“Darwin did not change the islands, but only people’s opinion of them. That is how important mere opinion used to be, back in the era of great big brains.” – Kurt Vonnegut, ‘Galápagos’
Another NBA column that begins with some anxiety about my NBA fandom. I simply cannot watch as many games as I used to. I cannot listen to the podcasts I used to. Honestly? The desire seems pretty back-burnered. The uselessness of your Chicago Bulls1 and the proliferation of gambling make it hard to get too excited. My seven-year-old son shows flickers of interest that do not last (although he’s still down for seeing any sports game live) and my basketball-loving friends are also too busy to come over on a random Tuesday night, so my watching experience remains somewhat lonely. Group chats are wonderful, but have their limits.
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And yet.
There are certain things I’m enjoying this year. Not to praise Amazon in the wake of the death of The Washington Post at the expense of Melania, but the Prime broadcasts are really good. Taylor Rooks, Blake Griffin, and Udonis Haslem have rekindled my interest in halftime shows. We just got a new internet provider and a year of free Peacock, too. While I find Peacock’s interactive shit popping up all over the screen irritating, I do kinda like a streaming service that shows me options for NBA games, an excellent collection of horror movies and thrillers, and the new Keke Palmer show right next to each other. Also MJ.
The other thing I’m enjoying, I mean really really loving, is the San Antonio Spurs.
Which leads to the question I want to explore today: what is fandom?
People love to litigate what it means to be a fan. It’s interesting to me, because it’s always talking about very personal feelings. No matter how much the old timers think regionality matters. Like, I’m always going to be a Chicago Bulls fan. That feels encoded into my blood, #SeeRed. But reading this RomeJ column about Chicago-born Packers fans, I realized that my Chicago Bears fandom is over. It began in 2006. I stopped watching the NFL in 2015. Roughly 10 years later, I decided I simply didn’t care what happened to the Bears.
On paper, this should’ve been my year to bandwagon again. They made a playoff run, they have an exciting Black QB who paints his fingernails, I’ve made friends with a dad at my kid’s school who is a big Bears fan—if there is any year to recapture the thrill I felt as the entire dorm floor in 2006 was running out in the hallways yelling every time Devin Hester returned a punt for a TD or Peanut Tillman punched a fumble (also for a TD), it would’ve been the year when I could hear the neighbors in my building yelling across the courtyard as the Arlington Heights Osos walloped the Green Bay Meat Packers in a playoff game. But no, I am simply not a Bears fan any more.
The seed idea for this column was listening to Zach Lowe flip out about the San Antonio Spurs a month or so ago. The Spurs have always been my “second team.” See, I grew up in Tennessee. We got the Predators and Titans when I was in the 9-11-year-old age range (1996-1998), but I’d already picked teams I liked. Here’s that confused list in full:
- Chicago Bulls (best player in the world, coolest player in the world, coolest logo and colors in the world, best city in the world)
- San Antonio Spurs (I thought David Robinson was the most incredible looking man I had ever seen, those black jerseys, the number 50 somehow making his arms look even bigger, then they got Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili and it was over for me)
- Chicago White Sox (MJ played in their farm system, super sick black jerseys, Frank Thomas and Robin Ventura)
- Baltimore Orioles (I was born in Baltimore, my dad was a fan of the Brooks and Frank teams, I liked Rafael Palmeiro and Brady Anderson and B.J. Surhoff and Roberto Alomar and yes, Cal Ripken. They also had sick black jerseys)
- Atlanta Braves (my fandom has lapsed on them because the chop is so embarrassing, but this was the coolest baseball team of the 1990s and also THE TEAM for everyone in the South)
- Colorado Avalanche (my Canadian homie Devon was a fan from the Quebec days, Joe Sakic and Peter Forsberg and Patrick Roy and Milan Hejduk and Chris Drury and Sandis Ozoliņš were super cool)
- Tennessee Titans (Steve McNair and Eddie George, THERE ARE NO FLAGS ON THE FIELD, nuff said, although don’t make me bring up Frank Wychek or Kevin Dyson or Lorenzo Neal or Jevon Kearse or we’ll be here for hours)
- Cincinnati Bengals (this would’ve been my Madden 97/NFL Blitz playing days, when tigers were my favorite animal and Jeff Blake seemed sick as hell. Again, black jerseys—black jerseys go a long way for me)
- LA Galaxy (I was a Sports Illustrated For Kids subscriber and thought Jorge Campos, the goalie who sometimes played forward, and Cobi Jones, the soccer player with long hair, were the coolest guys)
The fandoms that persist for me today would be Bulls, Spurs, Sox, and O’s. Only one of those teams is ever in danger of being competent during my lifetime2.
To outline the dilemma, let’s talk a little about what the Spurs and Bulls look like this year.
