Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
Now on his ninth team, Jeff Green is trying again to achieve immortality.
Time, a relentless flat circle, is a construct. But what does this actually mean? It’s a measure of unit, a way for us to order and make sense of what appears to be the linear succession of events, what we think of, and refer to, with our insufficient language, as “existence”, but even this doesn’t quite do our childlike understanding of time justice. Time is relative, depending on what point you may approach it from. We all experience time differently. To my son, the near seven hours he spends in second grade each day feels like a much longer stretch of time than it does to me. I expect this is because his life is still surprising and novel, but a few thousand days old, whereas I’ve logged over 14,000, and because he’s spending his day confined in a room forced to learn new and strange concepts he doesn’t see any practical use for, and I look up from a Word document, shocked to discover I’ve spent three hours screwing around with a single paragraph analyzing Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof.
Though we’re much closer in age, I’d imagine the same dissonance could be applied to Denver Nuggets ancient and ageless Swiss Army wing, Jeffrey Lynn Green. Jeff has spent his near 37 years as a professional athlete, a tall, intelligent, good looking multi-millionaire whose talents have gotten him jobs with nine NBA teams, and flown him all over the world, as opposed to mine, the sum of which has earned me a few inches of digital space on this website to write about him. If you could quantify the individual speeds at which people perceive the span of their lives, it’s probable Jeff’s life and career, full of fresh locales, challenges and excitements, has dusted the leisurely pace mine floated by at. That if you were to ask him about how long his staggering 16 year career has felt before he embarks on this pivotal Western Conference Finals series against the Lakers, he’d tell you it feels like just yesterday, he was a Freshman at Georgetown.
Jeff Green emerged from that storied and seemingly bottomless hotbed of DMV talent in Prince George’s County in August of 1986. Green is 6’8, 235 pounds and built like a Greek myth. Perhaps as some kind of a curse, one single thing that offsets his eternal and ageless nature is Jeff Green has, and has always had “Old Face”. A sort of reverse Dorian Gray. He stayed close to home after winning the Maryland High School state title, playing at Patrick Ewing and John Thompson’s storied Jesuit University, where he played for Thompson’s son and with a tall asshole named Roy Hibbert. Green likely would’ve been a lottery pick had he entered the draft right away, but he stayed at Georgetown three years. Here’s a clip from his Junior season:
As in all things, Jeff Green serves as a reminder how incredible LeBron James is, because he’s within an inch and 15 pounds of him. He’s an athletic freak and can do all things on a basketball court well. On paper at least, you could see a world in which Jeff Green could’ve been one of the greatest players who ever lived, but he isn’t. There have been moments when he nearly reached his potential, like his 2014 season in Boston, when he averaged 17 points a game, and shot 34% from three, but the paradox of Jeff Green was posed by Danny Ainge that season: “Jeff will get a dribble handoff, turn the corner and drive all the way in for a thundering dunk. And people will say to me, ‘why doesn’t he do that every time?’”
There is something metaphysical, either a lack of drive, imagination, ambition, or a cocktail of the three missing from his game that prevented him from being the dominant force The Seattle Supersonics envisioned when they drafted him fifth in 2007, that for over a decade teams rolled the dice on, from Boston to Memphis to the Clippers to Orlando to Cleveland (Once again, Denver is Jeff’s 9th franchise), before accepting that he just kind of is who he is, and who he is has proven to be a remarkably useful professional basketball player for a remarkable number of years. In any profession, at a certain point, longevity is a skill, and the teams that continue to lineup to pay for his services are a testament to his competent sturdiness.
Some of us are born confident and self assured, on a career path by nursery school and never wavering, and some of us are like Jeff Green. We kind of stumble into our skills, our niche, and eventually find our way. That is to say, even though he was clearly born to play basketball, his body and skills were not commensurate with his natural position on a team, a position he’s at last found as a role playing, off the bench, additive wing (it must be acknowledged: alongside the league’s single greatest floor and ceiling raiser). Uncle Jeff is Brad Pitt: A character actor in a leading man’s body.
With advances in modern medicine and evolutions in how we treat and nourish our bodies, the relative death defying longevity displayed by 38 year olds LeBron James and Chris Paul, the extension of not just a basketball career, but stardom has the danger of becoming commonplace to a viewer. As a result, we’re all missing how incredible Jeff Green’s accomplishments are. He isn’t quite there yet, but within a season or two he will begin to approach top 50 in games played ever, and as he closes in on age 40, among the oldest players who ever played the game (He’s currently the sixth oldest player left in the playoffs, well behind the oldest, 42-year-old Udonis Haslem), which becomes even more incredible when you consider he played three years of college ball, and lost an entire year of his career to life threatening open heart surgery.
Jeff Green has never won a championship. He only made the Finals once, in 2018 alongside LeBron, but if he can get past his longtime peer (the Nuggets are currently second in Championship futures between the leading Celtics, and the Lakers). Uncle Jeff will finally receive the lifetime achievement Best Supporting Oscar he so richly deserves. He’s found an important role on an important team, he’s a respected veteran voice in their locker room and on their bench, and contributes a respectable 20ish minutes a game, scoring in the single digits, grabbing the odd board, contributing defensively, and occasionally, blessedly throwing down a momentum shifting, team bolstering dunk, that is only worth two points technically but means much more to the Nuggets. Here’s a clip from earlier in the season, of Jeff posterizing Giannis:
At the beginning of Woody Allen’s prototypical modern rom-com, Annie Hall, he uses an old borscht belt joke to illustrate the paradox of life: That it is filled with disappointment, misery, and heartbreak, and all over much too quickly. Though in the opening of this piece, I had mentioned from his perspective, Uncle Jeff’s life and career has gone by much faster than mine, I’d imagine something we can both agree on, that nearly everyone on Earth can agree on, is it all went by too fast. Someday soon, Jeff will play his last professional game, but for the next few weeks, you and I and everyone with basic cable can watch Jeff Green do the impossible, to rage against the dying of the light, to ask his body for a few more fleeting moments of grace. To run, to shoot, to dunk once more. To stave off the inevitable end waiting for us all, if only for a little a longer.
