The Heart of the City

Matthew Kreisher was born and raised in the North Carolina with a love of writing, basketball and music. You can find him at The Fadeaway or follow him @makreish.

Sunday morning is my favorite time to walk along Hargett Street. There’s no traffic; most of the sound comes from brunch-goers on makeshift patios, and an unsettling quiet surrounds downtown Raleigh. Sunday neither belongs to the week nor to the weekend; past and present become one, and time slows to a crawl.

It was on one of these mornings, a few weeks back, that I walked into Father and Sons vintage shop and found myself staring at two game-day programs from the ABA’s Carolina Cougars, this state’s first foray into professional basketball. I was born and raised in Charlotte, and can attest to the fact that this state’s cult of hoops isn’t just about UNC and Duke. I recently admitted to a friend that I had owned a life-sized poster of former Hornets star Alonzo Mourning, a revelation that led to a contentious debate over whose vault of Hornets memorabilia was greater. The Cougars are forgotten traces of my state’s NBA heritage; Sunday was the perfect time to find myself thinking of how far North Carolina has come since the days of the red, white and blue ball.



In 1968 the Houston Mavericks, like most ABA franchises, were struggling to turn a profit, a problem they (like most ABA franchises) chalked up to their current market. They were sold and then relocated to North Carolina. In hopes of capitalizing on the state's fertile basketball soils, the newly-named Cougars became a regional franchise, splitting home games between Raleigh, Greensboro and Charlotte.

In theory, the regional approach made a certain amount of sense. At that point, the state was without a major metropolitan city, and the North Carolina basketball tradition was a statewide thing. But the plan backfired, as the Cougars never got enough of a local footing in any city. North Carolina has always been a hot-bed of rivalry between four schools (NCSU, Duke, Wake Forest and UNC); hoops was a matter of particularism, not the universal. With each city hosting roughly thirteen games a piece, the local pride so key to the state’s rabid hoops culture was never able to take root. The Cougars were built upon the supposition that North Carolina’s basketball history had built unity, when nearly the opposite was true.

In 1905 Wake Forest University was the first to bring basketball to the state of North Carolina, followed quickly by Trinity College (later named Duke University after Washington Duke, owner of Bull Durham Chewing Tobacco Co.). The two schools played the first collegiate basketball game south of the Mason-Dixon line on March 2, 1905. NC State and UNC followed, both forming teams in 1911. It was Carolina who, in 1945, became the first of the four teams in make it to the Final Four, led by NC State transfer Bones McKinney. In 1946 Chuck Taylor, then a traveling salesman for Converse, suggested Everett Case for the job as head coach at NC State. Case built a 12,000 seat arena and recruited nationally, caused Duke and Carolina to revamp their programs and planted the seeds of today’s Tobacco Road mega-rivalry.

The Mavericks were bought by a conglomerate of North Carolina businessmen hoping to add professional basketball to this history. They hired Bones McKinney as the franchise’s first coach in 1969; the team finished 42-42 and were swept by the Pacers in the first round of the playoffs. The team regressed in their second year; McKinney was fired halfway through the season, replaced by Jerry Steele and the Cougars finished 35-50. Steele was promptly fired at the end of the season to make way for third year coach Tom Meschery, (Russian immigrant, former NBA player, today a member of the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame). In those first few years the Cougars made a habit of hiring homegrown talent, like All-Rookie guard Gene Littles, in his first year out of High Point College, and former Duke All-American guard Bob Verga. This practice led to one of the biggest coups in ABA history as the Cougars signed former Tar Heel star Billy Cunningham away from the NBA Philadelphia 76ers while Cunningham was still under NBA contract.

The Cougars signed Cunningham during the 1969-70 season to a 4-year $455K contract starting with the 1970-71 season. The contract called for a $125K signing bonus of which $45K was paid upon signing and Cunningham, who was getting old but still very capable, was to receive the remaining $80K upon turning down his option year in Philadelphia to join the Cougars; however, the Sixers star orally agreed to play out his option year in the NBA after claiming to have never received the full bonus. There is speculation as to whether a miscommunication took place or Cunningham was hedging his bets after fully realizing the financial instability of the league; either way he attempted to return the $45K bonus and then signed a new, 5-year contract with Philadelphia. Cunningham returned to the NBA for two seasons while a series of court cases decided his fate. Ultimately an injunction handed down from the US Court of Appeals barred Cunningham from playing for any team but the Cougars until his ABA contract expired. Cunningham would not join the team until the start of the 1972 season. In 1971, Joe Caldwell, not playing in the NBA but technically under contract to the Atlanta Hawks, jumped to the Cougars without spending the obligatory year in limbo. Five years before the Oscar Robertson suit, Caldwell and the Cougars circumvented the reserve clause, in effect inventing free agency. Caldwell was later traded when he attempted to hold the organization to the terms of his deal, and ended up causing so much trouble that he was blackballed.


In 1972-73, recently-retired ABA guard Larry Brown -- a UNC alum -- took Meschery’s place. It was Brown’s first-ever coaching job of any kind. The combination of Brown and Cunningham sparked the Cougars, who went 57-27 and became the first ABA team to shoot over 50% from the field. Cunningham earned MVP honors and Caldwell, no longer expected to carry the entire franchise on his back, flourished. The Cougars went on to win their only playoff series, sweeping the New York Nets, before losing in the second round to the Kentucky Colonels. Unfortunately, this success was short lived. Cunningham was plagued by kidney problems throughout the Cougars’ fourth year and they were eliminated again in the first round of the playoffs. The franchise was sold for $1.5 million to two New York brothers, Ozzie and Daniel Silna, and their lawyer Don Schupak, who moved the team to St. Louis.

The Cougars may have been doomed, but they stood for something bigger. The ABA was rife with experimentation -- even if most of was in the service of financial desperation. The NBA had not challenged its own conventional wisdom since the introduction of the shot clock in 1954; it was conventional wisdom that said players were bound to an NBA team for life unless the team said otherwise. It was this spirit of departing from the norm that allowed the Cougars to experiment, and ultimately fail. That is Raleigh’s legacy of professional basketball. In retrospect, that they failed to establish a regional franchise is less important than the fact that they tried at all.

I was born and raised in Charlotte, but now call Raleigh home. When I was growing up, Charlotte was a small banking city, whose goal of becoming a nationally recognized banking city unified a community. In 1989 the NBA rewarded the Queen City with the Charlotte Hornets. By the mid-nineties, Charlotte was somewhere between a small Southern past and a future of financial growth, an identity that took hold just as the Hornets took off. New NBA teams succeed when they’re integrated into the culture of the city, and capitalize on civic pride. This was why the Hornets succeeded at first -- that and Charlotte’s determination, as a mid-level city fighting for national recognition, to make sure they succeeded. Then George Shinn happened, and by the time the Hornets moved to New Orleans in 2002, the community was unified behind its dislike for one of the NBA’s worst owners (and worst people).

When the Bobcats started life in 2004, Charlotte was the worst kind of city for an NBA franchise. Today, the state is a very different place. The struggle for recognition that once galvanized the people of Charlotte ended in 1998 when the Bank of America merger turned it overnight into the nation’s second-largest banking city. With the struggle for recognition over, the civic pride that manifested during the city’s period of growth quickly eroded. Charlotte is now defined by the corporations that now call the city home. The NBA's second attempt to tap the basketball gold mine that is North Carolina now perennially ranks toward the bottom of the league in attendance levels. With the CBA negotiations going nowhere, David Stern has begun talking contraction; many point to Charlotte as the most logical team to cut.

However, Charlotte wasn’t the only growing North Carolina city. Raleigh has quickly risen to second largest metropolitan population in the state and along with Durham and Chapel Hill forms the Triangle part of the Research Triangle Park. In 1973, Cougars owner Tedd Munchak wanted Raleigh cut from the regional plan because attendance numbers lagged dramatically behind both Charlotte and Greensboro, where the Cougars were once attacked by bugs left over from the previous day’s cattle show. Raleigh now grows at a rate of 22% a year. The Research Triangle Park (RTP), located between Raleigh and Durham, has become a destination for technology firms. Since RTP was located on what was once farmland, away from the heart of Raleigh, there was no need to bend to corporate will in the way Charlotte did. Instead, Raleigh responded by renovating historical buildings in attempt to preserve the past. Small businesses began forming where once there were only government jobs and local culture was allowed to flourish and evolve. The New York Times recently described Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill as North Carolina's "Axis of Cool."

What makes the area unique is the strong sense of culture and community within each city. Chapel Hill is Chapel Hill, and Durham built a culinary empire around local, individually owned restaurants like Magnolia, Nana’s Steakhouse and Vin Rouge. Not coincidentally, that’s also the UNC and Duke binary. Raleigh, though, has found its own way, one whose strong local culture and love of basketball could make it a Southern version of Portland.

A few years ago, Ivan Howard of The Rosebuds invited me to a regular pick-up game at some outdoor courts tucked away behind Peace College. I play there regularly, along with Victor Lytvinenko, founder of high-end denim brand Raleigh Denim; writers like Grayson Currin, music editor of The Independent, co-creator of Hopscotch Music Fest; and musicians like Howard, Megafaun’s Brad Cook, and Steve Popson, bassist of FD favorite Polvo, who after his time in Chapel Hill moved back to Raleigh to open King’s Barcade. I’m close to convincing him to buy NBA Jam ‘93 for King’s. It’s people like these -- hoops fanatics who also now make Raleigh such a vital city to live in -- who remind me of the legacy of the Cougars.



The Bobcats will continue to have my support, but every time I watch them play in front of an empty stadium, I feel like I’m watching a wasted opportunity -- for the NBA and for my state. My whole life I have been proud to call North Carolina home. The glory years of the Hornets left a stamp on my childhood -- I experienced Larry Johnson’s rookie year, witnessed Jordan in the ’98 playoffs, and fought back tears after hearing the news of Bobby Phill’s crash -- and created a lifelong NBA fan. It was hard to embrace the Bobcats at first, mainly because of the once-strong ties to the Hornets, but ultimately I couldn’t resist. Yet they play in a city that barely cares, and part of me wonders what could have been had NBA officials ignored the conventional wisdom that has become Charlotte’s mother tongue.

Thirty years ago, Raleigh was home to an ABA franchise that challenged the norm, however disastrously. With labor negotiations stuck in the mud and the possibility of a lockout on the horizon, it appears both sides have lost. The spirit of the ABA and the changes it provided are needed now more than ever. The Bobcats are indicative of all that’s gone wrong with the NBA; we may never know how different things would be if, instead, they had followed in the footsteps of the Cougars.



(You can view both programs in their entirety here)

You May Have Heard It Happened

I know, not only is this site barren, I've now resorted to straightforward photos of players. Players I was slow to embrace as postseason creatures (for the record, it took one win before I believed Believe. There's a gulf between theory and practice for me, and it's called proof.) Really though, what the fuck does this image mean? Anyway, here's some stuff elsewhere, but all under FD's dominion, that may interest you:

-New Disciples of Clyde podcast.

-Ziller and I adventure into the Bobcats and get hit in the head with a pan.

-I'm writing every day about what happened, and what's about to happen, in the playoffs. You will like this one, which is about the logic of styles and systems and tropes of wisdom.

And, after much thought, this is my favorite Gangstarr song. There's some sentimental reasons at play, but I think that's the case with a lot of people's Gangstarr picks.

Suckers Get Put to Rest

It's been almost a week since the trade deadline, and we're still trying to figure it all out. Joey has thought A LOT about how this all affects the Knicks, so definitely give his analysis a read. Dan and Ken are also Knicks fans, so of course they talk about it, too, along with the Bulls, the Bobcats, the Kings, the Rockets, and all of the various moves. They claim that their opinions are even more valuable than an expiring contract, and who am I to argue??

In all seriousness, this episode contains the most Ken and Dan seriousness in weeks, if not ever. Serious basketball talk. Because this is beginning a serious part of the season.

Put this in your ear:

Songs from the episode:

"Money Motivated Movements" - Guilty Simpson
"Busload of Faith" - Lou Reed
"From One Primadonna to Another" - 90 Day Men
"Won't Trade" - Q-Tip

Clay Left Smoldering

New Shoals Unlimited on the linguistic lunacy that is the Most Improved Player award. Also, notice the new Amazon widget to the right: Same "you buy stuff by clicking through here, we benefit" idea, but new approach. We're going to be recommending books, music, movie, whatever we feel is worthy of FD's prized endorsement. If you click through there, feel free to buy whatever you want. But the point is to manipulate you.

Apologies if I've touched on this before, but when you have the same screamed phone conversation with multiple FreeDarko members, it warrants a post. It's agreed around headquarters that, simply put, Gerald Wallace is now scary. Not edgy, exhilarating, or overwhelmingly intense. When you watch him play now, fright nips at each and every fiber of your bones.

Part of it is his appearance. I will never cease to hammer home this "Gerald Wallace is the Predator" meme, because this is what a pop culture/sports analogy should be. Wallace is now a little older, thicker, and yet at the same time broken down and flecked with scars on his arms and shoulders. Gone is the sleek, statuesque specimen who was equally at home walking on air or slamming into the earth. Now, Gerald Wallace looks like the sum of all his heights and collisions—lofty, worn, tough, and always in a quiet frenzy. His dreads creep down the side of his head, where they occasionally come into contact with the plastic mouth guard that's always hanging out in the air.

This kind of adornment seems so out of character that we're taken aback by them. It's mysterious, like a vaguely sinister echo of his warped basketball philosophy and the moments that shaped it. We barely notice tattoos anymore—J.R. Smith and Larry Hughes are practically covered from waist to chin, but it's all in good fun. Wallace, though, exists at the intersection of style and grim reminders. Other useful pop culture references: Star Wars bounty hunters, those elegant tackle boxes with death sitting casually on their brains; every Vietnam movie where heroes get subsumed; eye-liner on radicals in the desert, and the chintzy portraits that follow directly from it.



No shock that this new vibe has manifested itself in—or stems directly from—Wallace's game these days. Gone are the eye-popping box scores of yore, the competition with Smith and Kirilenko to see who could most delight our mightily peripheral group of enthusiasts. Wallace scores less, attacks more sparingly, isn't as frequently streaking ahead on the break or leaping up for the put-back—even as he's continued to get more fluid and guard-like with each passing year. Part of this might be Larry Brown, which is fine, because it works. But it's most certainly not a reluctance to put himself or others at risk (though, it should be noted, usually only doing damage to his own person). Wallace is a lurching, semi-breathing basketball death wish.

Remember when Wade or Iverson embraced contact around to the basket to such an extent that it became an end in itself, and got kind of stupid? Wallace seems to have taken this same attitude toward open-ended, violent motion. And movement, if a difference exists there. He doesn't make plays as often, or sow the seeds of chaos (as said in our book.) Now, he's just kind of there to hit the floor like it was a dunk, go for blocks and steals like an agile wrecking ball, terrorize the court in a way that somehow evinces both more and less discipline. This isn't the hustle player reborn, but the blood and guts of what athleticism means at its best in the league. And it isn't necessarily pretty or inspiring, unless you think Icarus is really fucking cool coming and going.

That's because, while Wallace is by no means a dirty or petty player, the toll he's exacted upon himself is, for a basketball player, almost unprecedented. Four concussions to date, and an insistence on rushing back from a collapsed lung. The lung's actually become a running joke; most guys allude to their limitations with "I felt that in my leg," but for Wallace, the game catches up with him in his ribs and breathing apparatus. Forget the high-flown accounts of potential lost and imagined; in his combination of blazing ability, blatant disregard for his body, refusal to change one bit, and downright earnestness about the whole thing, Wallace is the second coming of Pistol Pete Reiser. As Big Baby Belafonte says, you can't watch him without worrying he's going to collapse or implode at any moment, even as he exudes strength.



I wish I could say that in Wallace, we see a simultaneous acknowledgment of mortality and embracing of life. Instead, he just makes my skin crawl.

FD Guest Lecture: Very Cross-Eyed But Extremely Solid

A report from Bobcats camp, by Avery Lemacorn. He's previously posted here about the Hornets and NOLA's revival.



There's the dad with the swishy athletic pants. We were just making fun of kids for wearing it, then we step behind a gray-haired man, corralling his kids into the 5,000 person stadium at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Maybe the words "training camp" inspired some type of slovenliness in the dad, making him reconsider his clothing options. Should I dress respectably or should I bring my tear-offs? Tear-offs it is, because they might ask me to run into the game.

And after the drills start for the Charlotte Bobcats at their scrimmage game, I can catch a glimpse of how that mentality might enter the average fan's subconscious. The masses don't know these players. No one shouts hysterically when 10 young millionaires and 5 six-figure men stroll into the smallest gym they have seen since middle school. The only other cheers come on a couple of windmill dunks made by any player, not Wallace or Richardson or Okafor. So the everyman asks, "Who do I cheer for, who do I follow?" It might as well be anyone.



Which is possibly the reason Larry Brown took this job. While last year was more Planters than pleasure, this year seems to have a relaxed professionalism, not the steady worry from Sam Vincent about how a real head coach was supposed to act in front of Michael Jordan. This is Larry Brown's team. Short and gray, the players look down at him, not away ignoring his edicts. They respect him. And this Charlotte Bobcats could be his Pistons from earlier this decade, when no one believed a team based on defense with no discernible stars could win. There are no immediate egos on the Bobcats, no petulant Stephon Marburys, or shaken Eddy Curry's. No unsteady Luol Deng's or legacy-stricken Dirk Nowitzki's to confuse matters. Instead it's a team of players willing to follow a coach that has won on every level, malleable to his stringent desires. This is Larry Brown's team.

During drill weaves, there is nothing to notice really, except for Adam Morrison. He's back, from an ACL injury. I point him out to my wife. She remembers him from the Gonzaga days on television, with the close-ups of his sketchy moustache. "That's him really?," she asks. "He looks hurt." Indeed he does. He barely stretches with the rest. He limps downcourt unsteadily with a half-jog. It was noted in the local paper earlier that Morrison has rounded out his mustache to a full goatee, and grown his hair out halfway down his back. It's tied up in a ponytail. With seemingly more in common with your car mechanic than anyone on this team, I'm pretty sure Morrison has assumed the style mantle of Scott Pollard. Except Pollard is/was a cult hero, not a top three pick as another questionable choice by MJ.



Speaking of, he is nowhere to be found. Technically, he is a local boy, having gone to Laney High School, the scene of the crime, the place where "Michael Jordan got cut." There are no streets named after him, no bridges, not even a Boys and Girls Club with his moniker. The only monument I've ever found is inside the local city museum, with his kindergarten graduation certificate, and a pay stub from his days as a busboy at a local diner. Perhaps he's wanted those things back and never knew where to look.

During the scrimmage (Felton with the starters, D.J. Augustin with the back-ups), the Pistons model is even more evident. Sean May is looking svelte, and as more than one seasoned Carolina observer notes, this is the best they have ever seen him. May is actually slim, and now in his fourth season, hopefully he can play a full year. The Brown system calls for a Rasheed figure, and May takes and hits shots from around the free throw line. Only once or twice do the blocks come into play, and only after rebounds. Brown was looking for a guy to extend his reach, and May at least seems willing to try.

On the other end, another unlikely figure for this role emerges: Alexis "Sticks" Ajinca. Though his legs look like rebar, he almost takes May shot for shot, both ending up in double figures, with several makes from around the three point line. And it's clear him and Augustin have done more than just toting around stupid luggage. They run picks off one another, and Augustin favors Ajinca over most of his other scrub teammates. It will not surprise me when phrases like "sleeper pick" and "underrated" are bantered around by the pundits for Ajinca.

Wallace, tonguing a bright orange mouthguard like a chew toy ("Is that thing really hanging out of his mouth?" asks my wife) soon grows bored covering Morrison, and starts to float. Brown, apparently emphasizing "team" defense, brings Wallace up for half-court traps, which still doesn't prevent Wallace from flying in for a rebound or a loose ball floating towards the dance team. As the Dog Whisperer likes to say, Wallace needs exercise, discipline, and a job, so Brown has him on the hunt, and pretty much free to roam where he wants to go (or maybe Adam Morrison can't shoot and can't defend). He even brings the ball up a few times, now totally free from his concussion inducing power forward excursions.

