An Ode to Kyle Lowry

Ugly things are beautiful

I first started following pro basketball in 2013 at the behest of a few college friends, all of whom were and are lifelong fans. When I started watching, I picked a team to root for more or less at random—the Toronto Raptors, because my family is from Toronto and Tampa didn’t have a team.

The star player on the Raptors at the time was DeMar Derozan, but the second option was Kyle Lowry, stout six-foot point guard from Philadelphia whom the team had acquired for pennies a year earlier. Lowry was a gifted player but an inconsistent one, and he had never while playing in the NBA put up the numbers of a James Harden or even a Chris Paul. There was something wily about him, though, a combination of craftiness and brute strength that caught my eye at once. He threw bizarre cross-court passes that always seemed to work. He hounded the referees across the court whenever he got called for a foul, and often they seemed to listen. He stopped on a dime in front of seven-foot centers, letting all two hundred and fifty pounds of the other player slam into him at full force so that the center got called for an offensive foul. He jumped into from the top of the arc and took a crazy three-point shot, heaving his entire body into the air behind the ball, and often he missed, but every now and then the shot went in.

Lowry plays a brand of basketball that is at once cantankerous and subtle; his impact shows up in a thousand little ways that statistics don’t capture, and sometimes in ways that cameras can’t capture either. He has streaks of brilliance and streaks of absolute incompetence. Once he single-handedly brought the Raptors back from a thirty-point deficit over the span of what seemed like five minutes; once he tried to crawl underneath a defender’s legs, which you aren’t allowed to do in basketball.

I guess the right word for this style of play is “ugly”—it’s gritty, it’s inelegant, and sometimes it doesn’t work, and sometimes it works in ways that are hard to articulate. A lot of this has to do with Lowry’s unique stature—he’s six feet on a good day, he’s stockier than most NBA players, and he has a really big butt. There is a video on YouTube of him getting blocked during a celebrity charity game by Kevin Hart, who is like 5’3”.

As you might expect with such a player, Lowry has over the course of his time with the Raptors been the subject of much derision and ridicule. When his game-winning shot got blocked by Paul Pierce in 2014, during the first playoff series I ever watched, fans called him fat online for years afterward. In the first game of the 2019 playoffs, a game the Raptors lost, he did not score any points; later on in those playoffs, when he missed a game-winning shot in the 2019 finals, some guy tweeted of Raptors fans, “they thought Lil Terio was gonna take ‘em to the promised land.” None of this ever bothered me. Even when he was at his worst, I knew that there was something else there, a goofy yet baleful presence that would someday earn redemption.

The other side of the ugliness I’m trying to describe has to do with his pugnacious on-court persona, equal parts ferocious and jocose. “Composure” is not an attribute one would associate with Lowry. He is always either frustrated and feckless or dominant and demonic; either he’s starving to death or he’s playing with the prey he has in his claws. This attitude is not the kind of attitude that basketball commentators are apt to praise—think of Kobe Bryant’s “Mamba Mentality” or Michael Jordan’s iron will—but it is very human, and I think it is very beautiful.

It was this ursine attitude that over the past seven years has brought Lowry out from behind Derozan’s shadow and earned him recognition as the greatest player ever to wear a Raptors jersey. Derozan might have scored more points, but Lowry did more of almost everything else, from passing to rebounding to stealing to a million other things they don’t have stats for. He perennially led the NBA in charges drawn (that thing where you let a seven-foot guy barrel into you) and almost led the league in minutes played per game as well. He is indefatigable, indestructible, unpredictable.

After the Raptors traded Derozan for Kawhi Leonard in 2018, it was Leonard who got all the credit for helping the Raptors win the championship the following year, but if you watch the tape you can see Lowry shining in all the spare moments. I think in particular of the final game of the playoffs, the game that won it all for the Raptors, when Lowry came out scoring three-pointer after seamless three-pointer, lighting the Warriors defense on fire. The following year, after Leonard left, Lowry’s heroics were even harder to ignore: he threw an unbelievable cross-court pass over a seven-foot-six defender in the final seconds of a must-win game, and a week later he played an astonishing 53 minutes in another must-win game, scoring on Kemba Walker in isolation to give the Raptors the victory.

The image of Lowry that will stick with me the most, though, is the image of him trying to inbound over Boban Marjanovic in the 2019 series against Philadelphia.

It was a meaningless play, a fractional gimme before halftime, but it seemed to sum up everything about what Lowry is and what his presence on the Raptors meant. Here was a guy who was severely outmatched from a physical perspective, almost to an unfair extent, and yet you still believed he could get it done. It seemed in moments like those that Lowry’s lack of size, his inelegance, the erratic nature of his play, were the greatest advantages a team could have. It’s facile enough to say he was David facing Goliath, but there’s a special truth to it too: the slingshot is a very ugly weapon.

After more than eight years, Kyle Lowry is about to leave the Toronto Raptors next season. He is nearing the end of his career and the Miami Heat are offering him a lucrative deal that the Raptors do not see fit to match. There is a very sad logic to all of this, but in a sense it also doesn’t feel like it’s happening. Miami is a slick city, a mirage city, a top-heavy work of art. Even if he plays there, that’s not what Lowry is.

No, Lowry is Toronto, the city that Bob Fulford called “San Francisco upside down” and Northop Frye called “a great place to mind your own business.” His aura is entwined with that of the city of Toronto, the rough-and-tumble town ascending into metropolitan air, the strange concrete core fattened by annex after suburban annex, the sprawling residential expanse strung through with railroads and ravines.

There is an ugliness about both of them, one that it is nobler to love than deny.

I will miss watching him play basketball for the Raptors very much.