Athletes these days share an understanding. Beneath the team rivalries,
interpersonal scuffles, and slow-burning skirmishes for primacy sits a
quiet acknowledgement of something like mutual interest—which, when
revealed, can appear stronger and even more admirable than the
competitive urge that makes sports possible. Devoted fans of the N.B.A.,
which began its new season last night, tend to know by heart which
players have been elected by their peers to serve as leaders of the
National Basketball Players Association, and these representatives are
often afforded an extra measure of respect. (The Houston Rockets’ new
point guard, Chris Paul, has served as the president of the players’ union since 2013; LeBron James, Stephen Curry, and Carmelo Anthony are also part of the union’s executive committee.) In
this era of mind-bogglingly lucrative broadcast deals and near-constant
league struggles between labor and management, maneuvering on behalf of
other players is esteemed almost as highly as achieving victory over
them. Sometimes, an old-schooler will lodge the accusation that a cluster
of forces—chief among them the A.A.U. youth-hoops circuit, which has all
but supplanted the energy of formal high-school competition—has made
today’s players too “buddy-buddy” with the guys on the other teams. This
notion is met by the players with bored contempt. So what?

That quiet brotherhood was on display during last night’s opening game,
between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Boston Celtics. The central
intrigue was supposed to be the clash between Kyrie Irving, still
looking strange in Celtic green, and the Cavs, his former team. Over the
summer, out of nowhere, Irving requested a trade, hoping, it seemed, to escape James’s super-cyborg shadow and start building a legacy of his
own. LeBron & Company must have taken the departure personally; clearly
the league schedulers hoped as much—and I did, too, I’ll admit. We all
wanted the opening-night game to take on a bit of an edge. There were a
few quick pregame boos for Irving—the game was in Cleveland—but that
much anticipated drama almost instantly faded when, just a few minutes
in, the forward Gordon Hayward, another recent star acquisition for the
Celts, executed a sly back-door cut, flew upward in pursuit of a lob
thrown by Irving, and, after a bump against James in the air, came down
with his left foot facing gruesomely off to the side. The crowd hushed,
and, when the other players on the floor saw the snapped ankle, they
fell into what looked like an impromptu prayer meeting. (A few Celtics
confirmed after the game that Semi Ojeleye, a rookie out of Southern
Methodist, led his teammates in prayer.) James sat on the scorer’s
table, looking dazed. In the huddle near the Celtics’ bench, Irving
appeared to openly weep. The image of the night was probably a photo of
the Cavalier guard and longtime friend of James, Dwyane Wade, down on one knee,
pinching his brow with his eyes screwed shut. In the background, Hayward
writhes while the doctors look on.

Hayward was eventually carted off to the locker room, but his peers on
both sides looked almost too shaken to play out the rest of the half.
Their play was halting, the electricity gone. They were all thinking
about the impossible angle of their fellow player’s leg. As they
wandered through their paces, an automatic outpouring of sympathy came
from the rest of the league on Twitter. “Hate to see @gordonhayward go
down like that. I know he will be back stronger and wish him the best
recovery possible,” the Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert, Hayward’s former
teammate, commented. (During the off-season, Gobert had made a point of
signalling his annoyance at Hayward for leaving Utah; that old grievance
seemed washed away.) “Man, nothing but prayers to Gordon Hayward!” the
Raptors guard DeMar DeRozan wrote. “Lord, Carry Him Now,” Dwight Howard pleaded, attaching a picture of Hayward in better times, as if his
colleague had given up the ghost for good.

Things picked up after halftime. The Celtics, especially, shook off
their malaise—I wished I could’ve heard the speech that their coach,
Brad Stevens, surely delivered—and closed the gap that the Cavaliers had
opened early on. The rally felt like a tribute. The newly svelte guard
Marcus Smart, a favorite of Celtics fans, was characteristically tough
on both sides of the floor, with hawking defense on one end and, on the
other, a bevy of insistent drives to the hoop. (If only he could shoot.)
Kyrie, colors notwithstanding, never changes; he stopped my breath with
a few dribble moves and lopsided fade-away jumpers, and looked intent on
matching James play for play. The most heartening part of his
performance, though, was his eagerness to serve his new teammates: the
alley-oop to Hayward had gone grisly, but that didn’t stop him, early in
the third quarter, from tossing a nice fast-break lob to the rookie
Jason Tatum, to collect one of his ten assists. (Earlier, Tatum had his
shot dismissively blocked by James: nice welcome to the league.) Even
more encouraging was the play of the second-year forward Jaylen Brown,
who looked terrifying all night in transition, and, picking up some of
Hayward’s slack, notched twenty-five points. At one point early on, he
swooped toward the bucket for a fierce dunk while James looked on,
unwilling to meet him at the rim and risk the proverbial poster. By the
end of the fourth, the Celtics found themselves in a pitched battle,
switching leads with the Cavs every few possessions.

Unfortunately for them, LeBron James was on the other side. He’s
thirty-two now, practically an elder by basketball standards, but,
still—if his twenty-nine points, sixteen rebounds, and nine assists can
be seen as representative—all but unstoppable. He keeps adding new
quirks: more than once, and, crucially, in the game’s waning seconds, he
showed off a pirouetting spin move that ended in the easiest possible
two points, up and in. He was helped along by his new teammate Derrick
Rose, who had an easy time, all night, of getting to the rim, making a
flurry of nice layups. (As if in response to some universal imperative,
Rose looks a lot better after leaving the Knicks.) The game came down to
the last play: a last-second three-pointer by Irving that would have
triggered overtime in the very first game of the season. He missed, and
then the nicest thing happened: he and James—who, on that final play,
had been guarding him—shared a little hug, James’s arm slung over his
old point guard’s head.

LeBron James has worked for years to claim—for himself, sure, but also,
by extension, for his fellow-athletes—the kind of freedom that Irving
exercised in leaving Cleveland and heading to the East Coast. James’s
recent interview with GQ’s Mark Anthony Green is instructive on this
point. He talks about race and society—as well as the
multimillion-dollar business that has sprouted up around his
indomitable person—with a well-earned ease of a kind that would have
seemed impossible in 2010, when he left the Cavs for the Miami Heat and
incurred the rage of fans across the country. After an off-season like
the one that just ended—during which Paul, Anthony, Irving, Hayward,
Paul George, and others switched teams, in search of more plentiful
pastures—James must feel vindicated, even if the new conditions cost him
a sidekick.

In contrast with the thin, ersatz “unity” that has sprung up in the N.F.L. in an effort to dilute the meaning of
Colin Kaepernick’s protest, N.B.A. players have used their new
prominence to forge something more lasting: solidarity. This, I think,
even more than the usual empathy, explains everybody’s loving treatment
of Hayward after his fall. They know how hard their power was to gain,
and how fleeting—how fragile—it really is.