The Return of the NBA, Birthdays and a New Era of Basketball?
The NBA season opener offers occasion to reflect on the mix of competition, entertainment and artistry in basketball while celebrating birthdays and struggling for a world as beautiful as the game.
The 2022-2023 NBA season started today, October 18.
The first nationally televised game of the season pitted the reigning Eastern Conference champions, the Boston Celtics, against the Philadelphia 76ers in Beantown’s TD Garden. Boston won, 126-117.
The second match-up featured the 2022 NBA champions, the Golden State Warriors, competing against the Los Angeles Lakers in the Bay Area. Golden State won, 123-109.
But anticipation mounted even prior to the opener.
The NBA preseason saw Kawhi Leonard, who missed all of last season with a partially torn ACL, back in action in front of a broadcast audience.
Kawhi’s knee rehab this past year evidently went well. Just prior to the start of this season, SLAM Magazine featured Kawhi and teammate Paul George on the cover, and in the cover story about the dynamic duo, Max Resetar wrote that SLAM’s photographer joked Kawhi makes up for being about an inch shorter than George “by being way more brolic than either himself or PG.”
Skeptics concerning Kawhi’s “brolic” physique can remove all doubt by taking a look at an image of him displaying all the mass he’s added to his thighs. Granted, doubters could be forgiven for suspecting photoshop foul play, given the girth of his quads and hammies; yet, those unreal-looking legs are real.
As I might’ve shared with Waywards readers before, the Clips are the Western Conference team I follow closely.
I’m from Illinois, so not surprisingly, the Chicago Bulls are my Eastern Conference squad.
Coincidentally, Nick Greene, author of “How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius: What Game Designers, Economists, Ballet Choreographers, and Theoretical Astrophysicists Reveal about the Greatest Game on Earth,” profiled DeMar DeRozan, the 6’6” wing for the Bulls who clawed his way into MVP conversations for a while last season, with a piece Chicago magazine just published.
For the record, DeRozan stays busy in the offseason, as Greene’s article attests. For two years running, the Compton-born master of the mid-range has also released a mini web series about his summer workouts. Not only that. About 48 hours before the first tip-off, Grayson ‘The Professor’ Boucher, familiar to basketball fans since his AND1 tour days, also released a video of him showing streetball moves to DeRozan, who judged whether what Boucher brought out of his bag would, and what would not, likely elicit calls from officials in the NBA.
Adding to the eager anticipation for the league’s return on October 18, the release of the documentary, “Untold: The Rise and Fall of AND1,” featured footage of Boucher on the court in the early aughts and showed him on camera offering retrospective commentary.
The documentary alludes to the company and a select few people profiting off of streetball culture without adequately compensating players, including those who struggled just to survive after the AND1 mixtapes went the way of, well, old school mixtapes.
That got me thinking about the role or potential of collective action among athletes who intervene in solidarity with one another and with fans – a topic to which I return.
As discussed in the AND1 documentary, streetball and its celebration of creative self-expression came to influence the game at even the NBA level.
At its best, that creative self-expression with a basketball becomes art.
Just before tip-off on Tuesday in Boston, poet laureate Porsha Olayiwola recited a poem in honor of the late NBA legend Bill Russell, the Celtics big man who won more championship rings than he had fingers. During her spoken word delivery commemorating Russell, Olayiwola referred to basketball as “a balance between art and war / a measure of the body’s will.”
The “balance” Olayiwola invoked highlights the artistic as well as the fiercely competitive elements of basketball.
It occurred to me that some players and fans gravitate toward the game because of its aesthetic beauty while others get excited about hoops because it ignites that competitive fire and gives people 94 feet of hardwood with which to battle it out.
The recent release of The Redeem Team, the documentary (also on Netflix) about the team that returned USA Basketball to dominance in international competition, underscored the above and, in relation, provoked renewed attention to the legacy of the late Kobe Bryant, the greatest student of the game who helped ensure that team’s success in between winning titles with the Lakers. The “Mamba Mentality” Kobe championed and displayed as a champion placed a premium on winning.
To be clear, I’m no fan of a competitive socioeconomic system that pushes some people into positions of subordination, and I don’t think militarism and warfare are conducive to human thriving, meaning I think we need to use resources at our disposal to prevent and end war; however, I see the value in competitive sport. “The world of sports media is basically where American men go to avoid therapy, where they can project their wounds and failings onto strangers and referees,” explained Sam Anderson (no relation; plus he’s a better writer) in an early June 2021 feature for the New York Times about perennial All-Star Kevin Durant and the Brooklyn Nets.