All the while, it's clear Felton is passing early and taking supreme care of the ball just not to lose the starter's role. His first dump is always to J-Rich, who then decides what to do. In a few fast breaks, he throws alley oops. Augustin, perhaps not surprising, seems exactly like he did last year at Texas--a complete dictator or perhaps a dutiful floor general, depending on your outlook. He drives deep, getting tangled with May and Mohammed. He throws last ditch passes out of bounds. He never looked frustrated, just a bit out of sorts with what to do with the likes of Morrison, who couldn't make a shot. Towards the end, he instead preferred Shannon Brown and Jared Dudley, who almost rallied the second teamers back to victory along with Ajinca.



My mind begins to wander. I do want to see Augustin, but I'd prefer a lineup of Wallace and Richardson as guards, Ajinca as the out of place 7 footer, and May and presumably Okafor on the blocks. And in a classic Chad Ford overindulgence, for some reason I do believe Wallace and Ajinca could be the mentally stable but physically disruptive manifestation of Howard-Nowitzki. At least it's there in my mind, for a few seconds.

Surprisingly, the Gerald Wallace of the second team is fellow Bama alum Jermareo Davidson. He even has slight dreadlocks like Wallace now. Though making only a fraction of what Morrison does, he has significantly more impact. He is the man for the second team flying through for the putback. He is the guy Brown calls up for the trap. He is the wild and goofy one, joking around and looking slightly physically discombobulated.

J-Rich fits the Rip mode. Augustin/Felton perhaps excel beyond Billups and whatever backup they've had. Wallace has the Prince defense, plus the lackadaisacalness that makes him more fun to watch. Nazr has the Nazr role, which should have been a backup role all along, so hopefully Okafor will be an upgrade. And May will function in the practical Rasheed role (for now), while Wallace takes over the jawing and athleticism. Fill that in with a decent bench of Dudley, Matt Carroll, probably Ajinca, and hopefully Davidson, along with wherever Augustin and Nazr fit in.

Morrison will, Lord willingly, be traded for a halfway decent center and then left to deal with his inner demons of the "way things should've been" and his complex, but more-friendlier-than-ever-imagined relationship with JJ Redick. Also, he will find his own unique kinship with those that wear athletic synthetic tear-offs to sporting events, yet remain firmly on the bench.

Every New Generation Needs a Generation

Note: This for some reason took me forever to write and the pictures suck. So view it accordingly.

Nothing is more American than FreeDarko, or at least the "freedom" part. Distracted by the latest spat over whether we are or are not awash in racist connotations? Revisit our first-ever post. Here, Shoefly laid out the profound connections between letting unusual, individualistic potential loose, a responsibility that falls on both said individual and the community he would inhabit. Note: I will never get why "community" is all-American, while "collective", as a purely technical term, signals Stalin.

Ordinarily, though, I don't think we've ever felt cause to explicitly connect this most raucous of national milestones with this site's mission. And yet today, it's not the distinct John Adams vibe I'm getting from people in the wake of the Sonics compromise, or the hyphenation quandry that explains my devotion to Stern, that has me typing now. No, it's a cause that could not be more near and dear to this site's unspoken premises: Making sure that Josh Smith and Gerald Wallace are free.

We all dig those Atlanta Hawks. That inadvertent experiment in god knows what, set, however haphazardly, against a city that's come to embody a certain kind of African-American prosperity. If only the team were actually a part of Atlanta, it would be all sorts of versions of the American Dream. Sadly, though, this franchise is hog-tied by litigation, and seems unaware of just how lucky it's gotten over the last few drafts—and still can't boast any intelligible road map for the future. Freedom isn't Janis Joplin's whiny hedonism, it's casting off old truths with a bold new vision. Thus, Josh Smith, the everywhere-at-once, gloriously inconsistent terror who defines the Hawks to those in the know, needs to move on.



