Dunk You Very Much

If you aren't reading Yago Colas's posts about his Cultures of Basketball course, well, you're an idiot, because they just might be the most FD thing going right now. Sorry if I've used that line before. Sure, there's stuff about school in there, but even if you have no interest in academia or pedagogy, there's still a good 2,000 words on basketball and culture and memory. Here's Day 11; you can read the rest here.

I guess it's self-serving to keep in the parts that discuss the FD book, but oh well. That's context.

This must be a very precious memory. I’ve even written about it before, in passing, in the first substantial post on my blog, before I even knew there would be a Cultures of Basketball course. I am small, 6 or 7, maybe 8. And for today, I decide, I will be Walt Frazier in my driveway. I will dribble around aimlessly at first, warming up my imagination. And then: Time is running out (time was always running out). The Knicks are down by one (my team was always down by one). Frazier steals the ball from West and glides – yes, glides -- down the court (somehow fast and slow at the same time) but the Lakers are already back so he passes to Bradley on the wing. Bradley fakes a jumper and dribbles two steps toward the baseline, then facing a helping defender he flips it back to Clyde at the elbow, who rises, rises gracefully, cocking the ball back and releasing it like a gentle spring at the top of his jump.

My imagination loses sight of everything except the ball, its rotation and the perfect geometry of its arc to the basket. It’s good! It’s good! Frazier wins the game! Then I have an idea. This could be better. I get out my tempra paints and transform an old t shirt into a Clyde Frazier Knicks jersey. I look in the mirror. Better. But it could be better still. I get the paintbrush and carefully paint myself a moustache and sideburns, or maybe it was a full beard. I don’t remember. Now I am Clyde.

I loved the Milwaukee Bucks as a kid. They were born as a franchise the same year my family moved to Madison, in time for the 1968-69 season. The Celtics won their last title that year, Russell retired (I still have the issue of SI in which he announced it), and the field was open. The Bucks sucked that first year and I don’t really remember anything about them, But then they got Lew Alcindor from UCLA. And through the 1973-74 season they would amass the best regular season won loss record of any NBA team, win the title in 1971, lose in the Western Conference Finals to eventual champion Lakers in ‘72, lost in the WC semis to Golden State in ‘73, and lose in the finals to Boston in 74. I watched them in person when they’d play games in Madison (rarely), watched them on TV (a little less rarely), and listened to them on the radio (all the time).

The other perennial contenders of that time were the Lakers (champs in 72), Bullets and, of course, the Knicks, who won the 1970 and 1973 titles. These were my formative basketball years, the experiences and memories of teams, games, and players (Robertson and Jabbar, Wilt and West, Hayes and Unseld, and then, Reed, Monroe, Barnett, Bradley, DeBusschere, and, of course, Frazier) that to this day outsize all others in my mind; that make me bristle irrationally at any suggestion that any other NBA era was better, and that make it hard to even understand what teaching the period should look like, let alone to formulate a coherent lesson plan.

So I approached Tuesdays class, for which we had read the FreeDarko chapter called “The Get Along Gang: Why Everybody loves the New York Knicks”, with a mixture of intense childlike excitement, middle-aged nostalgia, and pedagogical cluelessness and panic. I have always loved reading, and there are certain writers that I have loved especially. But they are not confusingly intertwined with the core of my being like 1970s hoops. I feel that I’ve mostly managed to integrate my passion into my teaching without becoming wholly incoherent. So much for that.

Even now, as I’m writing, I’m having a hard time weaving a story or a focused argument out of the tangled skein of memories and feelings that the period evokes for me. All the more so, since as I told the students at the outset of class, that decade of NBA history is often dismissed as a kind of low-ebb middle-ages sandwiched between the Celtics dynasty and legendary era of the 1960s and the resurgent media friendly era of Magic Bird and Jordan. The 70s offered no single dominant franchise. But that’s not all, the ABA helped drive salaries up and the league became mostly black for the first time in its history.



Meanwhile, widely reported drug use among the players gave a mostly white audience an excuse to cluck in moralizing disdain and to turn the channel rather than watch rich young black men ball. All of this, of course, in the context of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Energy Crisis. Oh, and disco. So what do you when your fondest and most powerful memories of the game are of what most – not all – NBA chroniclers would prefer to forget, if not write-off as an embarrassing exhibition of what is not-Amazing? What do you do when the story of your formative years is of dissolution and wasted promise?

1.Evasive action II: Nickname poll (What is your favorite all time hoops nickname?). Results: Iceman and Mailman tied with two votes each (Skip-to-my-Lou also got two votes but I invalidated them in unaccountable contradiction of the political philosophy I advocated on Day 10). My own choice: Black Jesus.

2.Time killer: Three video clips: one of Earl Monroe (see 1 above), one on the 1970 Knicks title team and one on the 1973 Knicks title team.

3.Passing the Buck open-ended question for the class: What made the biggest impression on you as you read the chapter on the Knicks or as you watched the video clips?

Hmmm. Lots of silences in today’s class. I clearly came neither ready to play nor ready to really expose myself and try to make my inability to be coherent into a teaching opportunity. Which doesn’t mean that they didn’t try to step-up and fill the void. I’d say they did. You know, sometimes it’s the students who have somehow to find a way on the spur of the moment to pull together and make a particular class work, a job that I could at least have made easier by confessing that I needed them to do it. But even without that they came up with several interesting observations. Among them, the one that most stuck in my mind is that the Knicks rarely dunked in any of the clips we watched. Why, a student wondered?

I don’t mean to be coy or over-complicating in what follows. I know that the prevalence of the dunk today really had its origins historically in the 1976 ABA inaugural dunk context, in the merger that brought acrobatic dunkers like Julius Erving and David Thompson into the NBA fold and of course especially to the confluence of Michael Jordan and ESPN, with its nightly parade of dunk highlights in the 1980s, not to mention the overall superior athleticism of NBA players today. So that it might seem that the responsible thing would have been to politely explain that the question was anachronistic, like asking why the pioneers on the Oregon Trail didn’t just take a plane. But not quite, because it’s not as though nobody dunked in the NBA back then (and, indeed, the NCAA had not long before banned dunking, imagining the threat that anticipated Lew Alcindor dunks posed to the game), and the Knicks defense certainly generated plenty of breakaway opportunities for crowd rousing jams. So it was a valid question.

And, anyway, when you are teaching or thinking about things, sometimes, I have found, it can turn out to be useful to recall and then set aside the obvious path and just pursue the question along whatever paths it takes you. You might not get to a better answer to the original question (we didn’t) but you might discover some interesting other thoughts along these not obviously promising side roads. Plus, like I say, I didn’t really have the presence of mind to come up with something on my own so I wasn’t about to piss away a student contribution. What emerged from the discussion were three points that weren’t necessarily, and perhaps shouldn’t be, related, but part of the fun of this writing is making dubious connections and offering speculative interpretations that are only tenuously tethered to the facts.



The first two possibilities were offered by students: 1) the Knicks didn’t dunk because it was at odds with the unselfish style of play to which they all obviously subscribed. The dunk might have felt like an attempt to drawn attention to oneself as an individual player. And 2) the Knicks didn’t dunk because they preferred the understated cool and fluidity of the lay up over the staccato violence of the throwdown. So, I observed, we have a moral interpretation and an aesthetic interpretation of the no-dunk Knicks. Before going on I just want to pause to point out how pleased I was with my students for thinking “beyond a boundary” and recognizing how much more there can be to understand in what appears to be a simple technical choice between two equally effective options on the court: do I lay it in or do I throw it down?

The third idea wasn’t so much an explanation of why they didn’t dunk as an account of the hidden racial politics dogging the dunk, which I offered off the cuff in response to a student question about the legal history of the shot. The dunk was never illegal in NBA competition, but was banned by the NCAA, as I mentioned above, beginning with the 1967-68 season until 1976, But the point I also made about the dunk in that context is that the first dominant dunker, Wilt Chamberlain, as has been amply noted elsewhere, terrified basketball purists who feared he would destroy the game (see John McPhee’s elegant paean to Bill Bradley, which is structured in part around the sophistication of Bradley’s style drawing McPhee back to the game in the mid 1960s after its pleasures had been spoiled for him by dunking giants).

It’s difficult, and probably unwise to separate the fears of Chamberlain in that era (and of Alcindor in the next) from white fears of a black uprising in the game, which in turn are difficult to separate from white fears of a black uprising in society. In short perhaps overly simplistic but still illuminating terms, the dunk was unconsciously (though also no doubt in some quarters consciously and explicitly) racialized as a brutish black play at odds with the more sophisticated white traditions of the game.

So, for now, just keep these speculative notions in the back of your mind: the Knicks preference for the lay in over the dunk could be read as having moral, aesthetic, and political layers of meaning. Meanwhile, our reading for the day, as I say, was Bethelehem Shoals’ investigation into “why everybody loves the New York Knicks.” His argument, already succinctly expressed in the title of the chapter: “the get along gang”, is two fold. In the first instance, the Knicks embodied a style of play (aggressive team defense and unselfish offense with quick passing and lots of movement away from the ball) that “was a direct descendant of the ball that had been played in New York colleges during the first half of the century. It harked back to the city’s past and resonated with generations of fans from the New York diaspora (and not just Jews).”

Second, the Knicks employed the style successfully with a roster of players who represented exactly the particular racial, ethnic, geographical, and socio-economic groups that were most definitely not getting along in American society at the time, In Shoals’ words: “everyone loves the one about the pimp [Frazier], the nerd [Bradley – also a Midwestern banker’s son], the black Southern Gentlemen [Willis Reed], the white workingman [Dave DeBusschere], the hippie [Phil Jackson], and the street urchin they picked up along the way [Earl Monroe]. The Knicks were America’s Team for a country trying to make sense of itself –and wondering what coexistence might look like.”

In addition, I think that Shoals, in his comparison of Red Auerbach (architect and coach of the 60s Celtics dynasty) and Red Holzman (laconic coach of the Knicks), is also suggesting that the Knicks offered a different kind of response to the essential hoops tension between the individual and the team. Where the Celtics became interchangeable parts in a durably and predictably (if also magically) effective winning machine, the Knicks players were all personalities, celebrities even, off the court who found a way to mesh perfectly on the court – despite, or perhaps because, of the considerably greater spotlight that the new era and their New York home shined on them.

I have zero objection to this view of what made (and makes to this day) the Knicks of that era so appealing. Indeed in class we talked about this (oddly arriving at it ourselves without reference to the book – a sign of my poor psychological preparation for the day) and it led to an interesting, if abbreviated, discussion of the kind of roles that teams can play for their cities and for the society at large. We talked about and cited the numerous examples of teams galvanizing and inspiring a city that is struggling (as with the Pistons and Detroit, both in the late -80s and in the more recent edition). But we also wondered together whether there was a flipside to the way teams can inspire and excite struggling cities (and societies). Whether there is a palliative effect at work whereby the success of a team and the feel-good atmosphere it can inspire can serve to dissipate anger at conditions and injustices that persist after all the ticker-tape has been swept up.



In other words, we tried to think about the ways in which a team’s success can lead us either to stop thinking that our society has problems that need our attention and effort or to stop working for those problems because after all, unlike a title run, there really isn’t a clear cut sign of final triumph in the struggles against, say, poverty or racism.

I want to emphasize that I’m not proposing an either or here, nor am I trying to tell anyone (including my students) what they ought to think about this issue, or about any particular instance of these dynamics in general. I’m just trying to encourage critical, well-rounded thought on the question and, in class, anyway to try to introduce students to a long standing debate in the humanities over the role of art in society (a debate of which I take, for the present purposes, the sports and society question to be a kind of related offshoot). I like and wished I had pointed out to the students that its possible to feel and think both ways at the same time, as Shoals does when he writes, “if the Knicks offered hope for the country, they did so while acknowledging that things would never be the same again. For America, these teams were not an attempt to deny the trauma of the sixties but a reality that offered a way forward. They continue to resonate because, in the end, the Knicks are about the possibility of shared values even after the whole world seems to have broken wide open.”

I find that to be extremely stirring, well-thought-through stuff. It even helps me to understand why, even as they eclipsed my beloved the Bucks in agonizing fashion in the early 70s, I was dressing up as Clyde and loving the Knicks. Now that I think about it, I realize that as a kid I was looking pretty desperately for a get along gang in my own family, which suffered its share of tension and strife at the time. I’m not saying I thought this consciously of course. Consciously I just knew Clyde was fucking cool and I was going to be him when I grew up (which as it turns out is exactly what happened as you can tell from my account of the first day of class), I’m just saying that unconsciously I had picked up on the get along discourse of the Knicks and had internalized it as a kind of fantasy I wanted to live in, even if I was too young to really realize that my whole country – and not just my family -- might have been in need of that too.

So I’m down with all of this. But I’m still left wondering how to solve the case of the missing dunks, and I’m still not content to go with the easy and true historical answer (that the dunk was just not yet a big part of anybody’s game in the NBA at that time). I want to try to put this all together. It’s actually pretty easy with the moral and aesthetic qualities we in class attributed to the non-dunk. That is: if the Knicks’ non-dunk is an affirmation of unselfish humility and of understated fluidity then it’s not hard to see how that supports the kinds of values the Knicks would be supplying their city and the nation as a whole.

I’ll admit all of this may just be the sign of an oft remarked upon general shift in basketball culture. I’d never noticed the lack of dunks on the Knicks. But it was one of the first things my students – and a “Jordan baby” from the Chicago area no less -- noted. And believe me, I was and am as seduced as anyone by those Knicks teams. Above all, they created open look after open look whether on a fast break off a steal or in their unstructured intelligent and cool offensive flow – everything looks so easy. Who needs a dunk? Who even misses them when you are watching that?

But when I think about the racial politics of the dunk I’m left a bit confused and uncomfortable. Let me explain. The City Game, published by journalist Pete Axthelm in 1970s, is a moving, elegantly written account of the 1970 Knicks championship season that shows why the Knicks were so popular in New York by telling their story alongside those of countless city playground stars who played the very same kind of ball the Knicks played. But as Axthelm acknowledges, as galvanizing as those Knicks were, they did not cure the ills of the city or of society, and many of those same enthusiastic playground ballers wound up strung out on drugs, trapped in poverty, imprisoned or dead. What feelings does that give rise to? And what is the appropriate expression of those feelings? Where I want to ask, in the Knicks playbook, is the basketball play that expresses the sadness and rage occasioned by that social violence, that colossal waste of human creativity and talent?

It is as though, in light of all this, in addition to everything else I have also felt and thought about the Knicks, that I feel and think about the Knicks, I am also provoked – in spite of myself -- to view them as a kind of populist compromise. I mean, the sort of populist compromise that appears to offer room for everyone and everything at the social banquet table, but that has actually done so at the expense of leaving some standing outside the door. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s inevitable. Yet it doesn’t feel okay to me now, even as I still feel lured by the stirring style of play and success of those Knicks teams, even without the dunks.

If the dunk has historically been seen as the flamboyant, sometimes violent expression of individual power (if not anger, or gleeful anger), not to mention racialized as such, then I can’t help but think that there was no room for those things in the new reality the Knicks promised us. All of which would be just fine if it were also the case that the conditions that give rise to the feelings that get expressed in a dunk had disappeared from society.

But if they didn’t (and we know they didn’t and maybe that is the not so secret story of the lost decade in which I was formed, basketballically and otherwise), then what do we do with our desire – what do I do with my desire and I mean this as a real, not rhetorical question -- to forego the extra pass, eschew the easy lay up, and throw down a "Chocolate-Thunder-Flying, Robinzine-Crying, Teeth-Shaking, Glass-Breaking, Rump-Roasting, Bun-Toasting, Wham-Bam, Glass-Breaker-I-Am-Jam"?



Maybe I’m overstating things. I usually do. Maybe all I’m saying is that the missing jams look to me, now in retrospect, like an index of where we fell short in putting it all together. Where we are still falling short.

Rockin' Steady: Then And Now

Jason Johnson is, by his own admission, not particularly stylish or athletic. He does however hold the distinction of being the world's tallest sports/style blogger. He can most often be found at Style Points, or on Twitter @frazierapproves.

When Shoals asked me to write a style piece related to the re-release of Walt Frazier’s seminal Rockin' Steady: A Guide to Basketball and Cool, I jumped at the opportunity. Rockin’ Steady is, simply put, one of the oddest books I’ve ever read. Equal parts memoir, style guide, hoops tutorial and 70s PG scouting report, it is profoundly weird. Like "Keep Portland Weird", or that cow-camouflage-blazer-he-wore-a-few-weeks-ago weird.



Clyde’s basketball tips still ring true, because fundamentally, the game hasn’t changed that much since his day. Instead of focusing on the basketball portion of the book, I thought I’d see how much of Clyde’s 1974 closet would stand up in today’s league.

SUITS:

Clyde’s closet boasted 49. With the not-so-new dress code in effect, it would be surprising if most ballers didn’t have a similar number. While Rockin Steady doesn’t detail each and every suit (I’m sure most were conservative charcoal or navy worsteds), it does highlight some of the more, ahem Clyde-ish items. I was unable to locate any modern lamb or cowskin suits, but Andrew Bogut seems to be keeping Clyde’s white twill suit alive.



PANTS:

Clyde saw no problem with wearing his suits as separates. Wearing suit pants without the cost is a bad move because, ideally you’d like them to wear and age equally. It’s an especially bad move if, like Clyde, your pants have no pockets. After scouring the web for days, I came up short in my search for NBA players in verifiably pocketless trousers. Were I a betting man, I’d venture that one or more of the fits from Kobe’s infamous “white hot” spread would fit the bill.

KNOTS:

Circa 74, it seems that ties had fallen out of fashion. Ever a man of the times, Frazier purported to own no ties. This is incongruous with the photographic evidence presented in the book. From what I’ve seen, Frazier favored white silk ties with black suit/shirt combos. Gangster. Paul Pierce can be seen employing this particular look to questionable effect.



KICKS:

Shoes are dangerous. They’re a sartorial gateway drug. Every true clothes-horse has an even bigger shoe habit. Clyde was no exception. At the time of publication, he estimated that he had fifty pairs of shoes; 20 lace up and 30 loafers, mostly suede and leather, nach. One would expect that his shoe game would be relatively easy to export to into the new millennium; unfortunately, I was unable to find any pics of current players in 2.5 inch Cuban heels. I do, however, believe some college players wear them for on-campus pre-draft measurement.

COATS:

Endangered species laws and changing attitudes make it virtually impossible for a modern player to walk around in an elephant or seal skin coat like Clyde, but that didn’t stop Nate Robinson from stepping out in this full size Yeti-fur coat.



LIDS:

Walt wouldn’t have become Clyde without the hats. Frazier had a penchant for wearing wide brimmed hats before they became popular. After being ridiculed by veteran teammates, Frazier nearly abandoned the hats that gave him his now-iconic nickname. They called him Clyde because his hats were similar to those worn by Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde.

Today, hats remain a sartorial power-move. They’re high degree of difficulty items that should only be attempted by the most accomplished Clydes of our day.



There will never be another Walt “Clyde” Frazier. So much of what made him has been lost. That time, that New York is long gone. The city isn’t edgy anymore. MSG doesn’t mean as much as it used to, and the days of weirdo fashion plates leading entertaining Knicks teams are long past.

In the Shadow of Baking

Anyone who owns FD Book #2 knows how much we love Walt Frazier's Rockin' Steady, which as it just so happens, was reissued by Triumph Books this fall. COP THAT. There is so much to say about Clyde's opus that I can't possible do it justice at the moment ... so how about watching the Knicks legend be interviewed by Don Imus yesterday about a truly indescribable cultural artifact that he and Ira Berkow created way back in 1974. Huh?

I think this segment comes first but it starts with an ad and I wasn't having that.

…While The Worst Are Full of Passionate Intensity

FD's Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History will be officially released on October 26, but the celebration is beginning early. Inspired, and curated, by Brian Phillips of Run of Play, DREAM WEEK features some of your fastest and most favorite writers trying to crack the mystery of Hakeem Olajuwon and his Rockets.

Jack Hamilton would like to dedicate this post to the memory of Solomon Burke but given the subject matter fears that would be in poor taste. He’s previously weighed in on white folks in Boston and writes about music and other things elsewhere. You can find him @jack_hamilton

(Or, The Dream and the Juice)

Hakeem is rich with associations. At Houston he played alongside Clyde Drexler on the Phi Slamma Jamma teams; after his senior year he was selected first in the NBA draft, two spots ahead of Michael Jordan; upon joining the Houston Rockets he was paired with a creaky 7-foot-4 enigma named Ralph Sampson to form the “Twin Towers;” in the autumn of his Rockets career he was reunited with Drexler, then Charles Barkley. Along the way Hakeem forged rivalries against—and often bested—the finest centers of his day: Ewing, Robinson, O’Neal. It’s hard to think of Hakeem without thinking of any of the names mentioned in this paragraph.

And I’m not here to write about any of them. I’m here to write about what is the strangest and, for me, most indelible Hakeem association of them all, when for one not-so-shining moment the Dream’s legacy crossed paths with a man who was once the most compelling sports figure of our time. I’m here to write about O.J. Simpson.



June of 1994 had a confusing and darkly unsettled feel. Kurt Cobain had recently committed suicide, the GOP was gearing up to crush the mid-terms, and Major League Baseball was hurtling towards a strike that would take years of creative pharmaceutical consumption to undo.

The NBA was in a particularly strange moment. The Rockets and Knicks had clawed their way into the first Finals of the Jordan interregnum, and like Dan Devine I was rooting hard for the Knicks, albeit for different reasons than Dan, reasons I can’t even particularly remember. I wasn’t from New York, but rather suburban Boston; perhaps as a Celtics fan I felt some Atlantic Division solidarity, perhaps I was drawn to the fact that there was something distasteful about them, or maybe they were just a little more interesting than rooting for the Rockets. The Rockets were Hakeem’s team, period, and even though the Knicks were nominally Ewing’s team they had guys like Charles Oakley, Anthony Mason and John Starks keeping each game teetering on the brink of violent, Yeatsian chaos.

The first three games of the 1994 Finals unfolded as a defensive stalemate. Houston won Game 1 at home, lost Game 2, and won Game 3 at MSG. It was shaping up as a solid series, though one that would appeal far more to the hardcore fan than the casual enthusiast, marred as it was by a galling dearth of offense and the stark absence of anything resembling Jordan-esque star power.

Attention was further scrambled by an increasingly bizarre distraction from elsewhere in the world of sports. On June 13 (one day after Houston had taken their 2-1 series lead), the partially-decapitated bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were discovered in Brentwood. Simpson, of course, was the estranged wife of football HOFer and NBC Sports personality O.J. Simpson.

The first few days of all this were disorienting, even more so than everything that followed. O.J. as a public figure was a weird case, a guy who’d parlayed a brilliant NFL career into a social position best described as “famous-for-being-famous.” He’d shilled for Hertz in a vaguely memorable series of commercials, played a supporting role in the Naked Gun movies (an underrated trilogy whose rewatchability he has effectively destroyed), and pioneered the dubious practice of ex-jock reporters presenting “inside information” that was neither particularly inside nor particularly informative. Still, most Americans felt cheerfully neutral towards him, and certainly weren’t inclined to think him capable of double murder.

Things quickly got murkier. Tales surfaced of domestic violence, the tone of reportage began to shift, and suddenly O.J. started to seem less like a genial grieving husband and a more like a shadowy and troubled guy. Amidst all of this New York won Game 4—Hakeem scored 32 but got little help from his teammates, while the Knicks had all five starters in double figures and double-doubles from Ewing (16 pts, 15 boards) and Oak (16 and 20).



Game 5 was to take place on June 17, and by this point the shit had hit the fan, O.J.-wise. Confident that he was now the prime suspect in a double homicide, the LAPD made an arrangement with O.J.’s lawyers that he’d turn himself in that morning. Over a thousand reporters waited for him at the courthouse. O.J. never showed. A few hours later the LAPD officially declared O.J. a fugitive from justice; at the same press conference Robert Kardashian read a supremely fucked-up letter from O.J. that came off like a mixture of self-pitying diary entry, confession of guilt, and suicide note. Living on the east coast, news of all this reached us around dinnertime. I remember hearing it on the radio and my father, who’s a lawyer, saying something that can be profanely summarized as “holy fucking shit.” That was the moment I realized that things had gotten real for O.J.

And then things got surreal. My father isn’t a basketball fan and hadn’t been watching Game 5, but at some point he came into the TV room and told me that the LAPD were involved in a car chase with O.J. Simpson. A few minutes later NBC switched to a split screen, the basketball game on one side while Tom Brokaw anchored coverage of the low-speed white Bronco chase on the other.

What’s easy to forget about the now-iconic Bronco “chase” was that the stakes weren’t whether or not the cops were going to catch O.J., like most car chases that we see in movies or on TV (especially if you live in L.A., where they’re kind of a thing). The stakes were whether O.J., riding in the back of the Bronco with a gun to his head while his friend Al Cowlings clumsily negotiated with the LAPD, was going to surrender to police or blow his brains out on national television. Ninety-five million Americans were glued to their television in anticipation of the public suicide of a football icon and rental car pitchman; there’s really no other way to say it.

Of course, a small handful just wanted to watch basketball, and I was one of those. My dad wanted me to switch to ABC but I stuck to my guns and we kept it on NBC, which was more than a little awkward since O.J. was an NBC employee. The Knicks won 91-84, Ewing put up 25 and 12 and Starks added 19 points, 7 boards and 6 assists; Hakeem had 27 and 8 for the Rockets. The Knicks’ win would not be the lead story on SportsCenter the next day.



The epilogue seems almost unnecessary, but the Rockets won the next two games at home, breaking the hearts of championship-starved Knicks fans and giving Hakeem the first of his two rings. He’d win the next one the following year, sweeping an Orlando Magic team best described as “happy to be there.” The Simpson Trial was still ongoing, and wouldn’t wrap until October of 1995.

I was fourteen when Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered, and I was sixteen when O.J. walked. I could throw some cute Wonder Years-style tag onto that fact—“during that time I discovered true love/lost my virginity/saw my brother return from Vietnam a man”—but I can’t, because none of those things are true, and even if they were, who cares. I’m sure if I’d been a little older I’d have gleaned more significance from the polarizing racial dynamics and myriad outrages on both sides of the case, but I had black friends who thought O.J. was guilty and white friends who swore he’d been framed, and while I knew the trial was a big deal, it really just seemed like a sad state of affairs that became a lot more momentous than it ever should have. It seems that way now more than ever.

But for better or for worse, when I think of Hakeem Olajuwon I think of O.J. Simpson and that night in June when I watched a basketball game while occasionally checking out of the corner of my eye for a glimpse of the first televised celebrity suicide in American history. Or maybe it was vice versa; I honestly don’t remember, which shows how profoundly the two events have since intertwined. I don’t feel good about this, and it bothers me that Hakeem, one of the greatest players of his generation, a big man blessed with such incredible skill, grace, and athletic intelligence, is linked in my imagination to a murderous sociopath, but these things are hard to undo, and in a strange sense Game 5 of the 1994 NBA Finals may well be the most memorable basketball game I’ve ever watched. I don’t know what any of it means.

I do know one last thing, and I swear this is true. At some point shortly after the trial, a friend of mine happened upon Hakeem having lunch in Cambridge, MA. He went over and asked for his autograph, which Hakeem graciously provided.

Hakeem’s dining partner?

Alan Dershowitz.

Commence conspiracy theories.

The Paper Says Otherwise

FD's Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History will be officially released on October 26, but the celebration is beginning early. Inspired, and curated, by Brian Phillips of Run of Play, DREAM WEEK features some of your fastest and most favorite writers trying to crack the mystery of Hakeem Olajuwon and his Rockets.

Joey Litman is an FD regular and one of the authors of The Undisputed Guide. He blogs at Straight Bangin', he curates what he sees as America's steady decline on Shit Used to Be Better, and he tweets on the reg. Don't get him started about Drake. Neither he nor Dan Devine knew that Hakeem and the Rockets would stir their childhood souls in similar fashion.

Lying around my childhood room somewhere is a commemorative set of basketball cards from the 1992 NBA Draft. The whole gang is there: Shaq looking svelte; Christian Laettner looking white; LaPhonso Ellis looking weird; Marlon Maxey looking cool; Tony Bennett looking like a foreigner; Don MacLean looking middle-aged. I used to play with the cards in all kinds of ways. I would organize them based on which players had the highest Q-ratings in my wing of the home, and Anthony Peeler would be on top. Then I would reorganize them so that the players were sequenced by conference, with a sub-categorization for alphabetical team listings. I would create dream starting fives, I would stare quizzically at Clarence Weatherspoon, I would wonder for extended periods about how Brian Davis got the lines of his haircut to be so crisp and clean. Once, I spent what felt like an hour reorganizing the letters in Litterial Green's name to create as many partial anagrams as possible.

More than anything else, I would shuffle the cards into a confused, incoherent sequence before reimplementing the unyielding rigidity of the draft order. Shaq on top, always, followed by Alonzo Mourning, whom I presumed, given his proximity to Shaq, was destined to be pretty much as good. My dad would caution that Alonzo was overrated, but the cards said otherwise, and unlike my dad, they fit under my pillow when I went to sleep. When you're a ten-year-old, you accept conventional wisdom dispensed by presumed authorities with blind faith. Draft order, sanctioned and celebrated with its own TV show and all sorts of special media attention, was as authoritative as could be. And that was why I couldn't understand why Robert Horry always had to be placed on top of the Harold Miner, Malik Sealy, Tracy Murray, Jon Barry, Oliver Miller, and Byron Houston cards. I had never heard of Robert Horry, and he didn't seem to be so good. What did Alabama ever do in March?

(The internets tell me that he won three SEC conference tournaments and appeared in two Sweet 16s, but bear in mind that I was ten. Ten-year-olds don't care who made it to a mid-March Thursday night. They care about players with nicknames like "Baby Jordan" from schools where older cousins matriculate, and they care about teams in the Final Four. Also, they care about the Fab Five, because that remains the coolest basketball team ever.)



Horry's first year in the NBA validated my then-eleven-year-old's skepticism. He only averaged 10 points per game! He wasn't an All Star! This was the eleventh pick in the draft? His team was alright, but it wasn't really on my television very often. And forget the playoffs, which is the canvas of lasting impression, even for adults. For me, then and now, 1993 consisted of little more than John Starks going baseline on the Bulls only to see Charles Smith later go baseline in a much worse kind of way. I also remember those Finals because I hated the Phoenix Suns and resented that they'd even had the temerity to validate the Charles Barkley acquisition by winning the Western Conference. Houston went out against Seattle that year. Though I was by then staying up far too late and watching far too much basketball, I can assure you that I remember almost nothing of a series that usually tipped off each evening as my classmates were nodding off. I probably saw more Horry that year during the hazy moments of a second half as I'd struggle to locate the remote and turn off the television in my room than I did at any other time. No matter what the order of the cards said, he was not very good. I was certain of it, and I am sure I said so at school during at least one of the many morning meetings I'd take hostage with unsolicited basketball commentary.

We all know what happened the next season: Michael Jordan retired, Houston tipped the Knicks in seven games to win the championship, O.J. Simpson killed two people, Pat Riley absconded to Miami, and the New York-Miami rivalry was born. (Plug: There is an entire essay about this most curious kinstrife in FD's Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History, which you should buy.) I watched the Rockets against the Knicks with ferocity. Twelve-years-old at that point, I was the second-greatest basketball expert I knew, and my credibility was on the line. Only my dad surpassed me, and I was often reminding him to open his eyes as Finals games crept passed his bedtime.

Applying such keen focus for seven games, my dad and I settled into a rhythm--something I only recognized later in life--that persists to this day. We create our own memes when we watch basketball together. We are each other's best, most rapt audience, and as we share ideas and echo sentiments, we establish shared wisdom that quickly becomes gospel. (We also make all the same noises at all the same times because we're sick in the head.) This is a pathology that surely started before the 1994 NBA Finals, but that series stands as a definitive moment in my relationships with my dad and with basketball because our banter was codified in a special way: it was only then that I finally grasped what it meant to be a team, and why Robert Horry might have merited his place among the cards.