That’s about right, though I think sports sometimes serve that purpose for men, women and gender non-conforming folks alike.
On the podcast hosted by former NBA player J.J. and Tommy Alter, comedian Hasan Minhaj recently unpacked what winning means. “To me real winning is not just the points on the board and winners and losers,” Minhaj said. He addressed “Mamba Mentality,” and how Kobe ended up estranged from some people close to him for a time when he was most focused on (and achieving) NBA success. But Minhaj points to personal and professional satisfaction, peace and clarity of mind along with meaningful relationships as considerations for a “holistic” notion and reframing of winning.
I definitely don’t want to fault and to a degree actually admire athletes for dedicating themselves to winning and sacrificing in order to be great and win at the highest levels. That dedication helps raise the levels of competition even higher, making greatness greater. It can also fortify those devoted to the grind, cultivating their tenacity and confidence, which can be applied to other facets of life, including engaging in social movements and organizing against injustices for institutional change.
Arguably, elite-level dedication elevates basketball as an artform, which is maybe what attracts me to it more than the competition itself and more than the laser-like focus on winning. Maybe.
But is basketball art, entertainment or both? As popular culture, the sport surely entertains. It does so, in part, through collaborative artistic expression among teammates trying to move the ball up the floor and put it in the basket while opponents attempt to prevent them from scoring.
That mix of art and entertainment might make the sport amenable to other media we like to consume. To the point, on the eve of the NBA season opener, the Bleacher Report on Twitter posted a “Hero Ball” video with cartoon representations of Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid and Boston’s Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown (two stars who dropped 35 a piece in the actual opener).
Should we animate athletes more often?
Whether or not animation approaches the quality associated with art, the video explicitly connects basketball to combat, to the martial arts. And it entertains.
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The beginning of the NBA season this year also coincided with the birthday of WNBA star Brittney Griner, who’s been incarcerated in Russia for months on asinine drug smuggling charges. The union representing WNBA players made sure the social media world was aware. “How do you say Happy Birthday to someone who has been wrongfully detained for 243 days?” the WNBPA tweeted, along with the hashtags #WeAreBG and #BringBGHome.
Before the second game on TNT, Stephen Curry, the 2022 NBA Finals MVP, also shouted out Griner, wishing her a happy birthday and calling for her release.
Griner, who turned 32 today, ought to be able to refine her craft during this offseason so she can create art on the court when WNBA action resumes, not detained in a cell facing nine years in a Russian prison, increasingly and understandably anxious she won’t be coming home soon.
I’m big on birthdays, and I noticed that organizer and prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba, co-author of “Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators,” and author of the children’s book, “Missing Daddy,” celebrates a birthday tomorrow, on October 19. If you’d like to get her a gift, she’s encouraging people to donate to Sojourners for Justice Press, a micro-publisher specializing in zines, pamphlets and booklets.
The fact Kaba’s birthday falls one day after Griner’s got me thinking advocacy aimed at the latter’s release could be highlighting the injustice of incarceration, full-stop. Perhaps the WNBPA, along with the NBPA, which represents players in the league that just got going again, could consider collectively adopting a commitment to prison abolition in order to realize (and transform how society understands and practices) justice, by working toward decarceration and an end to all carceral confinement.
Moreover, maybe elite artist-athletes will start making more media and creating the kind of art capable of boosting Griner’s spirits, contributing to a movement to free her, and capable of nourishing a movement to abolish prisons and #FreeThemAll, as it were. There’s some precedent for this. After the police killing of George Floyd and amid the demonstrations that soon after swept the country in the summer of 2020, NBA players effectively withheld their labor with the playoffs underway and went on a short-lived strike (of sorts) in solidarity with activists who took to the streets. Colin Kaepernick, a talented quarterback excommunicated from the NFL a few years ago for taking a knee to protest racism in the US, edited and published, “Abolition For The People: The Movement For A Future Without Policing & Prisons,” and continues to advocate for an end to imprisonment.
In a 2021 journal article I wrote about art in relation to prison abolition, I suggested the aesthetic dimension art engenders offers human senses a direct, if incomplete, experience or foretaste of a more beautiful world that could potentially be brought into being. Basketball games can function similarly, in my view, illustrating the beauty of human coordination in a context predicated upon camaraderie and struggle.
The start of a new NBA season could signal the beginning of a new era – one in which we pay more attention to women in the sport, better appreciate the art of basketball, enjoy the game as entertainment, uplift it as art and bring people together to learn from and fight for each other. Hoopers and artists, often one and the same, can help fight to win a beautiful world where basketball courts replace prisons and what they create, be it off the dribble or on the canvas, inspires us to be and do better.