Quick commentary: ESPN suspends Simmons

You have to be freaking kidding me.  That was my reaction upon hearing the news of Bill Simmons' suspension from ESPN, and it is still my reaction now, really.  Just disbelief.  Bafflement.  And a complete certainty that Simmons' army of fans is going to absolutely flay ESPN for this. And the NFL too, because all Simmons was saying about Goodell was absolutely spot on.

Goodell was and is insulting, and if he says he didn't see the tape, or didn't factor in the evidence in question upon initially hearing of it, he lies.  He had to have seen it, or grasped enough of it that he would have felt comfortable making a ruling in the first place.  He certainly couldn't have done what he says he did, which was under-estimate the severity of the thing.  No: it was Goodell's actions which undervalued domestic violence, not the evidence to which those actions were a response.

Which gets to the greater point: Goodell also lies in the sense that it shouldn't even matter whether he saw it or not anyway.  The whole question of whether he saw it is really moot and beside the point, a way of taking us away from the issue, or saying one thing is an issue when it is the opposite that is the case.  What matters is that Goodell didn't handle this right, that no one should have confidence in a commissioner who acts this way.  Everything called not for leniency but for the opposite, even if the tape wasn't seen.  And Goodell clearly tried to do as little as possible.  Bringing up the question of when he exactly should have been responsible is a smokescreen which hides the fundamental irresponsibility.

And so it is just as Simmons says: Goodell treats an incident which has many fans questioning their loyalty to the sport with all the tact of BP cleaning up its oil spills and suing its victims. At a time when those fans need guidance and reassurance, he makes them doubt themselves and the sport even more.

And meanwhile Simmons gets punished for doing the one responsible thing: he calls people out as liars and frauds and incompetent hacks when they do in fact lie and cheat and try to skirt the issue and get away with bungling things.  Somehow ESPN thinks this oversteps its journalistic standards.  But muckraking has always been a cornerstone of journalism.  And if the muck can't be dug up through reportage, then flat out accusation, in a piece of (what is clearly labeled) commentary, is just exactly what needs to happen if anyone is going to be rallied around the cause of finding out the truth and not believing lies.

After all, calling someone a liar and saying they lied in a piece of commentary isn't necessarily a factual claim about whether they lied, as some people commenting on the story are saying.  It can be more of an assertion about how we should understand their language and actions. "He lied" means, "I think he was lying," which is partly what Simmons said.  But it also means, "What Goodell did and said, and the way he stood up there, trying to say that he only saw the tape afterwards, that amounts to a lie, a distortion of reality, a gross attempt to deceive and make us interested in stuff that is beside the point."  And that is the essential bit: that is what helps call us back to the question of the fundamental honesty of the person we are dealing with.  Accusations aren't pretty, but they are infinitely worse than tolerating evil and not speaking out.

We damn well sure could have used someone talking in Simmons' accusatory tone when baseball players were juicing up into freakish hulks right before our eyes.  But no, all we heard each night from ESPN especially was inane tribalistic war-whoops and celebratory grunting, urging the record-breaking to continue.  Journalists, saying nothing, unwilling to accuse, were then not only letting the problem develop, but were in fact actively helping to perpetuate the culture of PED use.

Simmons was, ironically, very much behind ESPN's article about the Ravens precisely for this reason: he thought it was saying a version of what he said, which was that all sorts of people involved here were lying about how early they grasped the magnitude of what Rice had done, and about how innocent their mistake was in punishing him so leniently.

And now these vermin are on the offensive, because they can see that they are nearly, nearly out of it scot-free. The thing is so twisted, actually, that one begins to wonder.  Is ESPN, after coming under fire by the Ravens for its less-than-air-tight journalistic case against their handling of the Ray Rice scandal, trying to make itself look like it is in truth pro-NFL? And that it isn't trying, really, like Simmons is, to rant forcefully and truthfully about the issue but is "maintaining journalistic integrity?"  Is it trying to make sure, yet again, "journalistic standards" always conveniently align with the standards of the professional sports' advertising departments, managers, owners, commisioners?  Trying to make sure what counts as journalism is never something that questions or confronts or is "insensitive" towards the institutions and beats that it covers?

What's clear is that right now same claim to "journalistic" standards ESPN invokes to shut up Simmons are just more amenable to the production of hours and hours of meaningless controversy and often frankly offensive pseudocommentary through shows like "First-Take," than for genuine commentary that actually cares about sports so much that it would call them out when they are wrong.

All I know is, this can't end well for ESPN or the NFL. The one columnist who was, just when it looked as if sports writing would be subject to the demise of print journalism generally, right at the forefront of making sports writing relevant to a media-savvy generation of readers, sports fans, and the wider culture in general--this columnist can't be treated so harshly and brutally over words so essentially uncontroversial because so essentially true.

The strange summer of sports reporting, or: How we learned not to love LeBron

LeBron caused sportswriters to go into a deep depression this summer.  It was bad.  Bars across America were packed with moaning journalists.  My Twitter follows teemed with discussion of Camus and Dostoevsky. I had to talk down four friends on four separate nights each of whom was calling to tell me they were going to end it all, they couldn’t hit the refresh button on LeBron’s website one more time.  City council members in Bristol had to get on the news and tell people to watch their heads for plummeting ESPN employees.

Now, thank God, there’s a little distance.  In hindsight, all the summer shenanigans are being put into perspective.  I managed to get all of my friends into therapy.  The last National Guard unit left Bristol yesterday.

But, as the truth and reconciliation process continues, people still can’t avoid a little flush of embarrassment in the cheeks at the thought of just how low we stooped.

And it was low indeed.  Let’s not mince words: LeBron James’ free agency was accompanied by pure shamelessness on the part of sportswriters.  Reputable reporters were speculating about hidden meanings in Instagram posts.  Venerable news organizations were linking us to internet fan forums where people were tracking airplanes with no one of importance on them.  Anything anyone with a “source” said became prophecy.  Chris Broussard spontaneously morphed into a weatherman and climatologist, analyzing where “the winds are blowing” LeBron.

Until LeBron decided, they all reported everything, whether it was speculation or not, as news.  The mere possibility of news became news.  Which meant fantasy had basically become fact. 

All when, basically, at bottom, we just didn’t know what was going to happen.  And instead of shutting up and waiting, we made things up to keep the news cycle going.

Many have made their peace with this, understood it was a strange, funny, stupid mistake.

Sports news sometimes just reverts from the sophisticated savvy objective reporting on athletic competition to an indulgence of strangest and most disturbing urges.  Our interest in our teams sometimes isn’t anything more than a base tribalism, the lust for our warriors to go out and conquer and stain the streets with blood, which makes us fans.  Our fascination with an athlete’s statistics and performance often isn’t anything more than an obsession.  Part of this passion makes it exciting.  But it also has the tendency to make us crazy.  We can, at times, value the state of excitement for no particular reason at all.

Furthermore, LeBron just is a charming guy, someone who fascinates us.  He is the only player besides perhaps Kobe Bryant who has ever seemed like he could be as successful an athlete as Michael Jordan.  And because he is so uniquely individual a player (unlike Kobe who so very much reminds us of Jordan) this is even more amazing.  We’ll see nothing like him again, so we want to see as much of him as possible.  The way the narrator of that Samsung commercial talks—like he has a LeBron addiction, has to have a daily intake of LeBron to survive—may be crazy, may be borderline pathological.  But we also know it isn’t too far off from describing our veritable need for LeBron news at times.

In the end, then, LeBron draws us to him, and we’re not always drawn to him always in the healthiest ways.  So we got a little worked up, and that’s why we overreached ourselves.  Or so goes the reflections of the saner sportswriters.  They realize it was an instance where writers took liberties with the already lax codes of conduct that apply to sports reporting. And they know that if it becomes standard practice, they are doomed.  So they’ve mended their ways, and come to terms with their overreach.

Others, however, still can’t come around to this view.  Something in them wonders why we were all drawn in so easily in the first place.

In fact, in their frustration and embarrassment, mixed with a good helping of pride, has thus led them to begin to doubt the true nature of their subject, rather than themselves.  The instinct to root can’t be wrong, can it?  The fascination we have with LeBron is real, right?  Then how was this overreach?  How was this wrong?

For them, looking back at this summer only makes them posit a frustrating, frustrated hypothesis.  You can hear being bandied about recently.  It is quite simple, and goes like so: perhaps LeBron isn’t who he seems. 

Of course it wasn’t LeBron’s fault entirely that he caused a media circus, goes this line of thought.  But there is something about him that is hard to grasp, that makes us speculate, and makes our speculations about him continually wrong or baseless.  Because we couldn’t be that wrong, precisely when we knew everything about the guy.  Let’s be frank: we know every detail, he keeps his life completely open to everyone who cares to look, he is relentlessly available to the media, he lives and breathes for speaking out and speaking loudly whatever is on his mind.  He may be, now, more vocal than he has ever been: during the first week of the Donald Sterling fiasco, for example, we witnessed LeBron James speaking his mind unequivocally, vociferously denouncing the man and calling for his removal from the league (suggestions that were not uncontroversial and fraught with complications). How could we have actually failed to find out what was going to happen for so long?  And how could we have been so wrong when it was finally clear what he was going to do?

The answer: he is a mystery precisely because he is an open book.  He has an app that shares his every move and thought, and precisely because of this we can’t ever really be sure whether what we’re watching, seeing, reading about is the real him.  It is genuine most of the time, except for what has to be behind it, which is a huge and massive reserve of privacy which escapes everyone.  Recent stories about LeBron’s mind, his genius, his intelligence and his memory, as interesting as they are in themselves, were the reflex action of a sports news industry that is mulling this over, embarrassed it got outsmarted.  The man outwitted us—so goes the collective thought process—so he has to be smarter. Everything he says is publicized, even down to the smallest detail, and he still keeps doing things that surprise us, that we couldn’t have predicted.  And that’s exactly how you know, then, there has to be something more there, something deeper down that he’s not showing us.  We know everything about him, and we know nothing.

Sure then, these writers conclude, maybe we became a little desperate to find out clues to this mystery man’s mind in the first place.  Maybe we should learn not to take things that far in the future.  But, in the end, it wasn’t entirely our fault.  There is something that is just tricky, even duplicitous about LeBron.

There are heavy racial codes behind this line of thinking—just like there were more hanging around all the concern about LeBron’s “laziness” in his “Cramp Game.”  But it also turns on a peculiar logic that we find in larger popular culture recently around the issue of transparency.  Will Leitch articulated it perfectly in a recent column in New York magazine, though he was using it there for another purpose than to describe the overreach of the media (he was discussing why exactly we might be more interested in offseason information in general than sporting events).  Leitch argues that social media technologies do the opposite of what they seem to do.  Despite all appearances, we’re kept further away from players than ever because of Twitter and other forms of social media.  Instead of bringing us closer to the athlete—Leitch says—all the information we get about them now shrouds their real core identity in a cloud of unknowing.

It’s a perverse notion, and it trades on the notion that information is some kind of burden, the modern form of the myth that ignorance is bliss.  When information is merely worked-over speculation, of course, that’s a different story, as Leitch himself recently pointed out a hard-hitting column on how rumors and trade speculation is simply not news (Leitch is one of the sportswriters above who very much has come to terms with the overreach that happened this summer).  Pseudo-information is not news.  But the corollary to this is that real information is news, no matter how much of it we get.  To argue that ignorance about athletes is somehow preferable to having too much information about them is then backwards. If what athletes say and post and tweet reports on their reality, it gives you that much more of reality to know and enjoy.

Nevertheless, the “information-as-burden” notion is a popular one, and it runs so deep because it appeals to a generation that is fundamentally and essentially confused about how to cope with the opportunities afforded by social media.  And to get a real sense of just how confused this generation is, all you have to do is look at Dave Eggers’ The Circle, published last October.

Eggers in the book describes a society ruled by a company like Facebook, where privacy is a thing of the past and users are shamed into making everything they do available for public consumption and inspection.  It describes this society in a manner like Orwell, by following the dreary existence of one of its new employees, as she slowly becomes enslaved to its ideology.  It closes with her eventually encountering a revolutionary who realizes the threat the company poses to privacy and turning him to the corporation.

It is a brilliant book in one respect: it exposes the culture of shame that subtly hides behind the moral arguments in favor of transparency in business, politics, sports, or any area of life in which there are organizations liable to corruption, secrecy, duplicity, under-the-table wheeling and dealing.  Transparency, like anything, is not a pure good, a solution to all problems, and to tout it as such involves attributing a fundamental state of corruption to all human action—unless, of course, it is publicized.  What Eggers exposes is that companies like Facebook trade in an updated, savvier notion of original sin, which they attribute to all members not brave enough to participate.

As a critique of a certain organizational ethos, this is savvy—though perhaps Eggers would have made his case better in an essay than in a rather plodding 500 page piece of dystopian fiction.  And as a statement on how this ethos is absolutely vital to the success of social media companies—how the triumph of moral imperative to be transparent is in their interest probably more than anyone else—it is valuable and no doubt correct.  But insofar as its critical skepticism becomes merely antagonism to transparency, it becomes a crypto-conservative piece of propaganda in favor of rights to privacy.

What many users of social media long for is something other than the plutocratic populism that is mistakenly dubbed “libertarian” by its supporters: they long, that is, for the return of the Public, and seek, by publishing what they do, to construct one, despite the railings of nutjobs for ever more privatization, ever more atomization of the body politic.  Social media companies are in the construction business, as it were, and the reason they have become such enemies of larger and more traditional institutions of mass media is that these latter have sought for years now to dismantle—through stupid, idiotic news, through shoddy reporting, through demoralizing those who try and share information through any other institutional framework than their news outlets—precisely what social media companies are rebuilding.

At the same time, and perhaps even more significantly, Eggers is an advocacy of a model of human psychology and motive that is fundamentally flawed.  For this larger political attitude that is antagonistic to the de-privatization of individual behavior finds support in the idea that human intentions are fundamentally not what they appear to be.  That they always have something more behind them.  That they can’t be taken at face value.  And, basically, that they are to be doubted before they are trusted.

This is really the nub of the matter, because this is everything that the value of transparency, promoted by the use of social media, has been designed to question.  Transparency is based on the idea that we can take our intentions for what they are: this is why the more they are available for scrutiny, the better.  Keeping things in the dark keeps them out of reach and scrutiny, out of the way of commentary, dialogue, cooperation.  At the same time, no one with nothing to hide ever had to worry about putting his thoughts out there as loud as possible.

There is something sinister in this, Eggers is right to note—a sort of guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality.  But the idea is also much more positive than this.  It is based on an idea that humans, if they state their intentions clearly to one another, can trust that those intentions are carried out.  It is an effort, indeed, to rebuild the general sense—lacking since about the 70s—that the social fabric can take the fact that we all genuinely want to be in social relationships for granted, that we all genuinely do, when it comes down to it, trust each other before we doubt one another.  If it weren’t the case—so the reasoning goes—there simply would be no society in general.  Which is what has been the result of assuming that human intentions aren’t to be trusted over the latter half of the twentieth century: with no sense that social bonds are fundamentally stronger than the pressures that divide society, there is no reason really to have a society.  You get politicians, rulers, saying “society doesn’t exist,” and legislating accordingly—and you get people bizarrely believing them.

On a more basic level, you just keep waiting, when you hear something someone says to you, for their “true” intention somehow behind it to come out, to make clear its coded message in whatever they jaw on about.  You ignore, actually, what they have to say; you don’t pay any attention to it except as something that conceals what they “really” mean.  What you pay attention to is your intention of what they mean.  You interpret, rather than ever really listen.

To see in this this deafness the ideal condition of informed discourse and conversation and to brand transparency as a threat is yet another instance of the late 20th century/early 21st century consumerist worship of authenticity and self-realization, which places no value on facts beyond those that are relative and displays a tired, incurious attitude towards the richness of reality—which sometimes, sorry to say, doesn’t conform to your interpretation of what you think it is, even as it repays you in full by being only that much more interesting.  And in this respect, this doubt and distrust is typical of the generation of sentimental, self-conscious, “creative non-fiction” writers led by Eggers and David Foster Wallace who were trying to find some way, any way, around and beyond the even more (if you can believe it) blasted, tired, unserious, apathetic, horribly ironic and fatalistic culture of crushed and broken baby-boomer idealists which they inherited.  To these writers’ credit, they are skeptical of the authenticity they trade upon and use to their own ends.  But the same can’t be said of the culture itself, which prizes this virtue even as it destroys the very basis of authentic trust.

And this brings us back from what Eggers has to say to the way act towards these theories promulgated by sportswriters recently.

Instead of encouraging interpretation, instead of encouraging deafness to what people actually say, social media turns communication into something more like an act and a gesture, rather than a broadcast.  Offered up trustingly to the public, it is not attempt to get something across but is, as a statement, simply done as much as said.  It is accomplished, rather than unfinished, up for deconstruction, endless analysis of what it might mean from points of view which don’t, often, even exist. 

So a person using it, like an athlete, doesn’t offer whatever they offer up for you to dissect it.  He tells you what he tells you.  There is nothing more to it, nothing behind it.  There is no scheming.  If it is done for a reason, strategically, that reason is also visible in the image, in the statement.  There is no reserve, nothing coded in what it conveys.  Images distributed on social media don’t cloak or cover up anything behind them.  What is made transparent simply is transparent.

All of which makes this speculation about there being something deeper to LeBron seem rather silly, and even a little malicious.  It comes from the types of misunderstanding that inform Eggers’ book, and the same belief that authenticity is really the same thing as privacy.

To imply that the reporting of what LeBron was doing this summer took place because the reporters were unable to understand their subject or were even misled--well, that is a bit rich.  And it is more pessimistic about the state of sports reporting than we need be.

We aren’t missing something deep—no one needs to go any deeper to actually figure out LeBron’s more secret machinations, and how he plots to cover them up.  We just got really worked up, and handled the thing poorly.

We don’t need to be more suspicious, we just need to be smarter about how we handle ourselves.  We’re not dupes. We might just be excited and, in our excitement, occasionally stupid.

Homecomeable players

Fans have got it in their heads that Kevin Durant may be going back to Washington D.C. LeBron-style in 2016.  Well, so does the sports media, which can’t stop speculating about it.  There was so much talk that Durant deleted his Twitter account, which was hounded by fans pleading him to go.  He doesn’t want his next two seasons to be overshadowed by the same “will he or won’t he?” drama that plagued James so much, even when it seemed unlikely he would ever come back. 

Unfortunately for him, the speculation continues, thanks in part to the moves by the Wizards themselves.  They stoked the fire not long ago by hiring Durant’s high school coach as an assistant.  Why else would they do this, if not to lure Durant?  And Durant’s recent withdrawal from the USA national team from the FIBA World Cup has also been surrounded in strange off the wall ideas from Wizards fans that he wants to keep himself healthy with 2016 in mind.

There is real excitement about this issue.  Historically fans are generally supportive of athletes’ decisions to live wherever they want.  But it is nice to think that it is possible for other players to return like LeBron did.  The only real problem concerns who besides KD we might pin our hopes on.

Elite Daily recently put together a great list that showed what each team would look like if its players were only the local talent.  It piqued interest for a while and made us wonder about the options available to other players.  But as soon as you begin seriously looking it over, you find yourself doing a lot of headscratching.  It isn’t that the moves wouldn’t exactly make sense.  It is just that not all players indeed pass muster as homecomeable players.  They don’t make you as happy as seeing them on their current team, or on another team where they have better potential to succeed.

Yes, it’d be great if the Clippers had Klay Thomspon, since he grew up in Los Angeles.  But would you really want to see that instead of seeing him on Golden State, where he makes up the Splash Brothers duo with Steph Curry?  No way.  Would it be nice if Robin Lopez was on the same team, since he also grew up there?  Not at all.  The man so obviously belongs in Portland it is hard to imagine he was ever on another team in the first place.

So this naturally leads us to ask the question: What exactly makes for a homecomeable player?  A player who we would like to see come home to his home town or region, rather than go do something more and possibly even better with another team?  And who really, currently, are they?

The way I look at it, there are several determining factors which qualify you as a homecomeable player, or bar you from being one.  In some cases, one factor is enough; with other players, you need some combination of the factors.  Everyone, certainly needs the first:

If you grow up in the US or Canada and within a few hundred miles of a team:

First, on a basic level, our homecomeable player definitely has to live in the US or Canada, or somewhat near where a team is.  Sorry, foreign players.  Though it may be nice for some of them—say, Manu Ginobili, who loves his Argentina dearly—to be able to play for their own teams, I doubt few would ever give up the chance to play in the NBA for the chance to play in one’s own city or country.  That is what FIBA and the Olympics are for.  As for players born in areas where no real NBA team is, such as Kansas—well, every place has a team, pretty much, so that’s less of a consideration.  Except Alaska.  But then if you’re from Alaska you’d never even consider going home in the first place, because you don’t want to freeze to death.

If you value loyalty

Next, it probably has to be a player who values his roots and for which loyalty is a big part of how they play team basketball.  In this sense, it would make complete sense for LeBron to come back to Cleveland: he values loyalty perhaps above all things, and the way he does his duty on the court for whatever team he is on, rather than taking over, shows it.

The more self-centered players in the NBA then aren’t quite as homecomeable.  Can we really picture Kevin Love coming back to Portland?  Hardly.  He’s from Oswego anyway, which isn’t really part of Portland.  Hell, I’m doubtful whether it is even part of Oregon.  But besides that, he loves to go wherever the biggest action is, and he plays like it.  Chasing stats is exactly the opposite of what a homecomeable player would do.  Loyalty has little to do with his game.  Same with Rondo, strangely: he isn’t considering Sacramento, we know that (as much as he would absolutely destroy people on that team), but he also isn’t looking to go anywhere near Kentucky.  He doesn’t quite play selfish, but he definitely plays in a self-involved way.  And no one like that is really home-comeworthy.

If your game expresses a regional style or culture of basketball

You don’t always have to value loyalty to be able to “come home” as a basketball player.  It is enough, perhaps, if style of your play has some significant relation to your roots.

I could indeed see someone who played basketball in New York as a kid having something to his game which is tied to the location itself.  Take Lance Stephenson, for example.  There is, I think, something of a homecomeable to him.  If he came to play for Brooklyn, it would somehow make sense, in a way that someone who wasn’t from there would.  Similarly, it makes wonderful sense that Chicago has Derrick Rose, and that Rose probably would not ever leave the team.

There is one wrinkle to this idea, however.  Larry Bird no doubt was formed by the type of basketball culture in Indiana.  But could we ever really see Bird playing for the Pacers and not for Boston?  There seems to be a certain level of refinement, personalization, which takes you beyond the home-coming decision.  The talent of someone like KD and LeBron must, as thoroughly as it is individualized, still express something more about the locale.

If you have a personality that expresses where you come from

Could we see Kawhi Leonard as a Laker?  Hardly.  All that glitz doesn’t fit him.  Could we see Lillard as a Warrior?  Yes.  That’s a team that’s hard as nails and fun as hell, and in many ways very like Oakland.  Same thing with Jeremy Lin: he could play for the Warriors and represent too something of the sunny and freewheeling elements of the city right across the Bay, San Francisco.

If it doesn’t fit, though, better to let it go.  Joakim Noah?  He has personality, but it doesn’t say New York to me.  And letting it thrive outside of New York, has allowed it actually, to say Chicago.

If you don’t have a personality that makes the city feel awkward about the fact that you were born there

Dwight Howard is never going to play for the Hawks, in short.

And Dwayne Wade, you could say, has become someone so bizarrely un-Chicagoan you could only really see it making people feel weird when he drives around in his Ferrari with his sunglasses on in 22 below with the wind whipping off the lake.

If you are Canadian

Being homecomeable also has to do with the nature of the place you are from, too.  I think it is fair to say that if you are from Canada, then it makes you a homecomeable candidate for coming back to Toronto.  And this goes for anywhere in Canada, including Quebec.  Toronto isn’t just Toronto’s team, it’s Canada’s team.  At least until there’s more expansion.  And so long as that holds up, well, I could see Wiggins, Corey Joseph, Nic Stauskas, and Anthony Bennett having some sort of reason to end up there.  That’s not too far-fetched.

If you are from a run-down and depressed Midwestern city

Similarly, there are certain places where it just makes sense that you’d come back there.  Anyone from any post-industrial, decrepit Midwestern mid-market city qualifies as home-comeworthy.

Why?  Mostly because these places somehow embody the values of homeyness more than other places.  Plus, they are in immediate need of economic benefit, and the player can help return something to where he grew up.  I could see Corey Brewer, Lou Williams, or JJ Redick going back to Memphis.  We already nearly see Mike Conley on Indiana—and I certainly could see Gordon Hayward and Jeff Teague there, along with Mason Plumlee and, perhaps, Zach Randolph.  I could also see Wes Matthews going back to Wisconsin.  Caron Butler belongs back there this instant—though maybe Detroit is as close as the members of the Bucks really want him anymore.

And as for Detroit, I could see Jordan Crawford, Draymond Green, Kenyon Marton and Chris Kaman all contributing to something of the renewal of the city.  And not just by adding to civic pride.  They may add something to the mere willingness to survive and muddle through in dark times.  They could give some hope to the locals.  Kaman could also help shoot some of the wild animals reportedly running through the streets.

If you are from the South

The South doesn’t have as many NBA teams, and so there’s something right in wanting to go back and contribute to one if you’re near it.  Corey Brewer belongs on Memphis.  For some reason, KCP on Atlanta just sounds right.

And so does DeMarcus Cousins on New Orleans, doesn’t it?  It’s hard to call it home exactly, but it’s the closest thing to Mobile.  There’s something too about this idea that fits the player’s needs too: there is something in Cousins that seems rootless and restless, and in this case, he might find some support for his outbursts in the wild, excited culture of the region.

The real story here however is the Hornets, nee Bobcats.  The Hornets would become the South’s team.  Chris Paul, John Wall, Steph Curry, and Ray Allen (who was born in California but went to high school in South Carolina).  Go, now. You can’t have that many point guards, but every single one of those people needs to be on the Hornets.

If you are from the Bay Area/Central California

The Bay area and Central California is cosmopolitan, but also set in its identity.  It looks after its own, and its own are all sorts of types.  This is why it needs more people to come back home.  The Bay Area and Central California are some of the most accepting places in the US, and they need someone to accept.  We saw a little bit of it with Lin when he first played there.  But oh my, if Lillard ever came back home to the Warriors…

As for the Kings, Drew Gooden and Ryan Andersen both immediately need to get back home.

If you aren’t from Texas or Chicago

Sorry LaMarcus.  There’s just too much damned talent in that state, and too many NBA teams already that enjoy success.  If all Texas players returned home, the League would break.

It’s similar—even perhaps more the case—with Chicago, and the dominance of the team throughout the 90s doesn’t help.  Talent is better spread out than hoarded.

If you aren’t from LA or a location with a confused identity

Brooklyn has an identity that is not connected with its team.  In LA, there is also absolutely no sense of a unified place in the city to begin with, so no team can express it.  Having grown up there myself I can tell you: it’s like someone took a big handful of a bunch of buildings and palm trees and some scrubby mountains and sand and just chucked it over a 50 square mile stretch of earth next to the ocean.  Its internal logic is decipherable only to a grizzled madman I once saw gnawing on a manhole cover behind a bar in downtown Albuquerque, wearing a dog carcass for a hat and a necklace of human teeth, probably his own.  L.A. has very little identity, and both the Lakers and the Clippers are franchises that trade on glitz, glamor.  It is entirely proper that the players who most expresses them comes from Italy and grew up in Philly—two of the most un-LA type places you can get.

The same reason, to the farthest extent, goes to Phoenix.  This is the same reason, but taken to the farthest extent.  Phoenix not only has no identity as a place, the only thing it does express well is the heat itself.  No player actually comes from Phoenix.  Neither of these places is getting a player coming back to it as a “home,” quite simply because they aren’t homes to begin with.

If you would reboot a franchise

This is precisely why Indiana wanted so badly to acquire George Hill.  Reeling from the Malace at the Palace, the Pacers were looking to replace the team with “character guys” so that nothing like that would happen again.  Attendance also dropped massively, and so another idea to try and get people interested in the team was to find a home-town hero in Hill, then on the Spurs.  This is what lead to the Kawhi Leonard trade, which looks so significant for both franchises in retrospect.  It may have given the Spurs one of the best young small forwards in the game, but Indiana needed to bring someone home for them and create a different culture and team image.

The question is whether something like this would work with Minnesota, which needs a reboot more than any other team in the NBA.  It is possible to see Mike Miller, Kris Humphries, and Mike Muscala coming back to the team and generating some energy.  But the fanbase is so thoroughly maudlin and morose they seem like they’d need something younger to wake them up—though getting Wiggins, Bennett and the first-rounder for Love has sparked a bit more interest.  A big, big draft pick would be a wonderful thing.  And in this sense, “coming home” can’t really occur: you have to be somewhere else first in order to come home.

If coming to your team would connect the city to its history

Lance Stephenson needs to go to the Nets.  Now.  It would be perfect.  It would be a tribute to Brooklyn basketball.  And Melo, too, as bizarre as it would be to see him across the river. The team needs greater Brooklyn roots, to connect back to its basketball history, and these two players would do it. 

Hiring Kidd was a nice move, but it tied the team to its franchise history, and the results has left it suspended not unlike its mascot was over the court.  The team lacks any organicism—it seems to have little to no relation to the amazing culture of basketball outside it and much more to the best latte place in Prospect Heights.

A similar solution for Oklahoma City would be found in Blake Griffin.  And then there is Chris Paul coming back to the Hornets.  Paul has become such a big part of the Clippers that it would be hard to see him go, but it isn’t entirely implausible.  And it would bring the Hornets some success—success which it has contended for over a couple decades—especially in the 90s—but to no avail.  There is something calculating and fierce about Paul however that wouldn’t quite give the story the same warmth as a KD or a LeBron, perhaps.  But then again, Cliff is appealing, and maybe being back home and getting the franchise to make the city even more mindful of its successful past in basketball would bring more of that character back out.

If your city hasn’t won anything in a million years and you want to bring them a championship

It certainly does make you a homecomeable player if you have this particular motive.  No one is going to argue with that.  It is LeBron’s, of course.  But could others have the same motive?  How many people besides him could actually pull this off?

First, let’s look at the teams that would work.  They are ones that haven’t won anything at all, haven’t won much, or won their only trophies way back in the dark ages. 

We’d have the Nets, the Pacers the Cavs, the Jazz, The Suns, The Magic, all with zero championships.  Then, among teams with championships, there’s the The Wiz, The Hawks, The Blazers and the Sixers. Then there’s the Bucks and the Kings, and the Warriors who each have a clutch of trophies but not since the middle of the 20th century.  And then there’s the Knicks and Oklahoma City.

The Knicks, in some eyes, aren’t on the same list as the rest of these teams.  They are New York, they’ve had success in other sports and in so many other things, it is hard to think that if any person “came home” to the city, this would matter.  And does the longing, the desperate longing of for a third championship which has consumed fans since 1973, and nearly gave the whole city aneurysms in the early 90s, count the same way a total, utter lack of success does is Cleveland?  I personally think so.

Intensity here matters: the city would go insane if they had a real chance at a title, and if a resident of one of the boroughs came back to lead them to it—it might cause riots.  The promise that Melo could be this person drove the city crazy—that it hasn’t come to fruition is one of the saddest things about being a Knicks fan these days, and that’s saying something.   It is because intensity matters that the Wizards, for instance, is also on that list, really.  If the city didn’t care about it’s team, would it matter that much?

It is also why the Sixers are on the list too, though they won it in 83 and the city has had such success in baseball and other sports.  It is not just that 30 years have passed: despite the years of Iverson, Philly has been in a sorry state when it comes to basketball for quite a while, and the longing to watch good basketball is, among Philly fans, immense.  They are the basketball capital of the world: if one of their own came back to lead the team to a championship, it would seem significant.

This is slightly less so for Oklahoma City, though not much less.  Some people might not include them in this list because they simply have no history of championship contention in the first place: new markets can’t miss out on what they never had.  If Blake Griffin came back to Oklahoma and won the team a championship, they might be able to connect the professional team to the tradition of excellent basketball at the college level.  But that’s not the same thing.  The same applies to the Nets—though I think people would be more genuinely confused than excited for the team at this point: there is less of a longing there than for, say, the Knicks.  And that’s crucial.

We have the teams pretty much covered, then.  But of these teams, there are only so many players who, like LeBron, could actually pull off leading their city to a championship.  Terrence Jones certainly isn’t going to come back and lead the Blazers to a final and then some.

There seem to be only a few contenders.  Could we see Z-Bo coming back to the Pacers and somehow lead them to victory?  That might be a story with some warmth.  But Zach Randolph isn’t really a leader. And in general he has been around the league too much, played for too many different teams.  The thing about LeBron is that he made one move and then went back.  There’s something to be said for economy in the development of this storyline.

Could we see Kobe Bryant at the end of his career leaving.  Los Angeles to join the Sixers and win them another championship.  Hey—it could happen.  But it probably wouldn’t carry the same sort of home-town hero flavor: Kobe has lived most of his adult life in LA, now, and is such a part of that community it doesn’t quite seem like Philly is where he grew up.  Plus, he didn’t really grow up that long there in the first place.

If Lillard came back to Oakland, that would be something--though it would disappoint Blazers fans.  The problem is the Warriors aren’t going to be playing there for much longer, and they already have the success of the Raiders and the A’s in that area—though the former have never won anything in Oakland, and the A’s haven’t won a title since 89, which is seeming more and more like a long time ago.  The brute fact is that Oakland basketball hasn’t had much to distinguish itself, and the city hasn’t had much to distinguish itself, and even across the bay it would probably resonate.  It would be a little awkward.  But it would bring the city back to its history of success, raise it up, and go some ways to bringing it out of a funk.

We might wonder however whether this last motive truly is LeBron’s primary reason for coming back to Cleveland.  Are we sure it isn’t something else, like local ties, or simply the value he places on loyalty itself that makes him a homecoming player?  Certainly he belongs there, but he may belong there for other reasons perhaps, than this one.  The lack of a championship for the city however is so glaring and blatant, and would bring the city back to success, that the motive is just too good to pass up.  It is a brilliant script that LeBron has written himself back into, but there are other possible ones too, and other reasons for him to be in Cleveland, other ones that make for homecoming players.

Besides Lebron, KD too would fit this last criterion best, even over Lillard.  Washington has been in the dumps for so, so long, that coming back to the city would bring it something similar to what LeBron is doing.  We saw just how intense Wizards fans were longing for any chance at success in the playoffs last season: the freak-out that it caused was remarkable, involved the wild mood swings of a genuinely invested, demoralized city getting its first taste of hope in years.

And this, together with his fitting all of the other criteria shows you why he is next in line to go home, according to some people.  He is the most homecomeable player, period.  All of which means KD is in for a long couple years.  The speculation isn’t going to stop.  KD better just get used to it, and maybe some of the other players that are homecomeable as well.

Paul George and coming to grips with injury

I’m writing this right after Paul George severely injured his right leg in the US basketball team’s scrimmage game.  I’m not quite sure what to think, how to write an appropriate piece on what happened.  I had planned on writing up the scrimmage today and all the amazing things that occurred in it—specifically how absolutely amazing it is to watch Derrick Rose again, and to look at what Damian Lillard had to bring to the team—but like the game itself that plan sort of became pointless after George crashed into the stanchion awkwardly and went down.

When an athlete succumbs to a serious injury, it is an insignificant and very significant thing.  Both, at the same time.

It is insignificant because these are athletes, playing a game.  There is war and senseless killing going right now not too far away which is all across the front page of every newspaper, and while an injury is painful to witness, it looks like nothing compared to that sort of suffering. 

This is, of course, a pretty callous and cold view. But it is important to place things in some perspective.  The type of harm is coming to someone at the peak of their health, it is coming to harm someone who already has the best care in the world.  It is not coming on the already downtrodden, the exploited, the sick and the poor.  The type of harm that happens to them can’t be the same sort of brutalization, dehumanization which happens in war or at the hands of oppression.

Nevertheless, on the other hand, sport is where athletes dedicate that very human frame which suffers so much elsewhere to acts which precisely embody the perfection of which it is capable.  So an injury that occurs there is almost worse.  It is like losing a work of art, seeing it marred and desecrated.

Something that is supposed to image the best that is possible, as concretely as possible, is ripped and torn until it can’t ever pursue that kind of perfection again.  Or if it does pursue it, and does not do so at nearly the same health as before, it becomes a pathetic substitute of the very pursuit of that perfection—the game becomes a mockery of itself in that body.

The back and forth has to do with the fact that such injuries involve a dedicated body, a body that is and is not like normal human’s bodies.  Not in the way it is constructed, but in what it dedicates itself to.  Sport involves the body, and the body alone, in a way that even art—even dance—cannot achieve.  Nothing besides war involves such intense commitment of the human body to the achievement of a task—and that sport is not dedicated to the ends of war in fact makes the commitment that much more total.

The problem is that injuries are the one thing that can’t be overcome by this dedication.  And so the pain is great and awkward: while suffering occurs almost pointlessly elsewhere, an injury strikes at the heart of precisely the meaningful thing about a player, the thing he tries most to perfect, craft, and which cannot be damaged at all if he is going to pursue his aim.  In other words, with an injury, we understand that something dynamic, acrobatic, flexible and resilient is more fragile, brittle than we thought it was. It is like reality is telling us all that no, we shall not achieve greatness with our bodies.  We get the feeling that success is impossible.

And this is both a stupid feeling—because most people don’t have the opportunity to even think about that sort of success—and a poignant one—because if the athlete can’t do something, then we certainly are less capable than we thought we were.

The thing is, the sudden twist of reality that happened tonight, whereby it tells him what he was doing is impossible, never applied to him before, and may never apply again (though it may not need to, of course).  It doesn’t even apply to the other players on the court.  And so whatever conclusions we’re going to be drawing about the reaches of human excellence seem meaningless.  And we’re thrown back on the most stupid and obvious thought: if the injury wouldn’t have happened to him, he’d be fine.  It’s an undeserved and almost pointless lesson. 

We don’t know the full severity of the injury.  Sometimes injuries like that heal better than if it were, say, an ACL tear, people are saying.  All I know is I’ve never seen a leg do that before.  It brought up the words in everyone’s minds: career-ending.  It was not only proper but common sense to cancel the game when something of that nature happens.  You can’t play basketball when everyone is sick to their stomachs.

I don’t think it will indeed end George’s career as such.  But it could well be career-ending because it may be one of those injuries that permanently alters a career—ending it in effect, as it were, and forcing a player to begin again.  The player becomes someone else afterwards.  And Paul George was so promising, so amazing, recently, that it is hard to think that anything he became wouldn’t be a loss, on the whole.  While the praise for him last year was perhaps a little overblown, it was not that wrong, either, and the criticism and scrutiny he fell under as a player for this bizarre 2013-14 Pacers team was in a large part unmerited.

While George did not play as well as perhaps he could have, he still put up better numbers than ever in his career.  And while the team in general was turning into garbage all around him, he put up numbers that were not only respectable, but which allowed the team to put up a semblance of a fight throughout its struggles.  In many ways, he carried the team this year.

And by playoff time, whatever funk he himself was in had gone away, and he came out with amazing numbers and amazing performances.  His shooting was still streakier than usual, but when it looked normal, he obliterated teams with threes.  His decisionmaking was good.  His defense—which is arguably the best at the position—was as on point as ever.  And he remained the only player in the league besides Kawhi Leonard who could effectively guard LeBron James, which is an achievement that can’t be underestimated. That he looked like the only player out there on the floor for Indiana didn’t actually seem to matter.  Their sloppiness, confusion, and ineffectiveness also underlined how great a player he was becoming.

Now, that’s all up in the air.  The last thing you would have expected for George was an injury.  Everything that was meaningful in his career—even the weird off-court stuff that was going on with George—took a hit from this.  He will no longer be the next phenom, the rival to LeBron, who has to overcome strange and possibly seedy off-court issues to focus and challenge.  It is not only the short-term damage that is done to a player, it is the entire career arc that changes, the dedication of that body to something completely different, the life to a different meaning.

Shaun Livingston is a testament to the way that a player can come back effectively, if not better, than they were from a near career-ending injury.  I for one am looking forward to what Livingston can do at Golden State next year, and I think it may be more than anything he could have achieved without what happened to him.  He had some wise words about what happened to tonight, and said he believed the same would happen to George.

In the end I’m brought back, though, to the type of violence that we witnessed tonight, and I don’t know how to categorize it, to think about it.  I don’t know, at bottom, how real it is, how weighty it is, and where it falls in the scheme of things.  It’s not right to demarcate between “real” and “unreal” suffering, but the question of which one it is keeps coming up.  And I’m not helped by these reflections.  If even the lessons we can take away from what happened are possibly pointless, as we said, does that make what happened to George count as a more serious type of suffering?  Does it make it more real?  Or even less serious?

Perhaps, though, there is another lesson, coming out of the discomfort itself.  Injuries in sports might be important because they simply reinforce just how troubled this distinction can be.  At its heart, the strangeness and discomfort that we get from watching an athlete’s injury is that it is very much real: suddenly what was at bottom nothing more the playing out of a set of abstract possibilities with a ball and some lines on some wood has a significant human consequence on par with the sheer brutality of actions occurring elsewhere in the heat of enmity and hatred. 

But sport defies us to conclude that what makes reality—as opposed to mere play—so damned real is that it is more brutal.  Instead, it makes pain part of a game, in minor ways, but also in moments like this.  And in the process it shows that suffering can be, if not exactly managed—as these catastrophes show and one of the main things about pain is that it jars and disrupts—then integrated into a process, where we can do something with it, at the very least say something about it, think on it, mind it.  This injury doesn’t make George any less of an athlete.  It may make him more of one.  And that shows that the nature of the real, whatever lies outside the game, isn’t by nature violent.

And this is important because it gives us hope.  Reality may be uncontrollable, random, bizarre, hostile to humanity and the human body.  But precisely because injuries are such a large part of sports, because sport itself takes on the character of violence, in the pain it asks athletes to endure and survive, it actually gives us the chance to think that what lies outside the game isn’t outside the game merely because it is cruel.  It’s outside the game for all sorts of reasons: because it’s more complex, because it is more diverse, because it doesn’t play by rules, and near-miraculous things can happen in it, because it doesn’t involve as much competition, because it allows for more friendship, because it allows for greater competition, because it allows for wide forms of human expression.  In this case in particular, what comes to mind is that reality might be more forgiving, on the whole, than what is happening in basketball, full of good health coming to people just because they are people, just because they are living.

And this gives us hope, as bizarre as that sounds.  I don’t think I am trying to wrest anything hokey and positive out of George’s injury by saying that.  I think instead that George’s injury tells us something, in everything that makes it hard and difficult to think about.  That there’s hope isn’t always a comforting message, either—just as there is hope for George’s career, and this means he will have to put himself through even more difficulty and perhaps more prolonged and even more damaging pain to realize that hope.  It’s just something this makes us aware of.  And that we needed to be more aware of.  And that’s encouraging, even if it is itself painful to know.

Watching sports and and sportswriting

Just spent some time watching 120 Sports, if "watching" is the right word for it.  The MLB's Mark Newman had a nice little piece/advertisement describing what it is like to see it and just how it signals the arrival of a different world of sports viewing:

Picture a world of two-minute segments (hence the name) and ever-changing topical data cards, a world integrated with social media and a constant conversation that powers through everything in sports that fans are talking about everywhere. Imagine a fast-paced look at LeBron James' future and Mike Trout highlights and World Cup analysis and NHL mock drafts and Wimbledon previews and Bob Stoops' contract at Oklahoma and Tiger Woods back in action and NASCAR's Kentucky Speedway and college basketball recruiting and ...

There is no end, there is never an end. The videocentric show goes on, and 120 Sports will learn what you want the more you watch it. You are about to have access to unauthenticated video programming through a new platform built to intuitively integrate video and data in ways you haven't experienced. 

There were some good things about it, some bad things too.  Overall, it probably represents progress in the shape of the sports viewing experience, simply because of the hurdles it overcame trying to license so much stuff from various leagues, and the sheer disruption that produces for the model of distribution whereby the leagues each have their own special devoted cable channel.  In other words, it is remarkable for the amount of "content" that it has made available out of mere "broadcasting."

The result though, isn't as entirely surprising as this makes it sound.  The end result is something like a Facebook news feed that is nicely selected for you.  Meaning, really--because the newsfeed isn't really anything new in itself either--that it's just channel changing done for you.  The British cultural critic Raymond Williams coined a nice name for the resulting effect in the 1970s: 120 Sports produces a constant content "flow."

As such, it may be the future, or simply the retrofitting of an outmoded gesture/haptics that now (like the Facebook news feed) restores a little bit more control to the provider side of things and siphons it slightly away from the consumer, by shifting the consumer-producer relationship to one centralized media hub or output point.  Basically, its the internet's version of a cable sports package.

The one thing that may be the wave of the future involves the way the channel changing (as it were) changes for you: it does so according to the development of stories along social media.  After live-tweeting some basketball games like the press guys do at the games, I can tell you, it's REALLY fun, and much more fun than following stories as they are ultimately processed by sports highlight shows.  The more that it is raw twittering that determines narratives, the less those narratives get processed, and the more interesting are the possible ways that the story develops.

This is just like enlarging the stadium so that people who don't sit next to each other can sit next to each other. The strange result, in other words, is that we no longer become spectators interested in a representation but participants in a media event.

Pessimists thought this most likely would produce worse writing, but the exact opposite has happened.  It makes for a whole new mini-genre of writing: the sports zinger genre.  This is something that has purchase at the moment and will have it later when its outmodedness (anticipated and in a way built in to the form) is taken into account, but never quite fully captures the instant, never quite fully commentates upon it authoritatively, just shapes and solidifies and concretizes and memorializes.

Together with other types of writing that pop up around media-integration like this, it is productive of content that centers around the fundamentally great fact about sports writing as a whole: namely, that there's no need to craft a full narrative, not only because the narrative is ongoing continually, but because the words may have an effect, and at any time--like a cheer of support or of derision--affect the nature of the game it comments upon.  Any time there is a sign of narrative closure, events rupture it--I've never seen a field of storytelling that spends so much time pushing anti-narrative as sportswriters.  Contact with the immediate event, shaping that event and giving it significance or linking it to various networks, and then letting the thing go before anything more than a network of association, facts, statistics, what have you crystallize into anything too definite... that is sports writing, and it is glorious, and there is no other form of writing that comes close to it.

But for that, all you need is a Twitter app and a TV, really, not a whole sports platform, as it were. And that means that Twitter's auto-emojiing of the hashtags for the World Cup may be actually, in the end, a bit more relevant than 120 Sports.  In a way, while it moves towards mediatizing sports, it still conceives of its audience as a set of consumers still watching something like a channel and a flow.  And consumers have become users, fellow producers or mediators.  The ultimate irony for 120 Sports in general may be that, in the end, after working so hard to bring a good product to an audience, that audience depends not on the quality of their product, but just how much and in what ways it gets used.

Game 4 recap: on the Heat's "extra gear"

Erik Spoelstra said after the fourth game of the NBA Finals on Thursday that he would be “checking under the hood” of this Heat team, to try and see what could be fixed.

Maybe he’ll find that something in the gearbox was missing.

We all hear about the Heat’s “other gear.”  The metaphor is used loosely, but it’s meaning is clear.  The Heat possess something that steps up their game when the time calls for it.  That raises their top speed, that allows them to move faster.  The other gear is what allows the team to coast along the smooth wide roads of the regular season, and then, when they hit the highway of the playoffs, to speed up, shift, and blow by the other traffic. 

In the 107-86 Spurs victory, there was no evidence of any other gear there.  The team seemed merely to be clanking along.

Something of the same thing happened in Game 3, as San Antonio blew out the Heat 111-92.  But because the Spurs played so exceptionally well, and because the Heat were able to mount something of a comeback—nothing like an “extra gear” performance by any means, just a solid, determined effort to grind away at the lead and reduce it—it wasn’t clear whether the Heat’s inability to challenge them was a fluke thing or not.

But after an hour and twenty minutes of looking at film of the Spurs’ miraculous performance, and their own failure to keep up, we would expect the Heat to have come out in Game 4 at least with some better sense of what to do to make the Spurs work for what came to them so easily in that third game.

Instead, they played almost the exact same way: sloppy on defense, tired on offense, not finding open players, making bad decisions.  “I was surprised,” Spoelstra said.

He may well be surprised because what he thought was always there, and what was always there for the Heat, didn’t seem to show up.  It’s a real possibility the “extra gear” the Heat rely upon so thoroughly, and which is supposed to bring higher levels of performance out of them, isn’t there.

Indeed, it becomes dubious as to whether the intense effort that they used to step up their game ever constituted anything like an extra gear in the first place.  The better metaphor might have been something like putting nitrous oxide in the fuel supply.  The Heat’s inner workings may well not be designed around the presence of some special and separate level of performance so much as simply given a boost from outside additives that increase the pressure and make things run faster.

The Heat play an extremely difficult brand of defense (as Grantland's netw3rk pointed out well), as well as an extremely tasking brand of offense.  The fuel needed to speed it up, to make it work better, doesn’t come from it’s inner workings, the way it is schemed, the way it is run.  The Heat’s defense, when it is playing better, simply goes harder: the “blitz” that they use on the pick and roll play, for example, can work efficiently enough through its mere aggressiveness as a ploy.  It becomes better, it goes to another level when it is done with extra focus and added intensity—not when anything crucial or strategic about it is changed.  Offensively, their isolation plays create through constant, focused improvisation, and only becomes better by simply working more intensely: when LeBron, that is, or Wade, begin to simply play harder.

In a way, understanding how they work this way, makes their achievements more impressive.  They almost reached through their effort a level of efficiency that made us suspect the whole vehicle was set up differently than we thought it was, internally, on the inside.  They played so hard that whole vehicle in general almost turned into a differently configured machine than the one we saw during the season.

It makes their achievement last season in particular quite amazing, really: the suggestions floating around which LeBron James is worried about—that the Heat didn’t really win it, but got lucky—are all the more baseless (and not just because luck is part of the game and doesn’t invalidate anything in it when it falls one way or the other).  They played with such effort that things which happened because of the intense pressure they put upon themselves looked like opportunities only the most fortunate could have for themselves.

Even more than that, though, understanding them this way doesn’t give credence to the notion that because the Heat are simply worn out, they don’t “really” want the championship in the same way they did before—because if they did, they would switch it into that extra gear, presumably.  This is something that has been insinuated in all this talk of the “gear” in general, and put in franker and different terms by Mark Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy during the Game 4 broadcast, and their hounding of the Heat to “want it more.”  The Heat may indeed be bringing the extra intensity that won the championship last year.  It is just that, because this doesn’t make them into a different machine, but the same one only moreso, it can be beat by greater intensity.

Against a team that knows the workings of their machine inside and out like the Spurs, that has reverse engineered them over and over again, and that can pick them apart with a tinkerer’s precision, it becomes clear that the difference involved in the “extra gear” is simply one of intensity, not of kind—of quantity, not quality.  Because if the Spurs play with extra levels of intensity and effort—as they indeed are in this series—they can completely counteract everything the Heat can throw at them.   It just involves picking them apart more swiftly, thoroughly, ruthlessly.  And that is exactly what they did to them in Game 4.

So why did we think that the Heat’s “extra gear” existed in the first place?  Perhaps because the inner motivation that makes a player simply, frankly, merely play harder is quite opaque to us.  “Wanting it more” is a strange and almost empty notion: if we have a desire, it motivates us.  It’s that simple.  To want the thing more, doesn’t really alter the nature of the desire—unless this makes it another desire.  Also, to want something means wanting it practically, wanting it in a way that can translate into action—not disappearing into the realm of magical thinking where we think it can be gotten just merely because of the intensity of our want.  And if everything you are doing is indeed translating into action and effort, it is hard to see where further effort can be put in.

With all that being the case, it may just be easier to think that the Heat aren’t trying at the limit of their efforts, but actually just fiddling with the gearstick when they want, and becoming whatever they want to be.  What’s clear is that if any of the Heat themselves share this conception of their efforts, the Spurs surely are disabusing them of it pretty thoroughly.  Through this championship series, in other words, the Heat may finally learn how to appreciate their history of intensity and effort a little more than they already do.  It would be however sad to have to learn it through such thorough, crushing defeat.

What to watch when the Playoffs aren't on

Something unspeakable has been going on in between these rounds of the NBA playoffs.  Namely: they aren’t happening.  There is no playoff basketball on TV. 

Now, if you’re like me, this is extremely disconcerting. When playoff basketball goes off the TV—not just in my apartment, mind you, but in others, in the car (because it’s not on the radio), in sports bars, brewpubs, and other places all across America and the world—when playoff basketball disappears from the planet like this, I suddenly don’t know what to do with myself.  I’m roaming around like a zombie.  People mistake my face for Tony Snell’s.

As soon as I caught myself Googling basketball clips on YouTube, I pulled myself together and realized I had a problem.  These playoffs have just been too good.  I’m hooked, and now I’m suffering.

There is, of course, plenty to do to occupy myself until the Finals begin.  There is plenty of time now to rewatch the last series between the Spurs and the Heat.  But that will take only so long.  Reading all the material in the papers and on websites, can only do so much.  Meanwhile, I’m suffering.  I need a fix, so I’m not withdrawal.

And, furthermore, though it’s almost excruciating to consider right now, eventually there will be… the off-season.  If I don’t develop a healthy relationship with this drug, I don’t know if I’ll make it to July, when the summer league starts.  Blazer fans in particular may have gotten the worst end of this deal.  We had the most exciting series in the most exciting first round of playoff basketball in recent memory, while people with teams that didn’t make the playoffs have had time to disinvest themselves, to decathect. 

So I got proactive.  How, you ask?  I’ve decided to watch another sport on these days without playoffs.  The live experience of some other game involving a ball may help me through this, I think, and eventually transition myself into a state where watching something other than playoff basketball is ok.

But which one?

Throughout this last month, during these interim basketballless periods, there have been several choices to make on the TV.  And in these days before the Finals—and in the days in between the Finals, don’t forget those—there is a profusion of sports-entertainment product to consume.  So I grabbed the remote, sat down with a beer and some chips, and did the research for you all.  You can thank me later.

These are my rankings for the best NBA substitutes to watch when the NBA isn’t on, from lowest to highest.  I ranked not the sports themselves, but the experience of watching the sports on TV as a whole.

I did this scientifically, of course, breaking them down into three essential categories.  First, funsomeness: how much fun is it to watch the games.  How much I find myself off my seat yelling obscenities when something goes wrong.  How much I find myself ripping my shirt off if something glorious happens.  Second, rootability: how much can I get behind any one side in any one game as a fan.  How much I can play out my fantasies for how the game will go and develop, and how much I can get disappointed when these dreams are crushed.  Third, soothingbalmitude: how much watching the sport in question actually compensates for the loss of playoff basketball.  How much it consoles, relieves, and acts as a restorative force to get me ready again for its reappearance like a phoenix (Suns).

Each is rated out of 10, where a 0 equals a THAT’S TURRIBLE and a 10 equals an INDUBITABLY.

HORSE RACING

Now, I have nothing against racing horses—racing in all forms is excellent—but there is a strange atmosphere that hangs over the whole sport.  Something offputting.  The mere name of a race that was on after the first round of the playoffs was over perfectly captures this.  The Preakness was on.

The Preakness…That doesn’t sound like a sporting competition I want to watch.  It’s like how The Hague doesn’t sound like a city I want to visit.  I can sure as hell believe the International Criminal Court is there, though: there’s something too big and too vague intimated by making such an article an integral part of the name, even something sinister.  Moral of the story: you can’t have “The” be an integral part of your name.  In sports, it makes it seem less like a contest than an event, and less like an event than a show. 

And fundamentally, that’s what The Preakness was.  Things of consequence barely happen, and when they do are over too quickly.  There’s a lot of buildup and then a little bit of running animal legs and things, and then we’re done.  I know this severely underrates what is going on, the complexity, the beauty of the spectacle.  But fundamentally the clincher is—it’s still just too much of a spectacle.

Being there, being at the track in person, would be a blast.  Things that approached this—the sound of the horses in the gate, the thundering hooves as they rumble down the track, the chatter of the jockeys that you can hear—were neat.  But there is absolutely no way that all can translate into a viewing experience.  Sitting at home, watching on the TV, you can’t take part in it.  All you watch is a quick race that you know is just going on so that a bunch of rich people can bet and smoke and drink and debauch and be greedy and toss around money, women, men, salacious glances, never directed at the race itself, because they are not really being interested in what they're watching except for the outcomes and an occasion to generally act reptilian. 

In short: too rich, too odd, too distant.  At its best, it merely approaches the excitement generated by a Nets regular-season game.  And there’s none of the bizarre, terrifying Nets-Knight to haunt my dreams, either.

Funsomeness: 2

Rootability: 4

Soothingbalmitude: 1

Total: 7

NASCAR

Like horse racing except it has a poorer audience and the horses occasionally crash and explode.  So, slightly better.  But you’re still not brought any closer to the action, even especially on short tracks.  The only way to see it is up close.  And preferably drunk as you can be.

Funsomeness: 3

Rootability: 5

Soothingbalmitude: 1

Total: 9

WOMEN'S NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION

If we’re looking for something to help cope with the lack of playoffs, we’re also not looking for things that replace them.  We’re not looking for what is most like watching playoffs basketball.  Mimesis be damned: darts, for all I know, could be the best thing to watch (unfortunately, no darts was on, so they are eliminated from contention in my rankings here… though frankly I wasn’t quite ready to stoop to watching darts).

This is why watching the WNBA fails to really compensate for my loss.  You’d think that because the WNBA is basketball, it would fill the void we’re looking to fill.  But it isn’t NBA playoffs basketball, and, watching it, you suspect other completely different sports might fill the void better.

Now, “it isn’t NBA playoffs basketball,” is a loaded phrase, historically fraught.  And I mean it in a specific and I hope respectful sense.  The WNBA is too often doomed by association and comparison to the NBA.  You judge a dissatisfying thing harsher when it threatens to resemble the thing you like.  And in a way the WNBA has been dogged by this throughout its entire existence: at its best, it approaches something it merely resembles; at its worst, it seems to be unable to achieve any resemblance whatsoever. 

Different solutions have been proposed to deal with this: but if you compare it to NBA basketball, all you see are differences; if you begin to think of the WNBA as a different sport than NBA basketball, you’re effectively saying women can’t do what men do.

I know this is not a complete solution, but basically I see the WNBA as a version of NBA basketball that has different rules.  The rules are not ones really involving the size of the court, the ball, what constitutes a foul, and whatnot.  They have to do with the height of the player, their weight, their physical capabilities.  The WNBA is basketball which just like the NBA (or any game for that matter) is played within a certain set of limitations.

They aren’t, in principle, even more restrictive limitations than those of the NBA, though they have to do with the body of the player—certain physical rules are present, in this way of thinking about it, in the NBA too, and in many ways they are more strict.  In a way it is like the 6’5-and-under leagues you sometimes find.  The basketball is just as good—and often better—but its play takes different forms.  Ultimately it is like racing with different sized engines, or (the analogy perhaps most apt) different weight classes in boxing.

Now, with all that considered, where the WNBA games fail to satisfy my NBA playoff cravings, where they present themselves as particularly inferior, are in the fact that what I am looking for is indeed the specific awesomeness of PLAYOFF basketball.  Watching the Seattle Storm get beat the Phoenix Mercury, I felt like I would be having the same problems watching reruns from earlier in the NBA season as a way to fill the void here.  Things don’t hinge on every play, and the fun of it here is not in the action, but simply in the precision of the athleticism.

Watching Brittney Griner do things that are not only physically amazing, but also simply so precise—the way she uses her body, her ability to spot the exact angle at which to swat at a ball for a block, are exact motions, remarkable to watch.  You don’t find that in college women’s hoops, though in certain ways you find there a somewhat playoff-like crazy intensity that could, were the playoffs on, perhaps do some consolation work for me.

Unfortunately, though, the WNBA doesn’t quite do everything it needs to do here to bring this out in the manner of its broadcasting: we need more slow-mo replays to appreciate what these women accomplish as athletes, and we need more amazed, rather than simply excited, announcers.  It’s here that the whole experience seems most lacking.  There’s not enough people in the stands, there’s not enough glitz and general craziness.  I need the possibility of something like the aura that surrounded Lance Stephenson in those last two games.  With a little more entertainment and show—more of Griner’s tattoos around the league—it could well be a sporting experience I’d watch on these off days, when I’m longing for sweat and hardwood and Birdman and things like that.

Funsomeness: 3

Rootability: 4

Soothingbalmitude: 4

Total: 11

FORMULA 1 RACING

Like horse racing, only the people are even richer, and the horses are made of strange space-age polymers.

And let’s be honest: the whole thing is really mainly an occasion for parties.  I don’t say this lightly, as a fan of F1.  The F1 in Monaco, the trials for which were on between the first and second rounds was a significant race, a significant test of endurance and skill that sustains itself for quite some time.  The thing takes longer than 15 minutes.  Rich people have to occasionally stop swilling their drinks for a second to gather themselves and concentrate on watching.

But they still are rich people sitting there mostly to swill drinks, gamble, and screw beautiful women.  When this whole experience can be made portable, let me know, I’ll put it at the top of my list.

One thing which elevates F1 racing beyond the other forms of racing: the on-board cameras on F1 cars are EXCELLENT.  With a big TV, going a lap with your eyeballs bolted on one of those things is an experience.  NASCAR cameras are always placed deep inside the cockpit, where you have to look past a jungle of equipment and gearboxes and things out a grimy windshield to see anything.  Or if they’re on the car’s front or rear everything’s vibrating so you get sick and throw up that pizza you’re eating.  You’d think they could find a better camera angle.

Horse racing, naturally, involves no cameras at all, which is why it loses out yet again.  Though if we could find a way to install a camera on a horse, The Preakness might jump up near the top of this list.  Horse-View-2000 can become a thing.  You heard it here first.   Don’t steal my idea.

Funsomeness: 5

Rootability: 4

Soothingbalmitude: 4

Total: 13

MAJOR LEAGUE/CHAMPIONS LEAGUE/PREMIER LEAGUE/LA LIGA FOOTBALL AKA SOCCER

Well, hailing from Portland you know I have to enjoy seeing the Timbers.  And I do, even though they are having a horrible year and Porterball seems extinct amidst a flurry of injuries, bizarre suspensions, and general suckiness.

Yesterday they played against the Vancouver Whitecaps.  Because Portland’s Rose Festival is going on, they decked themselves out in their sexy reduniforms, to make all the womenfolk swoon and show some pretty sweet civic pride in the process.

I watched the game in a Timbers bar, and this made things eminently fun to watch.  Yet I couldn’t escape the general boringness of the action itself.  MLS soccer is extremely slow-paced, plodding, offensively minded, and generally not like its more interesting European counterparts.  Arsenal playing Hull City was some real football: big loping passes, quick sprints—the whole field seemed bigger and the players smaller, so quick was everything moving about.

But even this quick movement isn’t quite what a basketball-hungry viewer wants: the motions of soccer are too intermittent, the flight of the ball too high, the movement off the ball never quite clearly off the ball, the movement with it never quite reaching levels of control you get in basketball.  Eliminating the hands was a bad idea—that’s the upshot you basically come away with, as a playoff-basketball-hungry viewer.

But what saves soccer generally and makes it fun to watch are the fans—which are actually quite telegenic and so escape much of the problems of the other sports low on this list.   Shots of the fans are some of the most fun to see in any sport, and if you turn the volume up, you feel like you’re there.  When Real Madrid played FC Barcelona, THAT was amazing to see.  The general insanity of the entire country at that moment was wonderful, and you felt it.  And Timbers games are this way too.  Everything becomes amplified and funner to watch, even at home, when you see and hear thousands of people yelling songs continually, only stopping to excoriate refs in spittle-laced blasts of profanities, or pump fists in celebration in an orgy of war-painted blind drunk hooligans.

So while the game isn’t the best thing in the world for a basketball fan, the crowd makes it and provides a satisfaction that is hard to get elsewhere.

Funsomeness: 4

Rootability: 9

Soothingbalmitude: 5

Total: 18

NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE

This should be rated higher.  Hockey has the right amount of fast paced, graceful movement.  It has continual action.  It’s like watching one fast break after another.

And it is in the playoffs, which makes matches extremely competitive—something someone who is in playoff-withdrawal desperately craves.  And this means there are fights.  Even more fun fights than the regular season.

