“and so Doc leapt, / he left his feet,” – Ross Gay, ‘Be Holding’
I can’t help myself,
—I can’t help myself, thinking about NBA history after every finals. It is weird and premature and kinda stupid to be like “John Havlicek’s out of the Top 20 All-Time because Giannis just had a 50-point Game 7!” Or “Jokic is OFFICIALLY a better center than Patrick Ewing and David Robinson after this chip!” But it is a temptation I cannot help but give into.
It’s not simply about RANGZ, although rings is significant. The season is played for a championship. Only one team wins, though, and if we draw a binary good/bad judgment on a season ending in “29 teams = bad,” we’re missing the point of watching basketball. We watch basketball because it’s cool. It’s the same reason we read books, because they’re cool. Books? Basketball? Both cool.
So one thing I think about is: who’s gonna be remembered as the cool teams? Who’s gonna be the Larry Johnson/Alonzo Mourning/Muggsy Bogues Hornets, the C-Webb/Vlade/Peja Kings, the Steve Smith/Dikembe/Mookie Blaylock Hawks? Some teams have to fill that role every year.
Because, my comrades in Christ: us Elder Millennials talking about 90s teams is our dads talking about the Dr. J Nets or the Clyde Frazier/Earl Monroe duels back when Black Jesus was in Baltimore. Dudes, we’re old.
The good news is, history doesn’t stop happening, and now we get to witness cool things. Cool things like the Jimmy/Bam Heat.
This is part of why I chafe at “with Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison gone, who are the great American writers?” question that I’ve seen going around Twitter recently. The literary landscape is not “three or four writers we can attach to a movement” or “the same two poets who keep getting awarded prizes from committees where their girlfriend is chairperson” or “these guys named Jon.”
Small presses matter, mid-selling novels matter, collections of short stories matter, there’s a whole tapestry to literature that informs itself. I was especially struck by this reading I Keep My Exoskeletons To Myself and seeing Marisa Crane epigraph their sections with, like, Chen Chen. I don’t know how history will remember either of those writers (favorably, if there’s any justice and sense in the world), but it’s cool that those two contemporary works are automatically in conversation with each other now.
Did the 1920s have the equivalent of, like, Dean Young? Is there a 17th century James Tate lost to history? Forget “the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” how many storytellers in oral traditions never got the Homer treatment because they were bulldozed by colonialism?
Anyway.
Some NBA teams I think are cool from my adult life:
Champions like the Giannis-Jrue-Middleton-Lopez Bucks and the Jokic-Murray Nuggets would be cool “critically acclaimed” teams, except they actually won.
Every Clippers team since Blake Griffin’s rookie year has started out cool and ended in tragedy.
The DeMar DeRozan/Kyle Lowry Raptors were cool. So were the Kawhi Raptors but again, champions.
The Bulls are basically anti-cool—aside from the Jordan Dynasty, logo/uniforms, mascot, starting lineup introductions, and being from Chicago—but they’ve had flashes. Rose/Noah/Deng/Taj/Thibs was Certainly An Era, and the DeRozan/LaVine teams were cool for the like ten games Lonzo Ball was healthy.
The Lonzo Ball-Brandon Ingram-Zion Williamson Pelicans were cool for the like five games they were healthy together.
The Light The Beam Kings need another year or two in order to become cool, sort of like the Ja Morant/JJJ/Bane Grizzlies needed this past year not to have happened in order to remain cool.
The Marcus Smart-Jayson Tatum-Jaylen Brown Celtics were a rare cool Boston team until this past playoffs. Maybe in 20 years we’ll have nostalgia-tinted glasses on when thinking about them.
The Jalen Brunson/Julius Randle/Immanuel Quickley Knicks are cool. The last cool Knicks team was the Sprewell/Houston/LJ Knicks. I expect the next cool Knicks team when I am 70.
Some writers I think are cool who, even though I hope the best for them, I do not necessarily foresee Cormac McCarthy/Toni Morrison-level stardom in their futures, even though they are extremely talented and deserving of a life filled with all the happiness and comfort and book sales they could imagine:
Dude, just like, read the “Friday Links” column here every week.
You’ll notice the epigraph of this blog is from Ross Gay, talking about Julius Erving. My on-the-young-side-of-Boomer uncle would swear Dr. J is the best basketball player he ever saw. Not-much-older-heads would say Clyde Frazier is the best point guard they’ve ever seen. 50 years after their heydays, I don’t personally rank either of them top five all-time at their position. Poetry—especially poetry as good as the poetry Ross Gay writes—is just one way to preserve these legends.
Or maybe it’s nothing bigger than Remembering Some Guys. Remembering Some Guys is good.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris