Ten Reasons to Watch the los76ers in 2014-5

I grew up in Philadelphia on Allen Iverson’s 76ers. He took a measly, lousy, no-good team in 2001 to the NBA Finals. Seriously, get rid of him and what was that team? Mutombo wagging his finger and Eric Snow passing to Aaron McKie? Do you even know who Aaron McKie is? Tyrone “Skeletor” Hill?

Granted, that Finals appearance was against an awful Eastern conference that today is, outside of Chicago and Cleveland, just about the same in 2014. A.I. was ridiculous at the turn of the millennium, though. In those 2001 Finals, the 76ers actually managed to beat the previously undefeated Lakers in Game 1. Now don’t go all “Iverson scored 48!” because Shaq scored 44—that game was really about the Lakers being cold. They had a month off from annihilating the Western conference. What made Iverson fun to watch was that at any moment, he could be Magic Johnson or telling people who cares about practice. Sometimes, often in fact, he’d be both. My best friend from high school, Pat, used to joke that A.I. would boldly claim, “Quit school. Play basketball.” Iverson was fun to watch because you never knew what was going to happen but at least it’d be a good show. There would always be pyrotechnics. And Iverson was the Efreet.

Which brings me to the 2014-5 Philadelphia los76ers. They aren’t going to be a good team. They won’t win a lot of games. They may not win ten, although the end of the seasons, they might pick up a few from other spectacular firestorms (see: Boston Celtic). In fact, when I think of the 2014-5 los76sers, I imagine a flying pirate ship hovering over the Philadelphia art museum, with flames erupting from every port, every night. Of course that means it’s going to be quite the show. Indeed, there are plenty of reasons to watch the los76ers. Here are the top 10 reasons to watch them:

1. How bad can they get? How many games will they lose and by how many points? We should all root against the proposal to shorten games because seeing the los76ers fall to a sharp Bulls team in mid-season form by 70 points? *Seriously, why are tickets so expensive? Also, there are still a lot of expensive tickets for that Bulls March 11^th game!)*

2. Nerlens Noel. This is all we really need to see. But really, how much can he play? How is his offensive game? He could be really good and he’s a rookie.

3. The possible return of Joel Emiid. If Emiid returns, you’ve got 3 players who can straight up ball.

4. Michael Carter-Williams. Who is that third player I just mentioned? MCW developed bad habits last year after the Sam Hinkie’s fire sale. How will he respond?

5. Who will they trade? Really this could be anyone, including the chairs and hotdog vendors.

6. How many people will continue to buy these expensive tickets? What kinds of giveaways will the los76ers’ management think up?

7. How irate and outraged will Stephen A. Smith be? How many times will he bring up Allen Iverson on First Take?

8. How loud will the boo-birds be?

9. Seriously, who is going to buy those expensive tickets?

10. And lastly, don’t watch the los76ers this season. It’s sad. But if you do, imagine them as the nothingness from The Neverending Story. It’s a lot more fun that way. Or you could imagine them as an inverse basketball team. They are whatever team the Globetrotters plays against. Maybe we’ll get to see the 1962 Washington Generals. Maybe.

In Hope for the 2014 Season: The Dunk and a Cultural of Sure Things

Perhaps the most incredible sight of the late 1970s and early 1980s was the (re)turn to the slam dunk. Outlawed by white men fearful of a college-aged Kareem, who still holds the record for the best movie scene by an athlete, the slam dunk came back to prominence with Dr. J and Darryl “Chocolate Thunder” Dawkins. It was such a powerful, athletic, and artistic accomplishment that it literally entered our language as an idiom for a sure thing. A “slam dunk” wasn’t just for physically talented individuals after this era. Slam dunks were for businesses who landed a new client or, for younger kids, a good grade on a test. The “slam dunk” didn’t just change basketball. It changed the way we looked at success and produced a new category for the most successful victories, although certainly success in sports can’t be mapped directly to business models.

In the past three decades, we’ve grown accustomed to the superior ability of NBA athletes to dunk. While there are certainly cases of successful NBA players unable to dunk—the newly retired Steve Nash is the foremost example—dunking seems a prerequisite. But as we’ve grown accustomed to dunking (and the 3-pt shot, ahem Spurs, I’m looking at you), the culture of the dunk—of sure things—we’ve moved it into a culture of expecting. We expect Andrew Wiggins to dunk and expect Jabari Parker to be an all-star. We expect Joel Embiid to be great so long as his back holds up. We expect Marcus Smart to ball. We expect rookies to make great impacts on the NBA. We’re always looking for the next LeBron James, the next sure thing.  We expect.

But this season might be a little different. Derrick Rose, finally we say, comes back. No, really. He’s coming back and hopefully he stays. The experiment of the Cavaliers gets to be compared to the control group known as the Spurs. The Clippers are high-flying, fun, and could lose games 162-157 (it’s gotta happen against one of the awful teams in the east). Chris Bosh gets to show us what he can really do (although this looks a bit ridiculous). Will the NBA screw Memphis again? Is Russell Westbrook going to explode into a million little pieces of awesome? How bad will the Sixers be? I’m actually serious about that last one. It’s going to be as fun to watch them win a few games as it will be to watch any team beat them (in all their fiery glory). We get to watch Tim Duncan go for six rings.

So rather than expecting, we get to hope. There are no sure things (yes, the Spurs are there, but remember, they’ve never won two in a row). More importantly, as the NBA season begins again, we get to do what all sports fans get to do: avoid sure things. We all have to go to work in the morning and all of our social media apps update us instantly on life. Everything is a sure thing, even more so with our interconnectedness. That’s what makes sports different from everything else. It’s so unpredictable that it’s almost a modern opera (or maybe soap opera, but I dunno).

Sports are a herculean activity conducted, often errantly, by men who might have once been called Titans. Each season, we get to watch them joust and sit in awe. We follow their lives because, in part, they make everything that’s a sure thing seem unpredictable. They rip us from the grind. And NBA players do with majestic slam dunks.

The Grind: On the Twilight of NBA Careers

A friend of mine recently remarked that decimation doesn’t actually mean an all-out destruction. It actually means the reduction of an army by 10%, at least in the Roman sense. It was an elimination conducted by those in command and a punishment reserved for mutineers. “Decimation” in this sense is a much more accurate way to describe what we’re witnessing with Kobe Bryant, Steven Nash, and several other aging NBA stars like Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and even Dwayne Wade.

Whatever you might say about either Mr. Bryant or Mr. Nash or any other old-man baller, they’ve paid their dues with their bodies. They’re old for basketball players. Bryan and Nash are, prior to the 2014-5 NBA season, 14^th and 43^rd respectively, in minutes played all-time. Bryan has played over 45,000 minutes. If you played one game a day, never taking a day off, that’s over two years of basketball, excluding the postseason. Over two years of basketball at the professional level. Nash sits at over 38,000 minutes. Other active old-man ballers, like Shawn Marion and Vince Carter, are on that list too. With 48,000 career minutes, Garnett is 6^th all-time, but his career isn’t so much in its twilight as it is in the dark. Nevertheless, there are numerous aging former-superstars. Their careers are winding down now. That’s actually the most accurate way to describe the end: their careers aren’t abruptly ending so much as they are fizzling. They’re fizzling under the NBA grind.

It’s a grind. Unlike in the NFL, careers in the NBA don’t abruptly end over night. For instance, did you know Darko Milicic technically had a 12-year career and averaged more than 18 minutes a game? In fact, your average NBA player is handsomely rewarded. But they all end, eventually. And like getting old, the end happens bit by bit. The end of an NBA career, any career really, is death stretched over an extended period of time. A character in Neil Gaiman’s epic story The Sandman actually described this kind of death eloquently:

“Death’s a funny thing. I used to think it was a big, sudden thing, like a huge owl that would swoop down out of the night and carry you off. I don’t anymore. I think it’s a slow thing. Like a thief who comes to your house day after day, taking a little thing here and a little thing there, and one day you walk round your house and there’s nothing there to keep you, nothing to make you want to stay.”

The end in the NBA isn’t generally a shot to the knee, like it could be in the NFL. It’s a grind, a slow twist every time you land after a jump. That’s what we saw with Jordan and Bird. The knees ache, the rebounding gets grounded, the juke invariably slows. We saw Shaq turn into molasses to such an extent that we forget he used to do this in his college days. Others can see the grind too, hovering in the distance. LeBron and ‘Melo are wising up, losing weight, in preparation for the grind as it arrives with turning 30 as an NBA player. The weight, though, will only prolong the inevitable, the graying (or balding) of our heroes hair as Father Time touches LeBron and ‘Melo. Make no mistake, Father Time will touch them, as he will touch all of us, even if it’s bit-by-bit.

It’s the bit-by-bit that brings me to another topic: the ESPN harassment of Kobe Bryant. Even if Kobe is your enemy and an asshole, you have to respect the man.  Kobe isn’t a fractured ghost of his former self, at least not yet. He’s earned the right to keep playing and he certainly deserves the contract he was given, if only because the fans of the LA Lakers want to witness the final grind on a five-time champion.

In regards to players generally, I believe as long as they want to stay and an owner gives them a contract, NBA players have every right to play. In fact, that might actually be why the Lakers gave Kobe such a massive contract: people want to witness the end of something great and are willing to pay for that. We want to watch Kobe cling to the end because he still believes there’s something left. There is something for Kobe to still do.

What then is the larger lesson of the grind? I’m not sure.

But take a moment to watch this video. No, I mean it. Watch it. There is something here that transcends the grind and the individuals of basketball. The twilight of basketball careers always forces us to reflect on those who came before (before Kobe, there was Jordan, before Jordan, there was Bird and Magic, before Bird and Magic, there was Dr. J and Wilt, before…). The grind, outside of basketball, tells us that whatever we’re doing, as long as there is something still in our “house,” we should do it.

So let Kobe play and we can watch him doggedly push back against the grind. He is Sisyphus and the basketball is his rock. Watching him will remind us: as long as we find meaning in it, we should keep doing it. We should keep pushing back against that thief who will always successfully steal from us.

Keep pushing that rock, Kobe. Keep pushing that rock.