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Consider the Monolith: The Russell Westbrook Experience

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March 16, 2017
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Courtesy of the author

With Andre Roberson closing quickly, Brook Lopez launches a three, early in the shot clock but with enough space to give it a chance. The ball clanks off the front of the rim, kisses the backboard and falls into the left hand of professional basketball’s most perplexing genius, to rapturous applause from what should be a hostile crowd. It is the latter’s tenth rebound of the night, and after adding two more, combined with his 25 points and 19 assists, the intensely focused scientist sits, his team all but guaranteed a victory they would soon officially claim, his 33rd triple-double of the season secure.

Thunder doesn’t only happen when it’s raining. It was in the middle of March, in the midst of an overhyped blizzard, that the Brodie came to Brooklyn.

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Seizing Fate By The Throat

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March 14, 2017
3-Pointer, Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Suffering from a deafness which plagued him over the final three decades of his life, Ludwig van Beethoven explored new and innovative areas of musical theory which sometimes left him in controversial straits with critics. Having already composed countless quartets and sonatas as well as several symphonies, Beethoven continued to push the bounds of sound through his late period, often incorporating the influences of Bach, Handel and his immediate predecessor as foremost composer in the world, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Until his death in 1827, Beethoven strove to perfect the sounds and styles of the time which produced him.

On Sunday, two NBA title contenders, each by an MVP candidate, met in Houston for the second and final time in the regular season. The team that prevailed, the Houston Rockets, did so in much the same fashion as they have done all year: by adhering to their particular brand of the NBA’s prevailing style, launching as many threes as possible and, when that wasn’t available, getting to the rim for high percentage shots and foul opportunities. At the eye of the Rockets’ storm is James Harden, high-volume wing-turned-obscenely efficient point guard, a scoring machine in either case.

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The Noblest Roman of Them All

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February 13, 2017
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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“Morte di Cesare,” Vincenzo Camucci

As common as love, perhaps more so, betrayal is a delicate theme which, if the Book of Genesis is to be trusted, has permeated history since the inception of existence.  We know how this one goes: a serpent tempts Eve into an apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which is strike one; soon thereafter, their sons elicit contrasting reviews for ostensibly the same work, causing the first instance of jealousy and, subsequently, the first instance of murder in the form of fratricide, which is strike two; many centuries later, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon into Roman Italy and earned himself a perpetual dictatorship, until a group of his friends decided that perhaps that wasn’t such a good idea. Several centuries after that, we learned to sum up betrayal in three words, none of them English: “Et tu, Brute?”

On Saturday night, Kevin Durant returned to Oklahoma City, the arena and area which raised him from a lanky post-Supersonic to an NBA MVP, to face the Thunder at Chesapeake Energy Arena for the first time. Despite two massive victories over the Thunder already under their belts, there was no reason to expect this would be easy, particularly with many fans and, as it turned out, teammates still twisting the knives out of their backs.

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The Collective Wisdom of Individual Ignorance

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January 20, 2017
America, Basketball, NBA, Politics, Sports
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Photograph:A painting shows George Washington giving a speech on the day he became president in 1789.

Tompkins Harrison Matteson/Library of Congress

In theory, democracy is a relatively emotionally detached system, a utilitarian tool for selection based on preference which, at its conclusion, yields the most popular choice for a given role. In practice, of course, it isn’t so simple, as voting methods and the different weights assigned to certain swaths of the voting populace tend to skew results one way or another.

All of this is entry-level political science; you certainly don’t need anyone reminding you of the way things are, especially on this of all days. It seems overly simplistic to just say that sometimes things don’t break the way they should, the way most people think they should, but then, it becomes hard to explain other voters’ tendencies[1] without reverting to childish name-calling and inflammatory rhetoric.

On Thursday, the NBA announced the starters for this year’s All-Star Game. Russell Westbrook, currently leading the league in scoring while averaging a triple-double, was not among them.

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The New Normal

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November 30, 2016
America, Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Peter Homann

Since October 25th, when the NBA season began, a few things have changed. Some are minute; perhaps you switched from white wine to red, took up yoga or bought a new pair of dress shoes that you’ll save for just the proper occasion. Others, less so, but you can read about that in the oblique, unchecked vacuum that convinced you the world was one way when, in fact, it’s the other, at least to a large enough plurality for that to matter.

Much of what we presumed to be true is shaken, even stirred, while the rest is magnified to such an extent as to be distorted beyond reasonable comprehension. What we face now, in basketball as in life, is adjustment to the new normal.

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Strictly an Oklahoma Man

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November 3, 2016
Basketball, NBA
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Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid/20th Century Fox

“Boy, I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.” – Butch Cassidy

When the final whistle sounded on Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals in May, a certain feeling of deflation accompanied the confetti which fell from the rafters of Oracle Arena in Oakland. After having been up three games to one in the series, the Oklahoma City Thunder squandered their lead to the defending champion Golden State Warriors, the 96-88 final score of Game 7 being the most painful exclamation mark of any during the Durant-Westbrook Thunder era. Even with Kevin Durant lined up to be a free agent in the offseason, it still stood to reason that he had more to lose by leaving Oklahoma City than by giving it at least one more go with his explosive comrade in arms.

Already, the rest is history, albeit of the continually developing nature that calls for perpetual scrolling lines of text alerting the viewer to the absolute latest hard truths, highlighted in red and bolded beyond reason. Durant left to sign with the Warriors, the very team that had beaten his own before going on to put together an even more spectacular collapse in the NBA Finals. Westbrook re-signed with the Thunder, finally and definitively taking the wheel after years as Durant’s foil. Tonight, back in Oracle Arena, the erstwhile brothers meet as opponents for the first time.

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(Approximately) 30 Thoughts on 30 NBA Teams, 2016-’17 Edition

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October 25, 2016
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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CLEVELAND, OH - JUNE 22: Kyrie Irving #2, LeBron James #23 and J.R. Smith #5 of the Cleveland Cavaliers look on during the Cleveland Cavaliers 2016 NBA Championship victory parade and rally on June 22, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo by Mike Lawrie/Getty Images) ORG XMIT: 648981599 ORIG FILE ID: 542236368

Wake up, wake up wake up wake upppppp! Break out your favorite Starter jacket from the ’90s and saddle up, because the NBA is back tonight. Three games usher us out of the humdrum summer and firmly into fall, where all of our favorite professional basketball players[1] await to push the bounds of reality beyond any of our preconceived notions.

The reigning champion Cleveland Cavaliers[2] welcome the not-reigning-anything New York Knicks to Cleveland, suddenly the epicenter of North American professional sports, where Carmelo Anthony will get to watch the likes of J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert receive their championship rings. Afterward, the re-tooled and reloaded Golden State Warriors host a Tim Duncan-less San Antonio Spurs while the Utah Jazz visit Portland. With one eye on the proverbial jump ball and another drifting ever so slowly toward the Larry O’Brien Trophy, we take a moment – just one, lest we think too hard about the Bulls – for a thought on each team. As always, best of luck to everyone, especially anyone in a contract year. May you swindle a billionaire out of a few million.

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Independence Day

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October 21, 2016
America, Basketball, NBA
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“Custer’s Last Stand,” Edgar Samuel Paxson

Finally – finally – it is that time of year again. As the leaves turn, and the breeze becomes a chill, the NBA is at our doorstep, knocking incessantly, asking if we have heard the good news and finally accepted Adam Silver into our lives. As is tradition around this time, profile after ostensibly revealing profile has exploded through the Internet’s dams and into our timelines – of teams, of conferences and divisions and, of course, of players. Each one delivers us infinitesimally closer to the players we hold in high regard, whom we can never really know.

Fitting, then, that in the week before the start of the season, two captivating and personal cover stories on Russell Westbrook have preceded the NBA season, one from GQ’s Daniel Riley, and another from Sports Illustrated’s masterful Lee Jenkins. Each is uniquely great in its own right, and both brim with an undercurrent of the rage everyone anticipates and hopes to see manifested in Westbrook’s game on a potentially scorched earth-like MVP campaign. This is the Year of Westbrook.

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Dreams in Digital

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August 5, 2016
America, Basketball, NBA, Politics, Sports
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Courtesy 2K Sports

Click here for an enlarged version of the above photo; you’re gonna need it.

Though they actually began on August 3rd with several group stage soccer matches, the Olympics spring to life in the hearts of most with today’s opening ceremony. Working with a budget of roughly £3 million[1], a tenth of what the 2012 opening ceremony in London cost, a nation ill-equipped to host an Olympics is going to go full-throttle into it anyway, featuring such Brazilian luminaries as Gisele Bundchen and Dame Judi Dench in the Maracana, where the Olympic cauldron will receive the Flame. Much has already been made of the ethical and economic implications of these Olympics, and more awaits. Either way, they’re here now, so we may as well do our best to embrace them.

The U.S. figures to play a prominent role in most competitions, with swimming, gymnastics and track and field being among the most noteworthy. Basketball, also, is notable, though most have written off the tournament as one in which every country aside from the United States is battling for second. That seems reasonable; this country would be loath to repeat a disaster like what happened in Athens in 2004. To mark the Games, 2K Sports has released an Olympic team available for play, not unlike when they did so in 2012 with the Dream and Redeem Teams. So, sure, the real-life versions of these NBA stars are extremely likely to bring home the gold. The NBA2K equivalents pictured above, however, seem bound for much dimmer pastures.

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An Errant Wish

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July 26, 2016
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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“Once a Knick, always a Knick.”

These are the words emblazoned across a picture the New York Knicks chose to post in celebration[1] of Amar’e Stoudemire signing a one-day contract on Tuesday so that he could retire with the franchise he helped revitalize in the summer of 2010. At 33, the man who once posted a picture of himself bathing in red wine decided he had had enough of basketball, or perhaps that basketball had had enough of him.

Few in the history of professional basketball embody the kind of paradox he does. To a certain generation of NBA fans, he represents one very distinct, dynamic kind of player; to another, ever-so-slightly generation, he represents a broken promise, an undoing not entirely or even at all his own, but a bulky set of talcum shoulders on which to rest blame nonetheless.

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