Ed Davis Declares for the Draft

Is he going?  Yes.  Is he ready?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Am I upset? A little (maybe a lot).  Do I understand why he's leaving?  Yeah, it makes perfect sense.  I would probably go too.


When players like Ed Davis leave early, it's not about the numbers they put up in college, how many minutes they played, or whether they're ready or not.  With the possibility of an NBA lockout next year, his leaving after his sophomore year makes perfect sense: why would a player with that kind of potential not leave early?  So the early departure is not what upsets me.  What upsets me most is that I feel like we never knew him.

The very essence of college basketball is temporary.  The longest these guys wear a team's uniform is for four years, and then they're gone; and those four years are both literally and figuratively the end of their adolescence.  These players come to college campuses at the end of their teens, and leave on the threshold of manhood.  When they leave college, their basketball game is a bear thrashing at its cage, biting at its chains, longing to be let loose on the world, but, when a player leaves early, that bear so often enters the NBA like a timid cub, not thrashing and roaring at the bars, but pawing and poking at the padlock, whining more than roaring, and sometimes in need of a nap.  Players like Ed Davis are hard to watch leave early because so little of what they did at Carolina gave them a true identity in the school's pantheon.

That's not to say that Ed Davis did not contribute to the program; he rebounded and blocked shots at a per minute rate that made his production resemble the rapid fire of a gatling gun, as he played significant minutes on Carolina's 2009 championship team.  What's strange is that Ed only began to receive a consistent place in the rotation when his fellow freshman big on that team, Ty Zeller, went down with a broken wrist.  I always saw these two as doppelgangers or foils of one another.  Ed's defense and rebounding and dunks garnered all the talk of athleticism, while Zeller's speed and grace and ability to glide as a 7 footer garnered all the coach's son talk.  These two, based on their skin color as well as the style of their games, formed a basketball yin and yang.  They had something to teach us.  The weak shot that Ed swatted away, Zeller reincarnated with a jump hook.  They completed each other, but, because of injuries and now Ed's early departure, they'll never finish the lesson.  We'll never see them side by side unteach all the refracted beauty with which the lens of race causes us to view the game of basketball.  If these two continued to play beside one another, I truly believe it would have gotten more and more difficult to tell them apart.  Their games would have blended, and we would have seen that athleticism effuses from and through the skin and flesh of our bodies.  It was going to be beautiful, but, alas, Ed Davis is leaving.

Now, the Carolina image of a pencil-thin Ed Davis falls in line with the images of Marvin Williams and Brandan Wright, and that's exactly what they are: images.  Their one season stays in Chapel Hill were fleeting, almost like dreams or hallucinations that we never quite grasped.  There's something ethereal about their time in light blue. Like a pencil refracted in water, their careers lack a continuity of form, and, therefore, substance, or they're like those instances when one quickly fires off rounds of syllables and words into the white flesh of the paper, as if the pencil were a gatling gun, and the results are sentences that explode in a beautiful fire and with each punctuation mark the point grows duller and duller until it's in need of sharpening.  One rushes to the mechanical pencil sharpener, holding onto the crank as tightly as the idea in one's head,  while reloading the ammunition.  Then one rushes back to their desk, trips over the waste basket, falls back into their seat, and begins to write--the sharp point snaps, the idea is gone, and we never know how Ed Davis would have finished his essay, story, career. . . .

and I find it hard to read without a conclusion (or at least the one I wanted).  Best of luck, Ed, I hope you find the ending you seek. It was fun while it lasted.