Hakeem's championship Rockets were the first great team I can recall from personal experience. I grew up with the appropriate level of respect for the 80s Lakers and Celtics, and I knew enough about the Bad Boys to understand their place in history, but I based those admiring verdicts on hearsay. I was instructed, and I assimilated the lessons. The Bulls, too, fielded great teams, but with Michael and Scottie, Chicago always seemed like two stars and a supporting cast. Especially to a little boy.

Houston, though, was different. I had watched Hakeem Olajuwon own Patrick Ewing for years, and Hakeem's grace, intelligence, and skills were readily apparent. Hakeem was great. However, no other player on the roster seemed like anything more than average. In fact, among the ten Rockets who played the most minutes that season, the only other players to ever appear in All Star games were Otis Thorpe, in 1992, and Sam Cassell, in 2004, well after he played for Houston. All Star games are not a dispositive criterion for any full evaluation of a player, of course, but think about that again: over the entirety of their careers, Hakeem's nine most important teammates from that season made two All Star teams, collectively. Houston was not a champion predicated on having the most talent.

Instead, Houston had the best component parts, and my father and I were mesmerized by it. Consider the point guard position. As we still say today in my household, Kenny Smith may have started for those Rockets, but Sam Cassell was the finisher. A rookie closer, in fact. Together, Smith and Cassell were ideal complements. Smith was able to keep defenses honest with his shooting while applying his athleticism in various ways, and Cassell was able to infuse energy, tenacity, and fearlessness, all crunch-time assets which Smith did not provide as readily. Individually, neither was a perfect point guard, and neither stood on his own merits among the better players at the position. But on a Rockets team anchored solely by Hakeem and a proud facelessness, the Smith-Cassell combination worked.

It was that way across the roster. For many teenage years, I carried around more esteem for Otis Thorpe than anyone outside of his family because despite never providing Karl Malone numbers, Thorpe was dazzling as a workman. More specifically, he provided basketball assets that were unassuming but crucial, and he did so on a team crafted for that purpose. (I also liked Thorpe's gaunt appearance and sinewy style. He was sort of like a Halloween skeleton brought to life.) Houston was not a Super Friends outfit stocked with Hall of Famers, an extension of the two-stars-and-a-crew model, nor a collective of the very good assembled around Hakeem. Instead, the 1994 Rockets were like the Duncan Spurs, only without as much Russian-culture graduate-degree work, talent, and timeless humor. During the championship years, Manu and Tony Parker were probably better, relative to their peer set, than the non-Hakeem Rockets were to theirs. Yet both teams shared an abiding faith in the maxim that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. The Rockets may have forever struck the best NBA balance among the worth of the raw materials and the marginal value of the finished product. (Maybe 1977 Trail Blazers partisans would protest otherwise.)



Houston's basketball modality was a revelation to behold, particularly for New Yorkers accustomed to outsized hype and the Knicks' tenuous grasp on functioning teamwork. For years, New York was always one player away--nevermind that the one player was never going to be an addition, but the subtraction of Michael Jordan. So the Brickers would bring in some shiny new piece, or consummate some critical trade, and hope that another amassed weapon would find the right place in the arsenal. This usually worked well, though never well enough, and the contrast with Houston was striking. Vernon Maxwell, Mario Elie, and Carl Herrera were not the missing pieces that captivated the imagination of a Knicks fan, but those standard-issue basketball professionals made critical contributions to the Rockets. As we watched, my father and I were resigned to acknowledging that Houston was "tough"--a team that executed effectively, placed constant strain on an opponent by relying on refined everyday contributions from everyone, and was mentally steeled for a fight.

Mr. Eleventh Pick fit right in on the 1994 Rockets. Horry was a lanky swingman who assisted in the modern cause to strip that term of its ugliness. He would hit jumpers, pogo around near the hoop for rebounds and diving one-handers, play excellent defense, and demand little in return. Not particularly strong or thick, he instead blocked shots on the weak side, challenged shots straight up, and made the right defensive switches down low and up top. Horry was almost always involved with winning time--offering a portend of a career spent as indispensable--and that inescapable reality quickly leaped out at my father. Not just "tough," Horry was gifted within Houston's system. A team that asked for each of its members only to provide what they could in a replicable and reliable fashion asked Horry to provide a little of everything, but never too much of any one thing. I had a harder time immediately appreciating a guy who averaged only 11 and 6 in the playoffs after a childhood within the NBA's galaxy of stars and superstars, but it came to me as I sat in the basketball echo chamber with my dad. Moving away from disappointment and skepticism, I eventually anointed Horry as a sure star on the rise, engaging in some classic, pre-adolescent overcompensation.

As we all know, Horry netted out somewhere between the two poles of undeserving lottery pick and should-be Hall of Fame player. His career, however it is classified, holds special meaning for me. Though no one ever should or will replace Hakeem as the symbol of the mid-90s Rockets, Horry was arguably more Houston than anyone else. On a team of everymen, he was among the finest, and his style captured Houston's ethos in a fashion belied by Hakeem's exceptionalism. Horry also authored a career of winning that still challenges the conventional methods of measuring basketball accomplishment. I just wish I could now manipulate time and convince my ten-year-old self to think this way. I likely would have spent less time in my room with those cards and more time savoring a basketball team in the proper sense of that word.

