“In the beginning everyone looked like Larry Bird / but everyone did not have the name Larry Bird / & this was confusing. Everyone had a headache” – Mathias Svalina, “Creation Myth”
It’s hard to talk about the aesthetics of basketball without sounding corny (“basketball is jazz!”) or silly (“that tall strong dude sure dunked real hard!”), so let’s get that out of the way. We’re going to talk about basketball the way theorists debate the merits of Fitzgerald vs. Pynchon, but there’s gonna be some Sports Talk while we do it. Basketball is beautiful, and that beauty is expressed with sick passing, honey-butter jumpers, and big ol’ hammer dunks.
People say “you can’t compare across eras,” but they’re usually talking about ranking. I like comparing the game aesthetically across eras. 1990s NBA, much like grunge, is awesome, paradigm-shifting, but surprisingly disappointing when you get past the hits. 1950s NBA, much like British poetry during the Restoration, is boring and bad. The 60s game is fast-paced, full of legends, and suffocatingly white. The early aughts is full of really cool players who didn’t do much and looked like they were wearing cargo pants. Every era in the league is interesting in its own right (except the 50s). It’s no secret that since 2015ish, we’ve been watching a new aesthetic of basketball being born.
The Geometry of the Court
When the three-point revolution kicked off, the game began to look different. Power forwards no longer crowded the rim in the dunker’s spot; no, put that 6’10” guy and his 6’10” defender above the break after setting a pick for a speedy point guard. Horns sets—wings in the corner, bigs at each elbow ready to set high screens—were ubiquitous in the 2010s. Centers like Dwight Howard and JaVale “Pierre” McGee enjoyed all the space to roll to the basket and catch alley-oops, but eventually they decided they wanted to shoot threes, too. The 25 feet in front of the basket totally opened up.
The Moreyball Rockets thought they could make the whole plane out of the black box, playing five-out and jacking threes whenever James Harden couldn’t draw a foul. But smarter teams figured things out, and figured them out quickly: the Spurs learned to attack off the catch, the Warriors learned cutting and passing gets you easy layups when half the defense is near midcourt, cutters like Dwyane Wade ate and ate well, and midrange masters like Kevin Durant and Kawhi Leonard figured you could still get to your spots if you hunted the other team’s slowest defender in pick and roll.
All of that was basic “three is more than two” math and “offense escalates, defense adjusts” stuff until something unexpected happened: the power forward position changed again.
Point Guard and Power Forward Have Become Intertwined
In his rookie season, back when Dennis Smith Jr. still had a starting job for the Dallas Mavericks, Luka Dončić was listed as a power forward on basketball-reference.com. It’s not there now, and hell, I don’t know how to use the Wayback Machine, so maybe it was a glitch or an error I happened to notice one day and got fixed later. Luka is obviously a guard—you probably want a point guard-sized guy like Dennis Smith Jr. next to him to shut down speedier guys, but Luka’s playing PG on offense—but it’s conceivable he could play PF. He’s built like P.J. Tucker and rebounds at a historic clip, why can’t he play power forward?
Julius Randle’s breakout 2020-21 All-NBA campaign was striking for a couple of reasons: 1) remembering how high Julius Randle was drafted and 2) seeing how comfortable he was with the ball in his hands above the break. I don’t watch a ton of Knicks, so maybe what was news to me was old hat to others, but Randle and his bowling ball-sized shoulders was bringing the ball up the floor sometimes. My jaw was a-slack, floor-glued. Then I remembered how Anthony Mason—a pile of cinder blocks from an abandoned construction site wearing a human suit—would sometimes initiate the offense. The defender shudders. RIP Mase.
Luka and Randle are very different players, but I lead with them only because it’s too obvious to lead with ballhandling bigs like Draymond Green, Zion Williamson, Ben Simmons, Bol Bol, and Bam Adebayo—all of whom could conceivably be listed as power forwards in the right lineups, though Bol and Bam are obviously centers. All of those dudes are tough dudes, you’re not going to go start a fight, but they’ve also got incredible skill to match. Let’s not forget about how LeBron, Durant, and Giannis are all break-the-mold power forwards with Finals MVP hardware in their trophy cases.
My favorite part about all this? The variance in styles and body types. Back when the stretch 4 was becoming a thing, they could all be stereotyped as lanky car-dealership-balloon people who wanted to shoot threes because they couldn’t bang bodies down low. Not so today. Put Zion and Bol Bol next to each other. They barely look like they should be playing the same sport. Giannis is built like he got in the lab and made the robot upgrades himself. Boris Diaw always looked like he had pregame coq au vin and drank the cooking liquid.
In his Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons expresses some aesthetic anxiety. I can’t find the line because referencing anything in that book is like trying to source which grain of salt makes your pasta water salty enough, but I remember it being something about how players these days are drilled in fundamentals during basketball camps from age three on and it removes fun little quirks from the game. Bill Cartwright’s over-the-head jumper, George Gervin’s signature finger roll, that sort of thing. I think what’s played out in the 14 or so years since that book was written proves the opposite. Basketball is a game of evolution and adjustments. In ever-lengthening span of my adult life, I’ve seen the stepback jumper go from “interesting move Kobe’s got” to “oh wow Steph can do it from distance” to “James Harden just hit his record-shattered 60th stepback three this quarter!” The talent is improving in basketball, and it’s only making the players more interesting. God, sports are cool.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris