahead through the dimly lit cavern wondering if we’ll get that shot at being the person we felt like we’d been pointed towards. And many of us have no choice to play it out on the bubble, wondering which ones rise and which ones pop. Many of us, to put it simply, don’t know what will become of us.

So, to everyone I wish a greater peace. I hope the D-League players love that they’re playing their favorite game for their living more than they hate that it’s not at the level they imagined for themselves. I hope the guys playing in China and Russia and Israel enjoy the adventure.  And nobody feels trapped. And everybody feels excited.

You’re good people, people who won’t quite be drafted. I love you. And so do I love the rest of you who are struggling upwards through uncertain steps to a dream you haven’t dreamt yet.