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Often, in discussing the merits of a basketball player I feel to be unfairly scrutinized, I will find myself saying with an air of resignation lightly breezing through my words, “Yeah, but he plays his ass off.” I like that phrase; it has an orbicular absurdity to it that tickles me.

Pleasure in the language aside, I watch a lot of basketball and, like everyone else I’m sure, come to various conclusions about the respective levels of effort of the athletes I watch. But why in the age of SportVU player tracking and comprehensive plus/minus statistics do I care if a player plays hard? And, perhaps even more disturbingly, why do I feel like the phrase, “He plays his ass off,” should be some sort of magical argument-ender?

For one thing, I get frustrated when people make statements of any kind whatsoever pertaining to personalities of celebrities, basketball players certainly included. It is my opinion that when you opine about what a celebrity is “like in real life,” you sound like an idiot and you are really just talking about yourself. I realize I’m not turning over any new soil here, but whatever; it’s a thing that frustrates me.

I was arguing with a friend the other day about whether the Celtics should, hypothetically, be willing to surrender all kinds of potentially valuable assets in order to acquire DeMarcus Cousins (we will hereafter refer to him by his proper nickname: Boogie) from the Sacramento Kings. My friend said—and I’m paraphrasing a little here, but not that much—that we (note: I have been referring to the Celtics as “we” for as long as I can remember, so leave me alone) shouldn’t give up too much for Boogie because even though he’s very talented, we don’t need any “divas” on our team. The implication is that there’s something inherently selfish, self-serving, self-aggrandizing, etc. about Boogie.

Besides the fact that I can’t imagine using the word “diva” to describe anyone, even “a woman of outstanding talent in the world of opera,” I think I see the issue fundamentally differently. Basically, I think that nobody I know personally, myself and my friend included, knows the first thing about what Boogie is actually like. On the basketball court, sure, he’s whiny, and he flies off the handle, and he gets out of control sometimes, and in moments of frustration sometimes he kind of mindlessly seems to zone out for a minute. I get what my friend is saying. If you listen to the media narrative around Boogie (which, let’s just say here and now that I’m not blaming Boogie for anything given the context of that total shitshow of an organization he’s playing for in Sacramento), you could get the idea that Boogie is a player who is supremely talented, but just not worth the headache.

On the other hand, you could consider these absolute facts:

Boogie is one of the five most talented players in the league.

Boogie is 25 years old.

Boogie is on a contract that has him incredibly underpaid for the next two seasons after this one.

Boogie is capable of a balletic kind of footwork on both ends of the floor I’m not sure I have ever seen in a player of his size and strength. He’s like Charles Barkley, but half a foot taller.

Boogie has improved his game at an alarming rate so far in his relatively young career, evolving into a first-class defender and a dangerous outside shooter while continuing to be a great all-around offensive player and a freaking lunatic rebounder on both ends.

You could also consider this thing that is not a fact:

I feel like he gives a shit.

I mean, I don’t know. I see all the same stuff you see. He gives up on plays. He gets visibly frustrated and has terrible body language. I get it. But I also watched him singlehandedly eviscerate a really good Toronto Raptors team on Sunday night, and I came away feeling like the dude is an unbelievable force for good where basketball is concerned. Boogie makes mistakes, but he gives a shit. You can feel the effort jumping off your television screen. His physicality explodes through the medium. You can feel bodies bouncing off of him. You can feel the way he warps the game itself. You can feel—and this is probably the most important part—the way his incredible skill makes the game much easier for his teammates, the way it allows his teammates (who, sadly, are not very good) the space to be themselves.

This is ostensibly an essay about Boogie, but it’s also about checking the limits of what you can know. You have to try not to be poisoned by words. The narratives are confusing and unfounded. We all have these feelings, and then we try to explain them and they just come out wrong. That wrongness starts to poison us. It turns our thoughts into other thoughts. They are less pure, and we can’t quite grasp them, and the distortion just keeps getting worse. Still, there is a basketball game happening, and you can watch it. You can try to just focus on the action and see how you feel. Watch the Kings tonight against the Hawks in Atlanta. Turn off the sound on the TV, and listen to some Ryuichi Sakamoto or something. You won’t be able to take your eyes off Boogie. He plays his ass off, and it’s awesome.

These are our Fall 2015 contest winners! Pre-sale is available NOW on our website for their poems. Congratulations to Wes Solether, W. Vanorden Wheeler, and Jeff Alessandrelli.

21. Sacramento Kings

Acquisitions: Rajon Rondo, Marco Belinelli, Caron Butler, Willie Cauley-Stein, Kosta Koufos

Losses: Carl Landry, Nik Stauskas

Had Boogie Cousins ever had been on a good team, I think he would be, like Westbrook and LeBron, a weather system through which basketball evaporates, condenses into the kind of existential awe and panic we usually try to contend with through poetry, and rains with clarity that offers some new dimension to the way we live our lives.

Boogie is a bulldozer in dancing flats, a friendly bear who moonlights as a tropical storm, a cannonball with a complicated interior life. On the court he glows and howls like a candy jawbreaker you want to crack open and stare at all the layers of at once.

His effort levels are a perfect asymptote graph, approaching zero and infinity simultaneously

But Boogie has yet to play in the kind of game that lets us revel in the light of his radiant contradictions. Instead, his teams have floundered in the semi-dark of the shallow end. For the past five years, the Kings have surrounded Cousins with one head-scratching roster after another. This year’s squad is an industrial itch. Just like there are no boring cartoon characters, the Kings have filled out a roster with some of the strangest personalities in the league.

Rudy Gay is an advanced statistics punchline who once blamed his poor shooting on contact lenses. Caron Butler just published a book called Tuff Juice. Ben McLemore tried to do a weird dunk over a throne Shaq was sitting in. Willie Cauley-Stein is my early favorite for Peach Basket Rookie of the Year, partially because he plays defense like a giant benevolent spider, too kind to do anything but stay with an incredible and perfect ease in front of his man, partially because he has already changed his name to Trill Cauley-Stein. Marco Belinelli is a cold-blooded mercenary from behind the arc, and the heir apparent to Sam Cassell’s marbles dance. David Stockton and Seth Curry are like knock-off clones of their famous family members (John and Steph, respectively). Kosta Koufos is somehow only 26.

And then there’s Rondo, the black hole of enigmas. Questions about him get sucked into his gravitational pull and disappear, never to be answered, the mystery of their disappearance never to be solved. Here’s what I know for sure:

There’s a version of Rondo where his status as ornery genius is buoyed by the ornery genius of his play. This version of Rondo is known at Peach Basket Headquarters as Celtics Rondo.

I love Celtics Rondo.

I miss him.  

Watching him last year in Dallas only compounded that ache. It was like watching a train just slightly too big for its track. I held my breath at every turn and even when things went well, deep down I knew it was mainly luck. He couldn’t muster the spark on his drives that opened up weird lanes for his postmodern passes. And his defense was frail. In Boston, Rondo tormented the opposing point guard into a different time zone. In Dallas he couldn’t get around a pick.

If Sacramento is finally going to be the team that unleashes Hurricane Boogie on the masses, Rondo has to be the Kings’ second-best player. Can Rondo return to form and be Celtics Rondo again? Of course. But there are only so many times you can ask yourself a question before the asking becomes the answer. I’ve been asking after Celtics Rondo for a good long while now. I either don’t know what to make of that, or I do, but won’t. I can’t give up on Rondo for the same reasons we feel an emotional attachment to strangers playing a child’s game in the first place, the same reasons we yell their names at TV screens in anguish and exaltation, the same reasons we watch sports at all. I don’t need to say them, even if I could.