But it is all—padded.  And laden with sticks and gloves and whatnot.  There’s something about basketball’s nakedness, the fact that you are simply there with your body, in nothing more than thin uniforms—well, unless you are Dwight Howard, and love to wear those foamy wraps and elbow protectors and things and look like a big red 7 foot human condom.  For the rest of NBA players, you’re out there, you’re moving just with your arms and legs and a ball, and you are the only thing that pushes the thing through the hoop, or stops it along the way.

With hockey, there’s a huge amount of mediation of athletic force.  You’re not watching the athlete put the puck in the goal, you’re watching his stick.  And while this should actually make it more awesome, for those hooked on playoff basketball it doesn’t.  It feels more false.  During the regular season, perhaps, when basketball players concentrate more on saving their body, the relationship is turned around: playing with pads is actually a pretty good way to describe what happens during that period of time, and so hockey has a sort of honesty to it that is satisfying and makes the playoff clashes between the skating players much more interesting to watch.  But there’s no comparison between a hockey player getting hit to the boards and LeBron getting grabbed and smacked going to the basket.

Nevertheless, hockey is fun as hell.  The fans are drunk, attack the players when they get hit onto the glass, and it remains the only sport amazing enough to blare a klaxon normally reserved for ICBM strikes accompanied with red flashing lights stolen from nuclear submarines when something good happens to their team.  All this translates well intoa viewing experience too, because, unlike soccer, the rink is small enough that all the insanity gets piped pretty clearly through the TV.

And yet while hockey seems to deserve a much, much higher rating, it has to be put here.  This year so much action has gone on, so many game 7s, that it’s actually painful for me to do this.  But science requires I have to grit my teeth, because there are two even better sports to watch.

Funsomeness: 9

Rootability: 7

Soothingbalmitude: 5

Total: 21

MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL

Loss is a curious thing: you wouldn’t think the absence of an object could actually be a rich emotional experience.  The thing you don’t have is gone.  You’d think that, if there’s anything you feel, it’s not what the loss itself makes you feel.  Rather, you think it’s the residual attachment you have to the object now gone that hurts in so many ways.

But the opposite is the case: lack has many dimensions to it, ones not even caused directly by your attachment to the object that is missing.   I miss a thing, but it’s not that thing which makes me feel cruddy.  All sorts of other things, some involved with basketball, some not, are what are actually making me feel cruddy.  It’s the void itself and what surrounds it: everything that the thing it has its own texture, its own character, elements I discover more and more as I go along.

In a way, all this means is that we are childish and spoiled and we tend to replace a loss with a longing for the missing thing very quickly.  Too quickly, sometimes: we don’t let the loss itself be felt, and all we have is the longing for something, the desire, the want, and we don’t understand what just happened to us.

But this also means the compensation for the loss that might be most satisfying can come from something that doesn’t necessarily look anything like what disappeared, or produce anything like the same sorts of pleasures.  In short, we don’t have to get what we like, to adjust ourselves to the loss of the thing we liked.  Each loss is an opportunity for the discovery of something new that can fill the void.

These are the deeper reasons why watching baseball is one of the most satisfying basketball substitutes.

It doesn’t resemble basketball at all.  The rhythms are slower, the game takes more time.  This annoys you for about 5 minutes, and the game begins to seem like the most boring thing ever in your life ever, and you sort of want to kill yourself, and you hand reaches for the controller to turn it to NBA TV to see if another rerun of Inside Stuff is on and you can learn more about Patty Mills’ country dancing… but then something changes.

You take a break from your attachment to fast-paced action, and the exasperated, extenuated announcing, always half-unsure about everything that is happening on the court.  Everything is clear in this strange sport you’re all of a sudden now looking at a little more closely.  Everything is almost over-calculated and decided.  Whether things come off is much more a matter of definitive action-taking than anything in the jazzy-free-flowing world of basketball.  While the latter takes more intuition, more sense of timing, baseball is rational, reasonable.  Everything is a probability much more precise than any shot-selection.  Every pitch involves more psychology, more biography, than Jordan used to take down one of his opponents.

And you watch this unfold, in its regular pace, with its rather staid and stocky gestures, its unnatural movements—is there anything more unnatural than a throw of a baseball?  And you begin to realize the depth involved in each movement, the level of thoughtfulness.

And by now you’ve joined the flow of the game, and you’re hooked.  Baseball is so satisfying because it doesn’t represent anything like the pleasures of a playoff basketball game at all.

The more superficial reason for all this—I’ll shed the existential analysis here—is that it all translates well into a TV experience extremely well.  It doesn’t make for the most entertaining viewing—but it is less different than being at the game than pretty much any other viewing experience you could think of.

Furthermore what you see is just what you want.  It’s early summer, you want some sport that is a little bit more outdoor-friendly, after being shut in for the whole winter and partly the spring.  It’s high time to get out.  And as the camera sweeps over the huge stadium, overlooking a city skyline, or a vista over which the sun is setting, you get this experience to the full.  And there is the crowd: a crowd that is bigger, and in for the long haul, no matter really what happens.  Ballparks aren’t so much entertainment venues as places, sites that you visit.  You don’t find the seats empty in the 1^st quarter and at the end of the 4^th like you do in American Airlines Arena.  People are there, they are sitting down, relaxing, as if at a public park.  This change in scenery makes for a change in mood, which is strangely refreshing.

And that’s the key to the experience: it’s like a dip in the pool.  It gets you feeling good, so you can sit back and have more fun in the sun.  So too are you ready for basketball right when it gets back.  And if it never got back, well, you’ve discovered something new in baseball, something that can strangely satisfy a whole host of things that surrounded our love of basketball.  And this is probably what makes it the best sport to watch after playoffs are finally over and gone.

Funsomeness: 6

Rootability: 6

Soothingbalmitude: 10

Total: 22

BOXING

Let me list the reasons why boxing wins this contest, hands down.

• It involves people fighting other people after months of each participant bragging that he will hit the other person more.  Competitiveness can’t be more present in a sport.

• It involves concrete outcomes.  As much as the scoring is said to be a detriment to people watching, it’s clear what is happening at each moment, and it’s pretty clear what happens at the end of each fight: someone gets beat more than another guy.  Or if it is close, that’s clear too.  Boxing may not have the most decisive or decided outcomes, but it certainly has ones you can see and feel and witness.  This is because,

• It involves a level of physicality, athleticism, and endurance that shames every other sport besides basketball and maybe even includes the latter.  This is because, like basketball,

• The people are not wearing anything.  There’s only the gloves.  You see everything.

• It’s therefore one of the most telegenic of sports, maybe even beating basketball in this respect.  The only thing you could ask for more is more slow-motion replay, to witness just how much goes on in every single second, how much fakery, how quick reactions work, foot movement, everything.  But it’s quite frankly okay that this doesn’t happen.  Why? Because,

• The action never stops.  Even between rounds.  Each time the bell sounds, it’s like a pitstop takes place in which all sorts of implements of torture are used to stitch up a poor guy’s face and keep it from bleeding.  It’s like watching the Clippers play the Spurs, two teams that push the ball as quick as possible across the half court line.  Only if they only got defensive rebounds and only occasionally scored.  Everything is moving, all the time.

• The crowd is amazing, always bloodthirsty, and often indignant, which is the best mood a crowd can be in.

• The announcers are amazing.  They invite people who went rounds with each opponent into the announcing booth.  Which isn’t a booth but a ringside seat, feet away from all the action, just like in the NBA (there are few sports where the announcers can be involved and hit or hurt by the action, and all these sports are AMAZING).  This leads to authoritative, direct, personal commentary, of the kind that only Chris Webber or Charles Barkley really pretty much uses.  It also involves the most amazing phraseology in sports besides basketball.  Watching a heavyweight match between the first and second rounds, this sentence was uttered: “He’s lookin fresh like a glass of iced tea.”  How can you not love that.

• Occasionally, they’ll interview the coaches and trainers as the round is going on.  In an interview with Buddy McGirt he has to stop talking to yell “KEEP THAT RIGHT HAND UP!!!”  It was like watching Joakim Noah’s father during that Bulls game earlier in the year.

• Like basketball, physical characteristics translate into movement and character direct, with surprising immediacy.  Saying someone has a “chin” is very much like saying they have a good “left hand” in basketball.  The body becomes more than just a body: it becomes representative of a style and a way of playing, a “game” unto itself.  This is the type of thing that makes basketball approach dance or other forms of art.  Only there is slugging and hitting and blood.

• And this gets at the deepest and most fundamentally satisfying, fun element of boxing, that is incredibly like basketball.  The participants are individuals, characters, well before they are athletes.  Or as athletes, they are humans.  This has always been the appeal of basketball over other sports, and it comes home especially in playoff time as we look back and look at the journeys each player has made to get so far.  And boxing gives it to you in an almost more concentrated form.

If that doesn’t get you watching boxing in these off-days, I don’t know what will.  The only downsides are the relative lack of frequency in matches—the thing that makes them such a big deal also leads to a kind of randomness in scheduling—and the non-existence of teamwork.  Nevertheless, it’s about as close as you can come to basketball, I think, in terms of a satisfying TV experience.

Funsomeness: 9

Rootability: 9

Soothingbalmitude: 9

Total: 27

So there you have it.  Nothing, of course, replaces playoffs basketball, but one of these replacements will do a pretty serviceable job, now and even eventually in the off season.