180 degrees of knowledge

Or, better late than never.

After outrageously attempting below to rationalize the dress code, I finally got around to reading the thing. And then, like a flash of madness, I realized that I'd been in denial: this is the worst thing that could happen to the association, especially from the FreeDarko perspective. I'm not so concerned about Iverson being able to stay real on the bench, or S-Jax's constitutional right to floss. It's those episodes in which dress actually transforms your view of someone, making you realize how much more there was to them than you'd ever imagined or suddenly unifies your disparate, ambiguous impressions of them. It may be a league based on style, but sometimes it takes an incredibly explicit cue or gesture to actually bring it all together/out for one single, individualized player; more often than not, and certainly more often than the spoken utterance, this happens in dress.

The minute I starting seeing the phrase "press conference" all up in the official wording, I immediately though of a crystalline moment in NBA Playoff history, that, while not readily available in photographic form on the internet, is at least somewhat well approximated below (minus the suit, of course):



If style is golden, then in these cases dress is that that first nugget found, usually by an unsuspecting pauper, in a Klondike stream.

HOWEVER: I could make a wholly similar argument for Draft Night suits, which perform this same function, more formally, for cats we're all bound to know all too well after their first few months in the league. And continue to stick in our collective craw like that, well after their initial usefulness should have receded.



I guess that's the real challenge here: can the players (and us fans) make every night Draft Night, style-wise? And even if anyone were up to it, would something be lost in the process--or a whole new world of exaggerated meaning unveiled?

P.S. This is Vlad's time to shine!!!!!!