The Chicago Bulls Are 2016 All Over Again
Speaking of “if there was a year,” you’d think this would be it. I’ve got representation on the Chicago Bulls! There’s a long-haired white guy with a small forward’s body trying to play point guard (and not playing defense). He’s wearing what would be my second choice of number, were I on an NBA team. Josh Giddey is hard to get excited about though, and not just because of the investigation that the NBA declared resolved. He doesn’t play defense. No matter how many years his percentage on threes is north of 35%3, opposing teams will never respect him from there. The Thunder traded him and promptly won a title, and while that’s not necessarily an indictment of Giddey, it does say something.
Star-but-not-All-Star guard Coby White and Chicagoan Ayo Dosunmu were both awesome, but I almost had to hold my love for that backcourt at arm’s length. The two of them being traded to Real Teams was inevitable (of course, poor Coby got shipped to Charlotte—shame he couldn’t have gone to Houston or the Clippers). I was hoping for Ayo to be catching DTOs from Nikola Jokic in Denver, but guarding the other team’s best perimeter player so that Anthony Edwards doesn’t have to is a good fit, too.
Trades were made last week, but how can you get excited about them? This is still the organization that brought in Pau Gasol and Nikola Mirotic as starters after Joakim Noah posted a near-MVP season, this is still the organization that traded Jimmy Butler for Zach LaVine, and even if both of those things had justifications at the time, it signifies a terminal case of Not Knowing Ball. This is an organization who, since 1999, has had precisely two seasons of championship contention (July 2010 – April 28th, 2012), five years of interesting runs (2005, 2007, 2009, 2015, 2022), and an ocean of outright irrelevance otherwise.
Matas is cool, with a caveat. As I told friends when the Bulls started this year hot: don’t get excited when the Bulls have a strong core of white players. If this team even sniffs the second round once with Matas and Giddey as its stars? Expect to see Matas and Giddey get max contracts until they’re both Admiral At The Lake residents.
One crucial difference between now and 2016: Billy Donovan can coach, whereas Fred Hoiberg and Jim Boylen could not.
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The San Antonio Spurs Look Like The Future Of Basketball
Yes, yes—last season’s Oklahoma City Thunder proved that their team is the future of basketball, and they’ve been doing their best to keep it up this year. For the record, I like most of the guys on that team. They’re fun. I wish Chet Holmgren lots of luck on his journey to learning how to read.
The Spurs are like if the Thunder had swag. Stephon Castle, Dylan Harper, and Devin Vassell are a set of big guards who have that massive presence on the court, that imposing sense that they will do whatever they want against smaller players while making taller players look silly. They are walking embodiments of the word hooper. De’Aaron “I’m fuckin nice” Fox is exactly as he once described himself. Keldon Johnson, who is not Vince Staples, is a 6th Man Of The Year candidate. Julian Champagnie is coming on, hitting shots. Luke Kornet and Harrison Barnes are excellent in the grizzled vet roles. Jeremy Sochan and his Dennis Rodman tributes are playing good soldier while biding his time on the bench (mark my words, he has a signature moment in the playoffs coming).
Before I say the next thing, know that this is not a statement I’m making because Ron Harper’s son is on the team. BUT. It feels like if the Harper-MJ-Pippen-Rodman quartet was playing together when they were all 23, plus they added, like, Terrell Brandon or Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. Oh, and their center was a guy somewhere between 7’3″ and 7’7″ who could shoot threes and play the entire floor on defense.
Yes, the Wemby of it all undercuts the radical framing of “the future of basketball.” Big Vic is the size of a cryptid and about as believable as one. He might be the future of the sport, but his archetype is once in a lifetime. There isn’t much to say about him that hasn’t already be said. He does everything. He spent his first seasons in the NBA learning the speed and physicality of defense (short learning curve) and expanding his shooting range. Now, in Year Three, he’s putting it all together. 24-11-3 with three blocks and a steal, plus 50/36/83 shooting splits actually feels low for him, and he’s barely 22 years old. I just hope he stays healthy.
The exciting thing about the Spurs, though, is their big guards (plus the super fast little guard). Again, team of hoopers. The makeup kinda reminds me of my last two years playing AAU, on Coach Jimmy’s team. I was the 8th man behind a bunch of dudes who would go on to play D-1 and/or in Europe. Our “practices” were just scrimmages against guys three or 10 years older who happened to be hanging out at the gym that day, therefore games against other 13-year-olds were pretty laid back. We won most games by 20. Walking onto the court, it never felt like anyone could touch us4.
Of course, we were playing against farm boys from Cookeville and Rockvale and La Vergne. Eventually, we ran into a buzzsaw of teams from Memphis who rocked our shit. Will the Thunder or Nuggets do that to the Spurs in the playoffs this year? Who knows. But I’ll be watching with rooting interest.
The Bulls will either win or lose a play-in game.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
- yes, I am writing this after the Vooch trade, which made me feel nothing ↩︎
- when Tim Anderson said “we’re going to win and look good,” I believed him, but then Jerry Reinsdorf proved that his teams are always only ever going to look good ↩︎
- this year and last, so far ↩︎
- we were a decade too young to face off against Goodpasture-era Ron Mercer, but I believe Darius would’ve D’d him up and Keith and Rod and Lucas wouldn’t have let him in the paint ↩︎