I Setting
From the thrilling rendition of the Canadian national anthem, which opened for Gladys Knight’s slam dunk of America’s own, it was as if any and all conflicts about conducting the 2021 NBA All-Star event were for naught.
Scratching below the calm melodic surface, however, as the NBA conducted its reduced (in concession to COVID-19) version of its All-Star Weekend, hard questions were raised; questions that threatened to change the love-fest atmosphere ensuing from the Great Bubble Experiment that had been so remarkably successful over the summer.
For over three almost miraculous months, the Tampa Bubble was maintained entirely COVID-free, and even survived a weekend’s interruption of play, following the police shooting of a black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin, an incident that briefly foregrounded the unexpectedly tanking Milwaukee Bucks.
It all worked so beautifully, providing a needed victory for an organization that had been doubly jolted by the rapid-fire losses of David Stern and Kobe Bryant, one to unexpected illness, the other to a senseless plane crash that also claimed the loss of Bryant’s 13 year old daughter Gianna and several of her team-mates that Kobe was coaching.
From their successful experiment, the NBA had gained a close association of its own mission with that of Black Lives Matter. Now we were not only out of the Bubble, but had terminated Trump’s stranglehold on the American Spirit. The league’s sponsorship of the mission of historically black colleges and universities [1] has been cemented by its close association with HBCU graduate Kamala Harris, who plays a starring role in the league’s promotional efforts.
Might much of this social capital and goodwill be squandered by the conducting of a meaningless exhibition game that the players involved believed should not be happening? The displeasure at having to sacrifice the week’s vacation that a bifurcated scheduling of games [2] bestows upon other players (those not chosen for the weekend’s reduced menu of events) was forcefully but mutedly expressed by Lebron James when the league decided to conduct the game, thereby contractually compelling him to participate. The King had called the league’s decision a slap in the face, and said that he’d be there physically, but not mentally. One thought back to his being told to “shut up and dribble.” Black Lives Matter, indeed![3].
But there would be no threatened boycott this time around, 57 years later. James (the Oscar, Magic, and Michael of the 21st century; pardon me, Kobe) made his statement and then accepted the inevitable: television contracts were at stake, and even though Adam Silver is a flat-out universally respected great guy (a players’ owner, one might paraphrase), he cannot be unmindful of the massive revenue toll that the pandemic has taken upon his otherwise phenomenally prosperous operation.
II The All-Star Game Over Time
The All-Star Game has become widely politicized, as indeed it should be, because, of course, it always was. Well, not always [4], but certainly since 1964, when The Big O, then just twenty-five years of age, spearheaded a threatened players’ strike that almost cancelled the game entirely–by refusing to take the floor!–but for a last minute capitulation by the owners to the simple demand for recognition by the burgeoning Players’ Union.
As decades passed, and TNT took over the franchise (in 2003), what was once just a game became a weekend carnival, replete with special events like the Slam Dunk, Three Point Shooting Contest, Rookie-Sophomore Game, and a variety of events crafted to showcase the evolving skills of the game’s cutting edge players.
Just last year, less than a month before COVID shut down the league for over three months, a clever new scoring format was instituted that would make the game more competitive, along with a new method of choosing teams: the old method- two captains choosing up, and having the teams bear their names.
Competitive tension is now maintained by awarding “points” for each quarter, points which can be redeemed for large cash rewards set aside to benefit charities near and dear to the respective brands of team captains James and Durant, just one of many ways in which the NBA struggles to promote and maintain a high-minded humanitarian image.
III Hitting Restart. Why?
With real life’s score cards reflecting escalating deaths and positivity rates high enough to crowd out sports statistics, the NBA began its 2020-21 season in mid-December [5], with–at long last–a humane reduction in games played–from 82 to 72, on the Tuesday preceding Christmas weekend, but kept to its modern format of five games on Christmas, rocking around one full swing of the clock, plus half an hour.
But last season had barely just ended, and here we were with COVID surging to yet higher levels of devastation. Would the return of professional basketball bring the same solace and relief that we all experienced during the summer? Solace and relief, maybe, but can immersion in basketball really right the world? Whatever the t-shirts may have told us, (Basketball = Life), such a goal was immodest at best; callous too; many would say racist. Help me spin that one, willya?
Alas, the return to regular season play had nowhere near the intensity provided by the playoff bubble experience. The contrast was glaring: with so little in-between time for the better teams, games were more like training camp or pre-season. In empty home arenas, you really noticed the absence of crowd pulsation; jarring.
Whereas in the neutral bubble, the absence of fans had the salutary effect of blunting home court advantage, now, without each game’s outcome’s having special meaning, it was more of a showcase for individual stars. Indeed the league is now blessed with an ever-expanding circle of elite, marquee, franchise (you choose the adjective you like best) players, but teams outside of Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Utah, and Los Angeles were slow in generating enthusiasm.
IV The Christmas Games: All Eyes on Brooklyn
The league selects its Christmas marquee match-ups carefully, so fans got to check out the Brooklyn Nets, who were early in the process of integrating fully recuperated superstars Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, close friends who engineered their coming together a year earlier, but missed (both of them!) the entire 2019-20 season with injuries. Meanwhile, their team nonetheless made the playoffs under Interim Head Coach Jacque Vaughn, who had coached in the league since 2010, much of the time as an assistant with the San Antonio Spurs, but also including a two and a half year stint as Head Coach of the Orlando Magic.
Not satisfied to rest on such an achievement, Nets General Manager Sean Marks passed over Vaughn, and brought in former two-time MVP Steve Nash as Head Coach. Hard to object to Nash, a white Canadian former soccer player, as universally loveable as any surviving Beatle, but his having unseated a young Black coach who had succeeded without his superstars made rooting for his success a bit unseemly. Plus, Nash had never coached, and the legitimacy of his consecutive MVP’s was as suspect as Steph Curry’s a decade later [6].
The season was turning out to be as much about Kyrie Irving as it was about his former championship team-mate Lebron James. After their 2016 triumph, making their Cleveland Cavaliers the only team ever to come back from a 3-1 Finals deficit, Irving had insisted on a parting of the ways, and wound up in Boston, where he was massively disruptive to team chemistry and morale. This year, Irving missed several games “for personal reasons,” and was observed mask-less at a huge indoor party around the holidays.
Both Irving and Durant have missed significant time with injuries or “personal” issues, and, after their Christmas appearance the Nets have added a third superstar, James Harden, as the other leg of their weird isosceles triangle [7].
With the overkill of adding Harden (and Blake Griffin, too), the Nets became a band of cultivated itinerant mercenaries. By contrast, the Lakers, who followed later, trailing clouds of the glorious dust that Lebron, in his bright red/orange shoes, throws skyward before games, as a harbinger of the lobs he’ll later serve up to fellow superstar Anthony Davis, seemed like a stable bunch.
V Currying Favor/Favoring Curry
Coming back from an injury that gutted last season, Steph Curry is now being lauded by local papers as having become–of all preposterous things for a two-time MVP–a capable defender! Does that mean that they recognize how much he did not belong with real superstars?
But amazingly enough, the way he’s playing and the way his body is looking now, it now appears that he does! I see a completely different player, the player he was touted as for many years now, but remained a faux superstar in my eyes [8]. Why faux? Because superstars are capable of guarding their man in whatever is their “natural” matchup, determined largely by position. Could Curry guard Damian Lillard? Imagine Dame coming off a hard screen. He’d be shouting: “C’mere, Draymond” or ”Your man, Klay.”
But Curry is almost universally beloved, and rightfully so. Coming off last year’s injury, he graced the three point contest with his presence, and maximized the possible drama by having his last shot (win or lose!) be the “money ball” (striped and worth 2 points) to clinch his 28-27 win over Mike Conley.
In the actual game, with Curry and Lillard playing together for Team Lebron, it was raining threes from near midcourt, with Lillard ending matters, fittingly with a shot from but a single across the mid-court line. Dame Time! But reverence for Curry reigns supreme!
Still, when it came time to name an MVP, it was impossible to ignore the always-amazing Giannis Antetokounmpo. The Repeat MVP “Greek Freak” scored 35 points without missing a shot, including hitting several three-pointers, to punctuate myriad emphatic dunks; not to mention the ball-handling lesson he was shown giving his infant son Liam.
As for Durant, we can’t leave him out, can we? “KD,” as he’s got everyone calling him, got to play captain and sit it all out: Another item on his impressive resume of desertion, disloyalty, ingratitude, arrogance, and petulance! But the man sure can shoot. Maybe he’ll even be back. No worries. Kyrie and the other James are doing fine without him.
You like your rivalry with Lebron, Kevin? Like Freud once said about psychoanalysis, don’t start anything you can’t finish.
Notes
1 This Year’s Dunk Contest went to an HBCU graduate, the cherubic-looking Anfernee Simons. With Steph Curry winning the Three Point contest, the public face that the NBA offers has softened remarkably! Damian Lillard and Luka Doncic help here too; as does baby-faced monster Zion Williamson.
2 Only half the season’s schedule was initially laid out, leaving the NBA technocrats (who are very good at their jobs!) enough wiggle room to make up for possible COVID-lost games. Games are postponed when a team cannot dress the allowable minimum of eight eligible players. Strict protocols are in place to proactively quarantine players who are known to have had exposure to the virus: so Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons had to sit out the All-Star game.
3 James’s position as elder statesman and leader closely mirrors Oscar Robertson’s in 1964, when an early version of the players association nearly derailed the all-star game in their original protest movement, which ended with the owners officially recognizing the players’ union. As team captain this year, but reluctant participant, James logged only thirteen minutes.
4 Having been at the 1954 All-Star game (with my father in luxury seats that had sky-rocketed in price to $10 for the event), I recall when, as Al Attles once put it about the evolution of pro basketball into a mega-marketing extravaganza: “Oh, you remember when it was just a game.”
5 The watershed year 2020 had begun with the deaths of empire builder David Stern and generational icon Kobe Bryant; whereas the distinguishing mark of its waning days was the passing of two more members of the Boston Royal Auerbach Family: in rapid fire fashion, Tommy Heinsohn and then K.C. Jones, both among the huge cohort of NBA coaches spawned by Auerbach. Bob Cousy remains with us at 92, and Bill Russell, noticeably diminished but still a regal presence, at 87.
6 Perhaps there should be a qualifying test of defensive suitability in order to be eligible to receive MVP votes, though this might troublesomely complicate the agendas of progressives seeking to expand voting rights.
7 Originally, Harden, Durant, and Russell Westbrook were all team-mates in Oklahoma City.
8 I can’t get anyone but Charles Barkley on my side here.