The Saskatchewan Rattlers had their home-opener, of sorts, at SaskTel Centre last night against the Edmonton Stingers. On account of the post-2019 offseason and 16 months of global pandemic, this marked the first basketball game held for a general audience in Saskatoon in almost two full years.
But it wasn't really the Rattlers' home-opener. This was actually the seventh game of the Rattlers' season, and their fourth at home. Due to pandemic protocols, they'd played their schedule in front of strictly limited audiences to this point. Their actual "home-opener" on June 28 was contested in front of a few select healthcare workers and local media personnel. Just yesterday, the province of Saskatchewan lifted a whole host of Covid-19 limitations, and now the province is "back to normal," or at least crawling in the direction of normalcy. As such, the Rattlers can now have spectators at their games, and last night they welcomed fans back to the SaskTel Centre for the first time since August of 2019, when they clinched the inaugural CEBL championship.
The lack of an audience has not made for a lack of drama, at least not backstage. On the court, the 2021 Rattlers have been a flop. Going into last night’s game, they'd lost all six of their games thus far. With the exception of single-basket losses to the Niagara River Lions and Hamilton Honey Badgers, the scores have been lopsided against the Rattlers. They lost their first meeting with the Fraser Valley Bandits by 18 points, and their second by 20. Their first meeting with the 2020 champions from Edmonton resulted in a 41 point loss. While these finishes were more comic-tragic than they were dramatic, something had to be done with the directorial staff. Accordingly, coach Chad Jacobson stepped down from his post. Jacobson had only won a single contest since he took the Rattlers' head coaching position for 2020's Covid-necessitated "Summer Series" tournament. Into his place stepped Conor Dow, bringing G League experience into the mix. In Dow's first game, the Rattlers showed glimmers of improvement: they played the Stingers again, losing this time by just 31 points.
It was the Stingers that the Rattlers had to deal with yet again last night in front of a live crowd. Could the Rattlers draw the margin to within 30 points, or would it be more of the same?
Some things have stayed the same in the Snake Pit, bringing back traces of the 2019 Rattlers-game umwelt. The Venom Girls returned in full force, only now they have been rebranded as the "Venom Dance Team," a moniker that is altogether less diminutive and more gender-neutral, leaving the door open for non-female members in the future. The lineup of the Venom Dance Team didn't seem to have changed much from 2019, though the familiar faces were covered by face masks, at least before tip-off. Once the game began, the masks were off and the unfailing smiles were back in view. It's as if the original Venom Girls never stopped smiling. Another Rattler standby who hadn't lost his smile was Ssswish, the theriomorphic snake mascot. He'd picked up right where he'd left off, harassing fans and clapping for the Venom Dance Team as they executed their routines. Also back was DJ Charly Hustle, manning the wheels of steel and providing beats for both the dancers and the ballers.
But some things had changed. Absent was Gregger (or "Gregor," as your correspondent mislabelled him in the early blog posts), the hype-man who ran the skits and the promos that filled in the various play stoppages over the course of a Rattlers’ game. He has been replaced with a woman with a pixyish voice who read the majority of her hype-mongering lines from a script. She did a serviceable job, but Gregger's self-assured swagger, radio-ready voice, and constant dad-jeans will be sorely missed. And among the fans, there was no sign of the heavy-set man in the green-painted hockey-mask or his significant other. He was especially conspicuous by his absence on a night when wearing a mask in public would have actually been socially acceptable. (As it turns out, your correspondent was the only person in his section donning a mask, as his trusted local pharmacist has been slow on the draw in lining up a second shot.)
But perhaps the most irreconcilable change was that of Marlon Johnson, who stepped onto the court in an Edmonton Stingers' jersey.
Marlon Johnson is the Saskatchewan Rattlers personified, or at least he was. Though he hails from the Windy City, for the spring and summer of 2019, he embodied a prairie plow-wind. He lifted Saskatchewanese spirits with each skyward drive to the hoop. His slam dunks were inspiring, stirring in Rattlers' fans a theretofore unimagined enthusiasm for basketball. Johnson was the on-floor architect of the Saskatchewan Rattlers. On May 9, 2019, with the Rattlers trailing the River Lions in the latter half of the first-ever CEBL game, Johnson slammed home a rousing one-handed jam, sending the SaskTel Centre crowd into a frenzy. By doing so, Marlon Johnson singlehandedly turned the Rattlers into an unequivocal home team. Johnson would continue to galvanize the home crowd right through to the CEBL’s final-four tournament in August 2019. Here, Johnson led those Rattlers to the inaugural CEBL championship with a victory over the Hamilton Honey Badgers. In the aftermath, Johnson would confess to the Star-Phoenix, Saskatoon's local rag, that it was the first championship he had ever won. For some among the Saskatchewan Rattlers' faithful, that unexpected glory that Marlon Johnson brought to Saskatoon sounded a little bit like fate.
And this is why it is so jarring to see Marlon Johnson in an Edmonton Stingers' uniform.
The free-agent Johnson was plucked away from the Rattlers in the 2019 offseason, and wound up with the Stingers for 2021. Marlon Johnson contributed in no small measure to that Rattlers victory in the 2019 championship final. To have him on the other side of the ball—and for an established rival, no less—should be a profound psychic discombobulation for Rattlers' fans.
Before tip-off, there was a ceremonial unveiling of the Rattlers' 2019 championship banner. There had been, of course, no opportunity to perform such a ceremony in 2020's prolonged lock-down. What should have been a jubilant moment took place in somewhat muted fashion. The PA announcer called the Rattlers' players to center-court to receive their plaudits, but this turned out to be rather moot, since there are, to your correspondent’s knowledge, no returning members of the 2019 championship team on the 2021 squad. The only integral member of that championship team in attendance was Marlon Johnson, in his Stingers' yellow and blue.
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| A blurred image of the inaugural CEBL championship banner. |
And even once the banner had been unfurled, both the players and the crowd strained to find it in the rafters. The PA announcer had to direct people's gazes to its specific location in front of the division pennants garnered by the Saskatoon Blades (the city's hapless junior hockey team). The banner still wasn't easy to see, at least for your correspondent, as it had been positioned right above a bank of lights.
Once the cursory applause had settled, the game commenced. For most of the first quarter, Edmonton rained down uncontested threes. The Rattlers' three-point attempts, by contrast, just wouldn't sink. Finally, with around a minute to go, a three went down for the home side. Edmonton came out at the buzzer with a 24-20 lead.
In the second quarter, former Edmonton Stinger Travis Daniels began asserting himself in the paint for the Rattlers. Eventually, the Saskatchewan side pulled even, and the two teams traded the lead. Meanwhile, the local fans took up heckling the Edmonton side.
"You live in the worst place in the country!" screamed one bespectacled young drunk. "It’s true!"
While your correspondent largely agrees with the sentiment, he was off-put by the boorish tone and comportment, which served to remind him precisely why he did not relish leaving the house before the pandemic.
Marlon Johnson proved to be the focal point of the Saskatchewan fans' jeering, and he was really hearing it during his foul shots. He got a measure of revenge in the latter part of the quarter when he plowed his way to the Rattlers' basket and threw down a stylish backhand jam, making sure to hang off the rim. Here then were shades of 2019. The aggressive jam did not, however, immediately break the Rattlers' spirits. Saskatchewan managed to take a 42-40 lead into the locker room at halftime.
For halftime entertainment, the fans were treated to an exhibition in misdirection. A non-threateningly handsome man with a headset mic had a courtside rube put cellphones into numbered envelopes. He then had the fan roll dice to pick out particularly numbered envelopes, and the magician/misdirectionist proceeded to smash all but one of the envelopes with a mallet. In the end, of course, the rube's cellphone was unscathed. The magic show left the rube mildly impressed, but for a group of well-dressed, upper-middle-class twenty-somethings in the courtside seats, it set off an absolute paroxysm of glee, which was probably ironic or else the product of alcohol and/or narcotic consumption.
In the third quarter, Travis Daniels stayed strong, draining a key three and a long two. But the Stingers pulled back into the lead, thanks in no small part to the virtuosic ball distribution of their captain, Jordan Baker. Jordan Baker is an absolute horse of a man. Baker's selfless approach and omniscience in the offensive zone set up many an easy lay-in for his teammates, most notably the irrepressible point guard Xavier Moon. The Stingers had a double-digit lead by the end of the third, up 65-54.
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| Xavier Moon takes a foul shot while Marlon Johnson looks on |
Edmonton didn't look back. In the fourth quarter, their three-balls swished through almost automatically. Their fast-breaks absolutely ravished the Rattlers' defense. Why? Because Jordan Baker just wants it more. With a 16 point lead at the midway point in the fourth, Marlon Johnson added insult to injury by completing an alley-oop dunk. Just as Johnson's slam dunks could inspire us when he was a member of the home side, they could also deflate us from the opposite side. Marlon Johnson giveth, and Marlon Johnson taketh away. The Stingers came up with a quick steal on the next possession, and Johnson attempted to follow up the flash with more flash. Leading a lazy three-on-zero drive to the basket, and with the listless Rattlers' defenders straggling to get back, one of Johnson's teammates underhanded the ball off the backboard in hopes that Marlon could follow through with a massive dunk. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately for the Rattlers' faithful—Johnson mishandled the ball and couldn't make the sensationalistic slam happen. It seemed like just comeuppance for hotdogging against his former team.
But clearly, the Stingers already had the game in hand, and the Rattlers understood as much themselves. Their frustration was palpable. On the end of yet another Stingers' fast-break, the Rattlers' D'Andre Bernard took out Jordan Baker with an outright body-check. The Stingers' players converged on the scene, huddling around in high dudgeon, but Baker seemed totally unfazed by the attack on his person. After the technical foul was assessed, Baker calmly netted his foul shots. Jordan Baker is an absolute Clydesdale.
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| Jordan Baker nets a foul shot with equine calmness. |
With the first dead ball after the four-minute mark of the fourth, the game was paused so as to set in motion the Elam ending. The Elam score was 86, and Saskatchewan had a lot farther to go to get there than Edmonton. The Rattlers' play improved in Elam time, and they climbed within fifteen points of their prairie rivals. But the comeback was not to be. Quite fittingly, Jordan Baker put down the final two-pointer to carry the Stingers to not just 86 but 87. The final score was 87-70 for Edmonton.
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| Marlon, circa 2019 |
With the loss, the Rattlers fall to 0 and 7. Perhaps it was a certain strain of nostalgia that brought the fans back to SaskTel Centre on this evening to be reminded of the 2019 champions, but Coach Dow and the Rattlers are going to need more than good memories to keep people in the seats. Specifically, they're going to need some wins, or at least some competitive losses.
Nonetheless, your correspondent felt some measure of nostalgia in seeing the 2019 championship banner enshrined above the lights at the SaskTel Centre. Hopefully, he wasn’t the only one. With that nostalgia came some closure, too. Two years later, we saw the long-awaited finale of a very happy chapter in a more innocent time. Now let’s hope that nobody who attended gets Covid.