That Philadelphia is the cradle of liberty really only figures superficially into this story, but I'm just as wary of (igniting a fire in the comments section by) saying that Smith's swagger and highlight-crazy game could help make the Sixers mean as a team what Iverson himself meant. The Hawks are anarchic, dangerous, the impossible dream that we secretly never want realized. They are a glorious, shambolic mess, full of spirit but explaining exactly why this country needed a Continental Congress.

While I have called Smith "a retarded LeBron," he lacks Bron's ability to plop down in the middle of anywhere and turn his whim into precept. Smith seems at times limited by both his strengths and his weaknesses; He doesn't quite know exactly when, or how, to take advantage of his abilities, many of which haven't quite come into focus yet. He's not Tyrus Thomas, in that you can discern the faint outlines of a multi-faceted player. But this isn't freedom, it's aimless ideas and glints of direction. We prize this player not for the confused mess he currently is, but for what he could become. Potential is the potential to be freed, which requires both the right assets and a sympathetic setting.

Here's where the Sixers enter the picture. Last season they were, in some senses, even more deranged than the Hawks. But, as with Smith, there was an understanding that this version of the team was still coming into focus. You have Andre Miller, gradually becoming the player his stats have always suggested he was. Mo Cheeks, a "players' coach" coming into his own as a leader and basketball thinker. Ed Stefanski, a GM who watches games. And, most importantly, a willingness to put the "Pippen-esque" Andre Iguodala in his place, maybe even let him walk, and instead put the future on the shoulders of the enigmatic Thaddeus Young—and, ideally, Smith.



That's what freedom really is. Not just a chance to run wild, and ignore the outside world except for when it gets in your face and needs a spanking. The Hawks this spring were a freakish feel-good story, not a cornerstone of something new; they were wacky outsiders, not crusaders for the other side. Not to mention that the team had been built accidentally, mismanaged horribly, had no institutional culture to speak of, and had a head coach who may or may not have had the slightest clue what was going on. They were a happy accident, not providence in action because it does occasionally take such sides. So yeah, I take back the Afghanistan comparisons. This was no prophecy, just maybe one of the monsters that shows up as a secondary character.

Maybe the Hawks will match—no matter what happens to everyone else on that roster, a Johnson/Smith tandem is at least now a source of some national interest. But something clicked in my head when I saw Smith in Philly: That team needs him to realize its ideals, and he needs it to become more than a fever dream in Nikes.

The Wallace situation is a hell of a lot more straightforward. Last season was a mixed bag for Multiplicity: It took some time for him and J-Rich to adjust to each other, but once they did, the team turned into a minor small-ball outpost. Wallace looked more guard-like all year, and Richardson, if you'd forgotten, is one of the league's best rebounding SG's (something often obscured in Golden State). Armed with a competent running mate, and now able to both do more and not feel compelled to do it all, Wallace was, if not a poor man's LeBron, than a lesser version of what the Sixers (or Hawks) are hoping Smith will become.

Then came the concussion, after which he never quite looked the same. When I watched him in person, Wallace looked tentative. Earlier in his career, he'd been spacey, but now he seemed averse to what he could do if he really sunk his fangs into the game—not simply unsure of his options. He came back too fast, and I was hoping he'd be back in full for this season.



And then, Larry Brown, who is largely to blame for my irrational attachment to David Stern, comes to town. Wallace represents the future; Brown, the past. You'd think he'd admire Wallace's fearless hustle, and yet before the draft, there the team was, shopping him for T.J. Ford. Certainly, this does not bode well for the next year in Charlotte. We should expect to see either a lesser version of Wallace, or perhaps one whose confidence is wounded. Simply because, while Brown could build his usual edifice up around Iverson, Wallace is a structural challenge to it, and one who encroaches on LB's most cherished ideological territory.

Were Wallace just a bundle of activity, Brown could convert, or surbordinate him. Unfortunately, the clarity of his mature game poses a threat. If Josh Smith can symbiotically engender freedom in Philly, then Wallace's experience is kryptonite to Brown's tyranny. Those who hate freedom hate it not in the abstract, or as an absolute, but as a process of community and context that will forever remain imperfect, fluid, and for this, a true participatory activity.