“I love basketball” – Metta World Peace, at the free throw line
Basketball is very good. NBA basketball, WBNA basketball, FIBA basketball, 3×3 basketball. I still only have time for the NBA, and I recently downgraded my TV plans, but I’m enjoying catching Unrivaled highlights on YouTube. There is so much aesthetic beauty to be found in this game, which is really how I want to think about it.
LOL CHRIS YOU CAN’T GET WHAT YOU WANT WE GOTTA TALK ABOUT THE TROLLS
Despite “the basketball being really good right now”—which is a thing I’ve been saying around the house and was coincidentally a Patrick Redford headline at Defector in January—people like to complain. Explaining what’s going on would be a wholte column, so I’ll start by giving the floor to Kofie Yeboah (emphatically not a troll). Kofie calls what NBA national media is going through a “negativity epidemic.” Using the language of disease seems fitting. It’s been a long slide, and now it feels terminal—except apparently nothing can kill Inside The NBA, even when they eulogize themselves at the All-Star Game. But we’re not talking about the All-Star Game, which seems like it was a Kevin Hart special more than a basketball game, if you ask Tom Ziller (“it’s not the basketball that’s broken”) or (“Adam Silver’s aching ambition is plain, he wants to create a sport that its viewers don’t have to think about”). Anyway, here’s Kofie:
Unfortunately, the NBA is a league constantly getting concern-trolled over how “the game is just a glorified three-point shootout now” or dealing with old players always yelling about “back in my day.” Everyone got so mad when David Zazlov was gonna kill Inside The NBA, and I’d still hate to see that kind of show go away, but godDAMN, the Inside dudes need get themselves to a nunnery already. I’m convinced no one except Kenny has watched a minute of NBA basketball since 2010, and none of them have bothered to learn the new rules about how to defend the post. If I hear Shaq speak one more word ever again for the rest of my life, it will be too soon. That said, Inside is way better than anything on ESPN, which might as well not exist in my mind. Let’s go to Thinking Basketball for a depressing montage of oldhead hoopers hating the passage of time and innovations in sports.
I’m pissed at those guys and everyone else in the above video for getting on TV and shitting all over the game they claim to love. It comes off as insecure, weak shit. And honestly? I think they’re carrying water for white supremacists. There’s no difference in my mind between right wing assholes and credulous centrists being all “wokeism has gone too far” and “you know, NBA ratings are down because game is goofy now.” The NBA is a Black league, basketball is a Black sport, in ways that football and baseball are not. I haven’t followed the NFL for 10 solid years, but they don’t get this level of “back in my day”ism and “just asking questions, but sportsly.” Ick. I don’t want to spend this whole column ranting and conspiratorial. Just don’t talk to me about ratings ever again. Ratings are down literally everywhere because fewer people watch TV and there’s no monoculture anymore.
Another Thinking Basketball Vid To Get Us Back To Aesthetics
You don’t need to watch the video to know this:
PLAYERS ARE OUT HERE INVENTING NEW KINDS OF SHOTS BECAUSE DEFENSES GOT TOO GOOD.
That’s the good stuff.
You know, if you watch NBA defenses this season, you’ll notice that speed and perimeter blitzing are high priorities. After years of offenses bending schemes to get shots in the lane, corner threes, or just-sprung-free-off-a-screen threes, defenses are starting to get really good at forcing offensive players into spots they don’t want to be.
And now players are inventing new types of jump shots, like one-legged floaters from the top of the key, or James Harden perfecting the stepback three.
If I can drop one more Thinking Basketball video here, the whole “defenses are forcing offenses where they don’t want to go” idea is an interesting lead-in to how the Memphis Grizzlies are running offense. Specifically, they don’t run a lot of pick-and-roll. Draymond Green, who is still one of the smartest defenders to ever live, when he’s not ensuring that the worst instincts of Inside The NBA will be passed down to a new generation, called Memphis’s scheme “weird offense, man.” That’s what you want to be making your opponents say.
Hey, speaking of smart people who love the game:
Hubie Brown Has Retired
If you love basketball, you know what a loss this is. When I first heard Hubie was stepping away from broadcasting, I told Mal, “I think he’s been part of every single NBA season?” Turns out that wasn’t true—he went undrafted in 1955 (the year my dad was born), joined the Army, then played for the Rochester Colonels in 1958-59. His last coaching job was with the Pau Gasol/White Chocolate Williams Grizzlies in 2004. Apparently, he left coaching because he realized he was becoming an asshole—like to refs and players—and he transitioned to the broadcast booth, where his love for the game and teaching it, to you, the viewer, was infectious.
Sportswriters love doing Hubie impressions, and if I’m a sportswriter right now? I’m thinking I got two options. One, I could spend 15 minutes trying to write a Hubie impression. Two, I could pass to the post and hard cut to the basket, flaring to the corner after getting a screen from the guy in the dunker’s spot. Oh look, Ray Ratto—one of the great obit/in memoriam writers out there—is open in the post. Here’s a quote from Ray:
…he won over all the networks he ever worked for because you can’t fake genuine. He believed in the game and those who played it, and he never back-in-my-day’d any game in any era, nor did he make himself the hero of his own stories. The game was the hero. He was elated when it was done well, audibly disappointed when it wasn’t, and couched neither in forced humor or attempts at post-modern hipness affectations.
“Elated when it was done well, audibly disappointed when it wasn’t” describes my reaction to poetry. Hopefully, when it’s time for me to go away, someone says that lovingly about me.
Y’ALL SEE THAT COBY WHITE DUNK ON WEMBY THO
There isn’t much to love about my beloved Bulls, especially with DeMar DeRozan gone. Coby White and Ayo Dosunmu are worth loving, though, and the former yammed on a 7’4” guy’s head earlier this year.
Also Mal and I took the six-year-old to his first game this year. Backup center Jalen Smith balled out. The Bulls probably won’t make the playoffs until the kid’s in high school.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris