I. Coping. Trying. San Francisco
Designed to accommodate living across the country from the New York teams I’ve once again come to love, my aspirational strategy of using sports to insulate myself wasn’t entirely working: I found pockets of untarnished beauty, but not anywhere near a Trump-free zone. Yet, despite my myriad complaints about changes in the game of basketball, I was having a great time checking out the variety of different leagues, at different levels, games comprising both genders (the allowable maximum by recent presidential fiat) that television brings us.
In addition to Duke’s super freshman Cooper Flagg (1), there was a resurgent Knickerbocker team; Columbia my alma mater, had a spirited women’s team, and Rick Pitino was bringing St. John’s back to national prominence. The WNBA, while basking in an accelerated growth rate (of both talent and pace) that Warren Buffet devotees would envy, has added a three person league, as well as a half court version, to showcase its star players.
Not to be outdone, college basketball — with its geographically insane conference reshufflings — floods the airwaves on both weekends and weeknights. Seemingly random games, like Maryland-Indiana, once you get used to the expansionist Big Ten (Big Tent?), can be thrilling. The talent level is beyond extraordinary; the pros seem to have passed a certain tipping point, with the skill level exceeding normal bursts of brilliance, and discussion has shifted to the minutiae of how many threes a team needs to take, in order to optimize the lives of players, numbers crunchers, and pundits alike.
Could this be my road back to fandom? Perhaps a four-year period of cooling out to see whether we need to re-strategize? As if the damage being done could be reversed! In my lifetime? In that of our planet? It was painful to come to realize that I was just trying to persuade myself that no lead was too big to overcome. The thugs in power might well be populating another planet by then. Just how does gravity affect the hops of the all-time greats in outer space?
Narrowing my focus as I felt was necessary, I got my son to install the NBA channel, so I could watch the Knicks, and listen to Walt Frazier, fueled reverentially by perfect gentleman Mike Breen, on demand. Clyde is linguistically bathing in his new left-handed doppelganger Jalen Brunson, who adds Willis Reed’s left-handedness and poise, which Clyde had in bulk. With the versatile OG Anunoby resembling Oscar Robertson, and combining elements of both Dave DeBusschere and Earl Monroe, I had it all going on. The whole shebang! The Knicks were not only very talented, but have the perfect personnel for Coach Tom Thibodeau, who often seems like an escaped character from a David Mamet play.
If only OG can stay healthy.
Watching Houston face the Knicks, I felt stunned: what a bunch of racehorse athletes! There’s an aesthetic difference between running up and down firing up threes and racing to the rim while using the three as a first option.
II. All-Star Time: Breathe.
Enough: Like they say to players who try to force matters: “let the game come to you.” So, I’m taking all this in from San Francisco, this year’s host city for NBA All-Star Weekend, as we neared the end of the fourth week of the Trump Demolition Era. Perhaps fittingly, the NBA’s seventy-fourth all-star game had a radically (if not significantly) altered format: a mini-tournament, smartly designed to reduce boredom and repetitiveness, the bane of the current league, to celebrate the game’s international nature, abd to embrace playground ethics: play to a certain designated number; no clocks needed.
“Changing the game,” intoned Tim Hardaway, representing a beloved former iteration (“Run TMC”) of the Warriors in what is being hyped as a new San Francisco, sporting a wealthy new mayor with strong local roots. Also representing Run TMC, Queens’ own Chris Mullin (now part of the Warrior broadcast team), would coach one of the teams, as would Mitch Richmond, the heart and soul of TMC, which died when Don Nelson traded him away for an unproven rookie (Billy Owens) in order to get four inches bigger.(2) All three were in excellent shape.
III. Back When
My son works for All-Star host Turner Sports (which is about to lose the franchise for All-Star Weekend after this year, its forty-first), and landed last minute tickets for himself, his wife, and nearly eight-month-old son. I was at home to take it all in on the network that pays their bills, busily indulging nostalgia: recalling my father’s bringing me, in 1954, to the NBA”s fourth All-Star game in New York, when I was not quite eleven. That one was seminal too, marking the end of an era, as the newly-integrated game would soon change radically: George Mikan and Bob Cousy (3) were about to cede their hegemony to a six man contingent of dominant centers (Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain), powerful and skilled forwards (Bob Pettit and Elgin Baylor), and game-changing guards (Oscar Robertson and Jerry West) who were big enough to be forwards and too overwhelmingly athletic, big, and strong for traditional guards like Cousy, Bobby Davies, Slater Martin, and Dick McGuire.
Baylor introduced an entirely new dimension to the game, combining Maurice Stokes’s ball handling, speed, mobility and power, while Pettit was defining a newly conceived power forward position: having played the pivot in college, he was deemed — by Coach Red Holzman — too thin to bang with NBA centers.
Brilliant move! free to play facing the basket, Pettit was still rugged enough to post rebound totals exceeded regularly only by Chamberlain, Russell, and sometimes Nate Thurmond or Jerry Lucas. Pettit broke Mikan’s long-standing single season scoring record the year before Chamberlain entered the league, and made all previous numbers meaningless. He retired — after only eleven years — as the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, and the first player to exceed 20,000 points. He was a first team all-star his first ten years, slipping to the second only in his last season. Never having averaged below twenty points and twelve rebounds, but no longer dominant, he understood that it was time to depart.
Of this regal six, only my two favorites, Pettit and Robertson (the oldest and the youngest) survive. Oscar was courtside, appearing somber, but lending dignity to the whole operation. Pettit turned 92 in December. Fittingly, given his allergy to hype, he stayed home.
IV. Onward: Embracing Change, But Clumsily
A new chapter,” Ernie Johnson called it, closing the book on last year’s 211-186 fiasco. After forty-one years, as part of a complicated new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that will usher in a new era in which streaming will first supplement — and ultimately supplant — cable.
The format was that of a mini-tournament, with foreign born players forming one team (the Global All-Stars), the older players (OG’s) another, the younger all-stars a third, and the surviving team from Friday night’s tournament involving first and second year players yet a fourth. To Turner’s credit, Candace Parker was named as nominal coach of one of the four teams, with “Inside The NBA” veterans Charles Barley, Kenny Smith, and Shaquille O’Neal “manning” the three others.
Games were played to forty points, with no clock. As such, the long drawn-out periods of both teams jogging up the court to launch endless threes, would be eliminated. With such a low bar for improvement, it all seemed to work quite well, until its momentum was killed by overlong entertainment festivities, orchestrated by a local comedian who really did not belong. Draymond Green, occupying the broadcast booth, akin to Musk in the Treasury, was vehement in his disagreement: “It sucks. Zero out of ten.”(4) Thanks, Dray.
With shorter spans of attention required of the players in this new format, you could really see the emerging games of new stars like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Victor Wembanyama, though in outline form. Unfortunately, many great stars were absent, including Lebron James, Anthony Edwards, and Giannis Antetokounmpo, but Wemby brought fresh enthusiasm, while providing an ideal foil for Nikola’s Jokic’s otherworldly imagination, timing, and passing skills.(5) In the first of the four games, there was trouble in paradise: the “global all-stars” did not knuckle under and put America first! Call DOGE immediately. And bring them tariffs.
The Final set up an interesting (conceptually speaking) “game,” not only pitting eras against each other, but having serious intersectional cachet. But first, anther rapper. Oy! I was reminded of Chico Marx faking a piano lesson, and Groucho stepping forward to address the audience, telling them that he has to stay around for this, but you can go out for popcorn.(6)
Perhaps because of the long and meaningless delay, the flagrantly cool shooting of the Global All-Stars team made the final game dull and perfunctory. The MVP — of course — was Stef Curry, the quintessential star of the three-pointer era. In evaluating his place in the pantheon of all-time greats, should one ask how he would have fared before 1980, when the three-point shot was made part of the game, the tail which seems to have swallowed the body?
I recalled 1954 again, the recount that became necessary when an unexpected comeback by The East made it necessary to re-poll the MVP votes, shunting the MVP trophy from George Mikan to Bob Cousy. Not so this time. It couldn’t have seemed more orchestrated.
The new Chase Center had been honored, with appropriate genuflection to the abandoned Oakland Coliseum, which used to be the Warriors’ more gritty home arena, and hosted a Saturday event in the three-day carnival. Ambassador Curry dodged the Oakland-San Francisco rivalry question by allowing- in effect- that there are good people on both sides.
…
Footnotes
1. It seems as if every Duke game gets televised nationally.
2. R. Liss. “We’re all in the Entertainment Business,” WELCOMAT, February 12, 1992.
3. Dolph Schayes deserves inclusion here. Having once tied for the league’s rebounding crown, Schayes also had unlimited range on his anachronistic two-handed set shot, a unique combination. In his own way, he pioneered the “appositional” game.
4. What can I say? I’m the guy who thought Dallas might have improved itself by trading Luca Doncic for injury-prone Anthony Davis.
5. Jokic and Wemby together! At eighty-one, I think I could win twenty NBA games with the two of them and the first two readers to respond!
6. I checked in with Chat GPT and was reminded that this is from A Day at the Races (1937). “Chico Marx’s character, Tony, is pretending to give a piano lesson to Mrs. Upjohn (Margaret Dumont) while Groucho Marx, playing Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush, steps forward and breaks the fourth wall, telling the audience that they can go out for popcorn if they want.”