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(Approximately) 30 Thoughts On 30 NBA Teams, 2023-’24 Edition

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October 24, 2023
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Welcome back. Depending on how you count the attempt at satire written in the midst of an early life crisis in 2014, and with apologies to the time in between the 2019-’20 season and 2020-’21 – spacing more questionable than the 2013-’14 Knicks, incidentally, but with a much more logical explanation – this is the tenth time we’ll be previewing every NBA team, so for those of you here from the jump, I must express some measure of appreciation.

A reminder, and a reintroduction: if you don’t know but you’ve been here this long, Robert Horry’s name is pronounced with a silent-H (‘Orry). His name is his name. He has more rings than Jordan, if that’s your thing, and he hit several of the most important shots in league history, with apologies only via volume in both directions to Kings fans and the Kyrie hive. 

Getting back to the point: you heard about him for years in the French leagues too, right? And even before that? Ah, so you saw what his wingspan could end up being? Not unlike the Burger King jingle that mutates each fortnight but remains an earsore in every iteration, the midseason tournament is coming for all of us: growth is the only mindset.

Watch your own fire burn as mine does. A model like yours? Nothing better. Just you wait and see:

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Love Is A Bird Rebellious

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May 23, 2023
Basketball, Music, Sports
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1, 2, 3…

At his core, he was a dancer. If Kobe was the Baryshnikov of his era, Carmelo Anthony was Albert Torres, engaging defenders at the elbow in a perpetual tango evoking their shared Puerto Rican roots. A step forward, a feint with his elbow, a half-pivot, then: gone, with the duck of his sweatband-adorned head. It was one of the seemingly endless ways Anthony could score; it didn’t look effortless, but, like a choreographed routine done right, it usually looked like he was having fun.

Except to older heads whose respect he ended up earning anyway, it doesn’t much matter that the biggest win of Carmelo Anthony’s career happened before he ever made it to the NBA. Everybody wants to win – of course – but winning was never the most interesting nor important thing about Anthony himself. On the day when the team that drafted him bounced the last team for whom he played from the playoffs, Anthony announced his retirement.

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Something’s Heating Up!

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April 28, 2023
America, Basketball, NBA, Sports
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This past Christmas, I was in Oklahoma with my oldest, not older, brother, taking in several of the NBA games that were on TV. They were there at my request, but several of our fellow patrons got into it; suffice to say, we identified a Kobe Guy. Two days later we would be at Paycom watching a Thunder-Spurs game that you’ve already forgotten; I doubt we ever will.

For what ended up being my family’s ad hoc Christmas celebration three months later, we descended upon South Carolina, my parents once again hosting a St. Patrick’s Day party featuring a lot of people I don’t know that well. One of them, a New Jersey transplant and lapsed Knicks fan, unfortunately found herself in a conversation with me, all but yelling at her about Jalen Brunson. 

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Tougher Than The Rest

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March 23, 2023
Sports
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If you recognize the image above, you know what’s next.

Louisiana native Willis Reed set Walt Frazier up on his first date after arriving in New York City – that’s Walt Frazier, a guy who put out an entire book on the idea of cool. A few years in the league under his belt, Reed always roomed with rookies in order to show them the ropes. He stopped fights in practice because he knew this team had the juice – they did – if only they could smooth out the vast caverns that separated, say, Rhodes Scholar Bradley from rhyming dictionary scholar Frazier[1], nevermind whatever Phil Jackson was up to that was too weird even for the Knicks of the Age of Aquarius.

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Randle, Redeemed

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February 25, 2021
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Julius Randle Earns All-Star Role, 1st Knick in 3 Years | The Knicks Wall

It’s been the longest, coldest, loneliest winter, and every time I look up – usually to take my eyes off the screen for the requisite twenty seconds-per-twenty minutes of screen time, or about as much as my stop light eyes can stand in the middle of the afternoon – it gets longer. Once again, winter is and has been upon us, beautiful falling snow giving way to the malignant ice, which has never done anyone any favors and, really, just ought to melt immediately, in between Jack Frost’s cosplay as Punxsutawney Phil.

Even in New York City – we’re the lucky ones as far as the past two weeks have gone, and among places you’d expect to not be doing so well in a February winter – seasonal depression is self-evident in almost anyone you encounter, as far as “encountering” a person can go these days: there is the lady on the muffled phone call, pulling from a cigarette in between listening; there is the shop owner, only going inside when a potential customer directs her in; there is the man on the street, literally pleading with his corgi to please join him on the street corner.

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Hello, Melo

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November 20, 2019
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Image result for odysseus

Odysseus and Polyphemus – Arnold Böcklin (1896)

Canonically, Odysseus ends up becoming immortal. He was always destined to be, of course, but depending on where you go for your Greek epic epilogues, his fate was either a bit in doubt or entirely certain after dying at the hand of his own son, Telegonus. It is less an Oedipus situation and more a Meat-Becomes-Murder ordeal as far as familicide in Greek epics goes, but you can look into it yourself if you are so inclined.

Similarly close to a place called Ithaca, Carmelo Anthony is already a Hall of Famer. He is likely also the most divisive player of his generation[1], a member of the venerated 2003 draft class and the only player picked in the top five of that class without an NBA championship ring[2]. His legacy has been in question for at least half a decade. Anthony had been out of the league for over a year until Tuesday night, when, carrying an exhaustingly-explained double-zero on his back, he made his debut with the Portland Trail Blazers.

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On Chasing Waterfalls

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June 28, 2019
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Image result for red rover game vintage

“Rover, Red Rover” – Arthur Leipzig

Free agency in professional sports, in its ideal form, is the best and most prominent example of the free market at work that exists in this country. A worker earns their keep; their employer either decides that they are or are not worth the trouble, and then there are suitors everywhere lining up to give that person their just deserts. It’s deceptively simple.

Yet – and that word does a percentage of the salary cap’s worth of lifting here – it is much more deceptive than simple. The salary cap itself is one measure of inequality-via-equality; were LeBron James ever paid as much as he deserved in his career, he would likely be rivaling Gaius Appuleius Diocles at this point. Alas, at least in salary-capped leagues[1], the reality is thus: make what you can of what you have, and be judicious with your forecasts. A tornado doesn’t have to spring up to be destructive; if it gets you to move, it’s done enough of its job.

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“Zion: Feelin’ Like a Kalashnikov Out Here”

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June 20, 2019
Sports
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Associated Press

At a time reported to be 7:30 pm Eastern but which will probably be sometime shortly thereafter, the 2019 NBA Draft will begin tonight. That means that, for the devoted, a tweet, or text of a tweet, from Adrian Wojnarowski will pop across their phone screens, sometime between 7:28 and 7:30, informing the masses what we’ve all known since before the Anthony Davis trade, before the All-Star Game, before Christmas: that Zion Williamson of Duke will be the #1 overall pick.

That he is presumably going to New Orleans is the karmic injustice befitting a team that wasted Davis’ first seven years in the league[1] but which new general manager David Griffin is already turning toward the future. If Zion happens to be the key to open that particular sarcophagus, alongside the newly-acquired Lakers tweens, then the Pelicans will be raising hurricanes, toasting the next decade of success.

If he’s caught in the right place at the wrong time, however, then the draft gods will have proven infallible once again. That’s the beauty and sorrow of any professional sports draft, but this year, and this one, feels especially momentous.

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A Theatre Of Envy

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June 22, 2018
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Lonnie Walker, with a fan/Kevin Hagen, AP

There are two incontrovertible truths about the NBA Draft, the 2018 edition of which occurred Thursday night, with which only the most high-minded blowhards and low-minded rubes refuse to agree: one, that it ought to be abolished entirely, allowing incoming rookies to enter a special free agency period before standard free agency; and two, that nobody knows exactly how players are going to pan out upon arrival to the league, all your Tracy McGrady and Darko comparisons be damned.

On the first, many others have pontificated in much better fashion than I could in this space, right now. It would be complicated to implement something like a rookies-only free agency period, particularly with the value of draft picks present and future as they are in the NBA, but it would not be impossible[1]. Perhaps something like ratioed salary cap allowances, in which each draft pick is worth a certain amount of money under the salary cap, or even simply straight cash, homie, could do the trick, but I’ll leave that to those with more money and power than subway rats and their constituents possess.

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