For 15 years, I watched basketball from afar, keeping not much more than wandering eye on the NBA.
I came back just in time.
I grew up on Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Reggie MIller.
As a Milwaukeean: Big Dog, “Ray Ray” Allen, Sam Cassell.
I missed an unforgivable amount, admittedly.
In the intervening years between the Bucks not going to a Finals they definitely should have gone to, and Steph Curry: Kobe and Shaq happened, Lebron and D Wade happened, The Spurs happened. Well, not everything was worth watching.
Now I was aware these things were happening, and I probably caught a lot of highlights, but for a variety of reasons, social and personal, I did not keep up with basketball the way I did when I was younger.
When I came back to basketball, I came back to a much different game.
My Rip Van Winkleness puts me in a unique position to talk about the differences of Van Exel and Van Vleet, and the league that changed almost as much as I did in 15 years.
Why I Wasn’t Watching
There are three reasons I stopped watching basketball.
First, for half of these 15 years, I didn’t have cable.
The first generation of cord cutters was coming of age and living alone for the first time put a cable bill out of reach.
But before I didn’t have cable, I did have cable, and, complicating things: roommates.
And still, I didn’t watch.
This is because I have lived the last half of my life in Minnesota.
Minnesota is not a place that rewards regular season basketball watching. The Timberwolves are not a team that inspires bandwagon jumpers.
Further, during these years away from the game the Milwaukee Bucks were not the Bucks they are today. They were what was known, for years, as “The Milwaukee Bucks”.
That is, besides the few years of the Big 3, and now Giannis, Milwaukee wasn’t good enough to get much regular season cable TV coverage.
So, without really noticing, I associated “basketball” with “the Bucks” and watched (or, didn’t) as they both slipped away.
The third reason I didn’t watch basketball (basketball = Bucks) is more of a social phenomenon that has changed in the time since I stopped watching regularly.
When I went away, people watched their team. Now, to a greater extent than before, as Bill Simmons argues, people watch players.
I certainly enjoy watching the Bucks play more than any other team. I think people are still big fans of their local teams.
But the league’s stars are arguably the most famous athletes in America.
The most mentioned athlete in the United States last year (2017) was LeBron James, and the most mentioned team was the Cleveland Cavaliers.
BI
As a result fans have a much broader palette for basketball consumption, e.g, they watch more teams than they used to.
The internet is, like everything else, changing this experience for the fans as well.
Highlights are immediately available in gif form.
Adam Silver explains why the NBA is far more liberal with sharing highlights on social media than other leagues
BI
Conversations between fans who are strangers to one another have gone above and beyond indirect interactions via the janky conduit of sports radio call-in segments.
With the bubble, we get aggregate accounts giving us all the player supplied content we could want: living side by side our stars as we keep our social distance
The level of in-jokes, in-memes, and in-talk on NBA twitter and r/nba is at times impenetrable.
The NBA is the most tweeted-about sports league in 2018, according to Twitter, with more than 100 million NBA-related tweets heading into the NBA Finals, which begin Thursday.
WaPo
Being out of the loop even shortly can turn a follower into a wanderer, lost in dense forest of self-references on the level of another random internet phenomenon: people talking about video games.
A brief aside.
One person saying one sentence about a video game is word for word, the most confusing sentence an internet user in the modern age will come across on a regular basis.
“I queenwalk, using an e dragon + balloons combo on th12-to-th12 attacks” is a real sentence I, sadly, understand.
NBA twitter – like r/nba, all of reddit, 4chan, Dunder Mifflin social media platform – is turning into that thing where, once every few years you think, “hey, maybe I’ll read a little bit about black holes or quantum string theory” and the first sentence of the first wikipedia entry sends you looking up every other word.
For instance, this Sporting News article is needed to understand this tweet:
Besides the moneyballing of NBA stats, and the seemingly exponential increase in the amount of people who understand and discuss cap space, sports radio has evolved in the last 15 years, exploded, into sports podcasting which has broadened the conversation.
You would think this widening of dialogue would equate to a leveling: a lowering of the barrier of entry into the conversation, but it’s had the reverse effect.
With so many talking basketball, the art of the take has grown more complex, the artists have proliferated.
Sure, any random voice can go viral on a given tweet, but that only increases the competition.
Insights need to be more intricate, more particular. What you bring to the conversation has to be unique or your voice will get drowned out.
Here’s Bill Simmons wishing he had made the connection that Raja Bell did about Damian Lillard being Kobe Bryant.
Now, granted, that’s at the professional level, but it trickles down.
Talking basketball over beers is closer to wine sommeliers discussing bordeaux’s than it’s ever been.
Coming Back To The Game
In the 15 or so years since I left, my life has changed more than the game.
And in the past 5 years, as I’ve come back to the game, the game has given me some of my old life back.
Last week the Bucks had a playoff game at 5pm on a Thursday (by the way, I love the constant bubble schedule, even if media outlets who decry lower ratings, conveniently forgetting we’re in a pandemic with multiply daytime weekday games being aired).
Before the game, after work, I:
- Mowed the lawn of my house
- while I waited for my fiancee
- To return to Saint Paul, the one (out of two) twin cities where we choose to live.
- I have a dog, I work in IT, I bought an energy saving washer this year.
My life is very different than it was even 5 years ago, much less 15.
So sitting down in front of that game, with a beer, and the best chicken sandwich I’ve ever had, was heavenly.
Central air, comfy couch, miller lite: my childhood was meeting my adulthood, and carving into it, a small sanctuary.
The game has definitely changed though.
The Identity of Basketball: 3-Pointers, Spacing, 14 Second Shot Clocks, The Euro Step
Look at this gif of Allen Iverson crossing over MJ.
Timeless.
But notice where the other players are.
They are all right next to each other. At one point, 6 players, a majority of those on the floor (and none of them with the ball) are directly adjacent to – or standing within – the paint.
Now look at this gif of Dame shooting a deep ass 3 pointer earlier this season.
1 player’s foot, of 20 on the floor, is in the paint.
The game has gotten…bigger.
Additionally, since I left, the Euro step and the gather rule have allowed players to move in wild ways compared to when I was growing up, which is to say, compared to what I understood the fundamental rules of basketball to be.
It’s made moves – and careers- like Giannis’ possible.
When a player has taken more than 3 steps without the ball being dribbled, a traveling violation is called. The rule was 2 steps before 2018, but The International Basketball Federation, also known as FIBA changed the rule.
Since 2018, there is a step called the “gather step” before you take the 2 steps.
DJ Wiki-wiki-wiki
The 14 second shot clock after an offensive rebound has helped expand offense, by limiting it.
(2019’s) changes, including resetting the shot clock to 14 seconds after an offensive rebound, were not hugely publicized, but the freedom of movement emphasis has had an effect on the game
Deseret
“You used to be able to hand-check Derek Harper or put your whole arm for leverage from behind like Buck Williams who mastered it and bothered Karl (Malone),” he said. “Now if you touch a guy, it’s a foul. It’s almost impossible to guard Steph Curry one-on-one because of the way the rules are now. Television wants a 127-122 game versus a 97-92 game.”
quoting Former longtime Jazz assistant Gordon Chiesa
All these rules make sense as the next evolution of the game.
They result in higher scores, but more importantly, they allow movement, they expand the possible, they reward imagination and athleticism.
And I have to say, I love these changes.
Unlike all these fucking idiots.
Player Empowerment and Talking To The Cameras
I chose AI at the beginning of the last section for a reason.
His player empowerment was cultural, and there was extensive backlash.
“David Stern’s NBA fashion issues”, as Nas put it. (New goal: Nas quote in every other essay).
Where AI broke down cultural barriers, NBA players nowadays get to make insane amounts of money, and seemingly hand-select their next team, as though corporate America collectively agreed to give basketball players a lot of money as long as they wore pants that fit.
There is not a direct correlation there, but it is interesting: AI was a force of nature, he was empowerment embodied, and he was admonished for his lack of “professionality”, another word for, “making white people comfortable”.
People complained about Allen Iverson’s pant size, his limp/swagger, his braids. Wow. Hair styled in intricate patterns. How terrifying. We white people are very good at being threatened by non-radical elements of black self-expression.
Today’s players have learned from AI.
I’m not saying today’s stars are betraying truths about themselves, and mainstream America may have gotten a little more accepting of black self-expression, but I have a feeling that social media, the constant “on”-ness instilled from a young age via the never-ending AAU circuit, and the size of the paychecks have brought players closer to professional than the other way around.
The game has changed, the way we talk about the game has changed, the way players talk about the game has changed, my life has changed…and yet, it is still basketball, and watching basketball is, once again, a big part of my life.
It also doesn’t hurt that, just as I put in my first real post-season of watching-every-single-game in quite awhile, the Bucks made it to the Eastern Conference Finals, that same place they made it to more than 20 years before.
The universe, through the outstretched arms of Giannis mid-dunk, was embracing me, welcoming me back, assuring me I had, indeed, come back just in time.