Hey, dear VM readers! The NBA season kicks off next week, so it’s time for the annual VM NBA preview! Official VM buddy Tom Spurgeon & I are spending this week profiling all 30 teams. (We might also get some guest-commentary from readers about their home-town teams.)
Let’s kick it off with Tom’s NBA 2005 introduction:
NBA Basketball 2005
by Tom Spurgeon
An oft-ignored key to professional sports in America is how effectively they straddle the seasons. Basketball, especially as the game has been re-imagined since the 1970s, is in the minds of most a summer game. It’s a game of playgrounds and parks packed with bodies young and those that remember youth trying to hold the court as long as possible. Playground basketball has a bad reputation vis-a-vis its effect on the traditional, more formal competitions, but in actuality the game is closer to its best in such circumstances than sandlot football or tree-bush-sidewalk-home suburban baseball could ever hope to claim. You can carve a space for yourself in a pick-up game in Seattle’s Denny Park or near the New City Y in Chicago by rebounding and playing defense, whereas football played between two driveways rarely rewards fine pass-blocking technique and hockey in the street, well, that’s a comedy sketch, not a contest. Basketball in the summer feels real, and not just the last game of the day, before dinnertime, but the first and the second and the third, stretches of movement and muscle and skill that ignore the final score.
And yet most of basketball is played in the winter, in white-hot arenas that one must leave in a heavy, three-quartered coats, opened to catch a flash of number. It’s swimming lessons as opposed to summers at the lake, heavy footsteps on the iron indoor track at the Y rather than a run by the river. There are significant basketball memories in harsh, cold places like Syracuse, New York, Minneapolis, Minnesota and Hershey, Pennsylvania; when one thinks of the old, great barnstorming teams they ride on buses in the gray cold of wintertime, hitting factory towns and playing in what would amount to cages, a snatch of summer put in the coldest most inhumane buildings imaginable. Basketball is packed high-school gyms and temporary legends, funny insults lobbed at the bench and Iron Crown beers downed in the car. When the great NBA teams of the 1980s met to do battle for the world crown in early June, they were finishing arguments begun in backcourts all the way back in January, heated discussions echoed in bars where men drank because it was too icy to drive home and into the mountains. Magic versus Bird was the conclusion to an argument that began with Dr. J’s hands around someone’s neck months earlier. The Showtime Lakers were built on Kareem’s turnaround punch the first game of the season in Detroit.
I’m not sure the modern NBA has ever understood its place in the cold, preferring instead the summer, and the Finals, and the Dream Teams, and even the WNBA. The other sports have always known how the second season comments on the first. October’s final showdowns represent the boys of summer all grown up. Football’s winter playoffs underline the battles of Fall against a more severe backdrop (a big reason the warm-weather Super Bowl generally disappoints; it should take place on an ice floe). I’d suggest the NBA has lost a sense of winter, the cold backdrop and artificial heat that links the game to its high school and college roots, that feeling of men at work, stripped to the bone, prepared to match determination and skill and muscle. Basketball is a winter sport, and needs to be once again, although the fragile athletes and ugly, undisciplined basketball made common by rampant personnel changes all scream back that no attention need be paid until June 1. And that’s okay, too. It’s just not the same.
