The Second Annual Shipwrecked Sailor NBA Appreciation Column
"Nba fans don’t like anything about the nba and it’s weird" - Kevin Durant, Twitter
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
Two quick links: “Cryptids and Climate Change,” the issue I guest-edited for Cotton Xenomorph, began publishing Tuesday! We’re doing to two stories a week for a while, so be sure to check CX regularly and follow us on your social media of choosing. The first story is “Mutant Gourd” by Lucy Zhang, and it rules!
Yesterday was New The Line Break Podcast Day, with our AWP episode airing. We got Stephen J. Furlong, Teo Shannon, Chloe N. Clark, Diannely Antigua, Matt W. Miller, Todd Osborne, Amorak Huey, and Maya Williams reading on this—an absolute Language Murderer’s Row of Poetry All-Stars channeling their inner I-got-basketball-shorts-under-my-jeans-if-you-wanna-hoop-right-now and reading all over the AWP book fair and panel rooms. Bob and I even get in on the fun and read some of our own work! I got wild and put some music backing us up—I wanted it to feel like the world’s most Didn’t Understand The Assignment house band was backing us up. Please check it out, we had a lot of fun and are super grateful to all the homies who helped make the weekend so special.
NBA All-Star was this weekend. I really enjoy All-Star, even when it’s bad, I think because I’m enough of a sucker for spectacle that I’ll cultishly support it when it’s my favorite sport. I’m writing this sentence like two weeks out and I’m not gonna change it. Every year, people debate whether this or that portion of All-Star is broken, or how to fix it, and I don’t care. The league office is not a Shipwrecked Sailor blog reader. If they are, please hire me to blog you! If I’m back next paragraph, something cool happened at All-Star, and the league office hasn’t hired my unique voice away from Lazy & Entitled.
[Update: I didn’t watch any of All-Star for life reasons, and heard it sucked. The previous paragraph still hands. Steph Curry vs. Sabrina Ionescu was awesome.]
Anyway, I wanted to maybe start a tradition of writing an NBA column around this time of year. The season’s in full swing! A lot’s happened! I’ve sort of kept up with it! That’s the thing, though. I don’t keep up with the NBA enough to be a real sportswriter. I’ve made various feints and starts at being a sportswriter—running a Bulls blog from 2010-2012ish (before I really knew anything), then doing a five part NBA history series for Cracked as well as some silly lists (this one about stadiums, this one about name changes).
I don’t know where there’s a space on the internet for weirdo, non-topical sports “features” with. Interviewing Leigh Ellis was a thrill, and Line Break guest and winner of Baseball Poet of The Year Sandra Marchetti reminds me there’s space for sports in poetry. But still. I like blogging! It doesn’t help that it forever seems like NBA fans, as Kevin Durant says, don’t like the NBA. Everyone wants to talk about meaningless things like ratings or things that are out of a fan’s control, like whether or not a Player X is “worth” the millions General Manager X signed them for. Even things I do think are interesting to talk about—aesthetics of play, answerless cross-era comparisons, why my favorite players are iso-heavy midrange guys like Kawhi Leonard and DeMar DeRozan when my favorite teams are intricate whirlyball offenses that focus on team over star like the Heat, Nuggets, and Kings—even those things are tainted by “back in my day” cranks. Hey, speaking of hand-checking, let me link this video my dear friend and most encouraging pickup homie Kevin San Juan showed me:
That’s Luka Dončić saying hand checking is still legal. Look how shocked he was when JJ said it was outlawed years ago! You want defense to come back, we need to get rid of defensive three seconds.
Anyway, a few NBA things I like this year:
I am trying to be less of a hater, so here’s me saying nice things about James Harden on the Clippers. I love a team of old dudes embarrassing the barest of bones in their mid-30s frailty and still making it work. Kawhi and Paul George are playing, Harden is playing real actual point guard, Russell Westbrook wrecking things off the bench. That team maybe wins a title or two from 2016-2020. Now, they’re a very fun collection of mid-30somethings.
There’s an influx of dudes who play with a ton of joy lately. Tyrese Maxey, Tyrese Haliburton, De’Aron Fox, Immanuel Quickley all come to mind. But even things like Chet and Wemby embracing their early rivalry, or Kawhi Leonard giving a damn in the regular season, and the in-season tournament, it seems like a lot of people, to quote Metta Sandiford-Artest, love basketball again.
Again in the spirit of being less of a hater, this Knicks team is fun. I’m not gonna be one of those guys who says “the league’s better when the Knicks are good!” That’s not true at all. In fact, it was hilarious that the Knicks were as bad as they were for as long as they were. Their owner got a Behind The Bastards episode! Robert Evans doesn’t even like sports! But again, less of a hater. I’m a big Julius Randle fan, and a becoming a big Jalen Brunson fan. I’ve long thought OG Anunoby was cool, and felt bad that he was too sick to play in the Raptors’ championship run. It’s cool he gets to be the New Luol Deng to Thibs. And genuinely, I’m happy for Knicks fans. Knicks fans care, and that alone means they deserve a good team. James Dolan should fire himself into the sun.
We should not take for granted cool things. LeBron James is in Year 21 and still kicking ass. The Nuggets make magic every night, as if Nikola Jokic sees cutters with those Donnie Darko-style strings coming out of them. Giannis is awesome, remember when he had a 50-pointer in Game 7 of the Finals? I don’t know, there are ways you can live life. One way has you worrying about the NBA on Christmas being totally ratings-dominated by the NFL, bellyaching how your team didn’t make moves at the trade deadline, and going out of your way at parties to say you think college basketball players want it more. Another way is appreciating how good NBA players are, and enjoying the fact that we live in a great era of shotmaking and scoring, You pick a Top 10 at random and you’re guaranteed to see something cool.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris