The NBA Big Is Dead, Long Live The NBA Big

“I was out-of-doors, eating snowballs / for dinner & sleeping by Lake Michigan.” - Adrian Matejka, “Blues His Sweetie Gives To Me”

But first, your weekly Vine: we’re in the last week! Plagues still happening, tho: Monday was Chapter 62: “The Plague of Bullets.” Tuesday was Chapter 63: “The Plague of Planning.” Today is Chapter 64: “The Plague of History.” Thank you to everyone who has read or otherwise supported Vine. There’s still time to catch up—Thursday and Friday’s stories are bangers.

You go from eating snowballs outdoors to purposefully getting gold teeth and bragging about how it makes every bite of food extra expensive. I’m reading about Jack Johnson and boxing this week, but let’s talk basketball.

We’ll bring it back to writing, though.

All you The Line Break listeners who turn the podcast off for the last 15 minutes, you’re absolutely within your rights, I’m just promising this column is more metaphor than straight sports talk.

we’ll even use dinosaurs as a metaphor again (credit: Pixabay, dvulikaia)

Everyone thought the big had gone the way of the dinosaur. This was around 2010-2016, an absolutely hilarious time to think a crisis was occurring, in retrospect. Sure, the nation was still reeling from the recession and Dwight Howard was running away with All-NBA First Teams. Sure, Charles and Shaq where on TNT every night, saying things like “why don’t the Warriors let Andrew Bogut pound the ball down low?” and “the Spurs do too much damn passing. Give the ball to Timmy down low!” and “Dwight Howard will never win a champion if he can’t pound it down low!” Did the Spurs, Warriors, and Dwight Howard win any championships in the last 10 years? Don’t ask the TNT crew, they don’t remember.

“I get paid so much money, yet we play Who He Play For every year” - the Jonathan Franzen of NBA commentary

Now, we have Nikola Jokic redefining the position with passing, three point shooting, and yes, low-post dominance. Joel Embiid, last year’s MVP who “can’t help but lead the lead in scoring,” per

The Second Arrangement

, is awesome even if his career does parallel Patrick Ewing’s too much. Giannis Antetokounmpo might be a power forward, but he’s been (not incorrectly) called the Modern Shaq and can initiate an offense. Karl-Anthony Towns is a player I don’t respect, but his self-proclaimed “best shooting big man of all time” assessment isn’t demonstrably false. Mitchell Robinson just decided a playoff series simply by having a bigger ass than Evan Mobley (thought by some to be Diet Kevin Garnett). We’ve gotten this far and not even mentioned All-NBA winners Domantas Sabonis, Anthony Davis, and Rudy Gobert. Nor have we climbed the beanstalk to check in on rookie phenoms Victor Wembanyama or Chet Holmgren. Thinking Basketball can discuss them for us.

The dominant big never died. Bigs just had to learn new skills. Skills they’d neglected learning since the 80s, when Arvydas Sabonis and Bill Walton and Manute Bol were all doing preliminary versions of these things. In a way, bigs having been giving guards an advantage, same as guards were letting bigs off the hook by not getting range outside 18 feet until Steph Curry was drafted.

I’m being flippant, but the point is, you’ve got to grow and evolve.

“a fucking asteroid took us out, why are you acting like we became oil by ourselves?” (credit: Wikimedia Commons, Schorle)

One of the books I’m reading this week is On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates. I have a strange fascination with Joyce Carol Oates. Her writing doesn’t really interest me one way or the other—I’m really enjoying On Boxing, I’ve enjoyed short stories of hers before, but no so much I didn’t sell the collection back to my college bookstore—technically good but a little flat, my friend [REDACTED] said. The volume of JCO’s writing makes it hard to get a mental picture of her the way I often do with writers. I followed her on Twitter in like 2014, then unfollowed her around 2017 for reasons I can’t remember. The thing is, whatever JCO I read—short stories from the 70s and 80s, boxing writing from the 90s, tweets from the 2010s—I always picture the exact same person. It’s what JCO looks like: put together but wispy, obviously well-read and intellectually assertive but not really ready for things like paying a train fare, or a dental visit, or a boxing match, honestly. She is sitting at a writing desk that would look old-fashioned on the set of Columbo, there’s classical music playing, but there’s an iPhone and Mac around somewhere.

Jonathan Safran Foer is somewhere in this house, nearing a nervous breakdown.

“and it’s here, right here, where you emailed a still-married Natalie Portman, while still married yourself, and said ‘I am falling in love with you.’ Tell me, were you thinking, here?” (credit: Wikimedia Commons, editrrix)

Imagining writers is one of the joys of reading to me, and I think that’s weird. This can probably be traced to when I was growing up, thinking R.L Stine and K.A. Applegate were just kicking it, thinking of cool-ass stories all the time. As an adult, I still like reading a lot of books by the same author and seeing what’s new in the toolbox. Idly speculating what life events inspired/led them to try whatever differently. “Ooooh Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s in Yucatán for this one!” “Yoooo Ross Gay wrote a book-length poem and it’s about Dr. J!” Remember when Brook Lopez’s career was over because he was a low-post scorer who couldn’t rebound or defend? Now he’s a 36% 3-point shooter and defensive backbone of a championship team. He’s on Year 16!

JCO, rightly or wrongly, I imagine doing only the Mikan Drill every day for six decades. Hey, Mikan won a few chips.

The reality is writing is work and sometimes you just work. Sometimes what you’re doing is similar to another thing you’ve done. That’s fine. But every produced and finished work is a snapshot of an artist in time. Like NBA players, writers evolve, become different versions of themselves, have new ideas.

“one time, I had a new idea, and my cousin was such a dick about it that I didn’t leave the house for over a decade and Kevin Love got a stapler for Christmas” (credit: Wikimedia Commons, J-Ham2000)

If you’re lucky, an artist evolving is more like “Brian Wilson writing Pet Sounds” and less like “Kanye West is trying to be both a cult leader and a Nazi at the same time.” At least, the interesting artists evolve. I didn’t think Aimee Bender could top Willful Creatures (in my personal rankings anyway), then she wrote Butterfly Lampshade. I thought Anthony Bourdain was at his coolest with Kitchen Confidential but then I hit my 30s and started appreciating Parts Unknown more. Interesting artists. Blink 182’s new video just reminded me that only one of them ever learned to play their instrument, which made me sad until I remembered it’s “I Won’t Be Home For Christmas” time and found laughter again. That’s one of them layered bummers.

Eh, I don’t know. Life happens, you gotta roll with it. As the fella says, strikes and gutters, man. Strikes and gutters. Take it is easy for all us sinners.

Sorry you got an email,

Chris