Truth Crushed to the Earth Is Truth Still

FD's Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History will be officially released on October 26, but the celebration is beginning early. Inspired, and curated, by Brian Phillips of Run of Play, DREAM WEEK features some of your fastest and most favorite writers trying to crack the mystery of Hakeem Olajuwon and his Rockets.

Dan Devine is a contributing writer for Ball Don't Lie, Yahoo! Sports' NBA blog. He Tweets, he Tumbls and he stows away neatly under your seat.

I was 11 years old when Hakeem Olajuwon changed the way I understood basketball. And God, do I hate him for it.

It was the summer of 1994 and my synapses were on overload. The Rangers were slaying the Canucks and Jordan was shagging flies in Birmingham. As I sat in my parents' basement in Staten Island mastering "Shinobi III," it felt like the New York Knicks were really going to do it.

The Knicks stomped the Atlantic that year, rolling up 57 wins with that bruising Pat Riley steez that still invokes screw faces. In the Eastern Conference Semifinals, they finally slid past the hated (and yes, Jordan-less) Chicago Bulls, thanks to a Hue Hollins whistle that will echo forever and ever, amen. Then they beat the somehow-even-more-hated Indiana Pacers, satisfyingly clipping the string on that miserable Chatty Cathy they had playing the 2, and graduated out of the East into the NBA Finals for the first time since 1973.

"Graduated" works pretty well here; with all due respect to the Dunking Dutchman, going from Rik Smits to Hakeem Olajuwon represents a pretty steep elevation. For Patrick Ewing, Master's-level work lay ahead.

In the memories seared into my gray matter, the 1994 NBA Finals consisted of Ewing having a seven-game nightmare against a bully he couldn't drop, throwing punch after feckless punch that landed flush on Hakeem's jaw but had no effect. In my memory, watching Ewing play Hakeem feels like watching my father try to get around on crutches after breaking his kneecap, seeing a giant laid low by a force beyond his control.

In my memory, this happened over and over and over:



Of course, as is often the case, memory doesn't quite nail the facts. Ewing wasn't exactly a scared little kid in that series -- he was a 31-year-old eight-time All-Star, the best player on a team that contested a Game 7 for the O'Brien, a linchpin who played 44 minutes and averaged 18.9 points per game in the Finals.

That said, Ewing did get destroyed in that series, bested in just about every facet of the sport. Hakeem was faster, sharper and more athletic. His hands slipped more smoothly into the passing lanes and his feet moved more quickly on the help-side rotation. He had a better handle, a defter touch and a more rapid reaction after receiving the rock. He had moves, and moves, and moves. Ewing set a then-Finals record for rejections with 4.3 blocks per game (Hakeem posted 3.7) and got the better of the boards, snaring 12.4 rebounds per game to Hakeem's 9.1. But just about everywhere else? Anything he could do, Hakeem could do better.

Olajuwon outscored Ewing all seven nights, averaging 26.9 points on 50 percent shooting from the floor. At the other end of the court, he forced Ewing, himself a 49.6 percent shooter during the '93-'94 regular season, into a dismal 36.3 percent mark. The Dream also more than doubled Ewing's dimes (4.1 assists per game to 1.7) and topped him in thefts (1.6 steals per game to 1.3).

Everywhere my 11-year-old self looked, there was proof. Seven games' worth of indisputable evidence, collected on the purest proving ground possible. Hakeem's team won, and they won because he flat-out beat Ewing. I hated it, I raged against it, but he was better. He just was.

And because he was, Ewing couldn't be what I'd come to believe he was: The best player in the game who wasn't Michael Jordan. (I know, I know. I was 11 and grew up in New York. Cut me some slack.)

Ewing losing to Jordan was one thing; Michael was another animal entirely, and everybody knew it. But losing to -- and being considerably less than -- Hakeem? Someone who played the same position as Patrick, who came from the West, who we never saw? (Again, kid memory falls short here -- they'd actually squared off in the regular season 15 times prior to the '93-'94 Finals, with the Rockets going 9-6 against the Knicks, including two white-washes that season in which Olajuwon outscored Ewing by a combined total of 66 to 24.)

Seeing Ewing so obviously outgunned by this tight-mustached cat who, as our esteemed curator notes, had "never seemed inhumanly perfect," who had "something approachable about him even when he was bringing the roof down on somebody's head," forced me to reevaluate him. And I wasn't the only one, either.

Hakeem's brilliance in the '94 Finals -- his victory in the first post-Jordan run for the roses, his seizing of the wide-open opportunity for anyone else in the game to stake their claim -- changed the popular understanding of Ewing and indelible-inked his story. No one could argue Ewing's heart or desire, but going into the 1994-95 season at 32 years old, with nearly 28,000 minutes of NBA ball on those knees, having just been summarily vanquished by Olajuwon, himself 32 -- and it wasn't just that he was better than Ewing, it's that he didn't seem worn down in the same way -- it was becoming harder to believe that Patrick could be a serious factor at the championship level.

Admittedly, the Knicks' subsequent clashes (and stumbles) against an ascendant '95 Pacers team, the MJ-revitalized Bulls and the late-decade Riley/Mourning/Hardaway Heat show that Olajuwon didn't completely cut Ewing off at the knees or end his tenure as a competitive player. But the team's best, brightest shot at the brass ring has passed and Ewing, try as he might to stay in the conversation, had settled into a lower tier (The Knicks did make one more trip to the Finals during Ewing's tenure, but their improbable title-round run in the strike-shortened 1999 season was fueled by the guard play of Allan Houston and Latrell Sprewell. While Ewing showed some of the fire of old in series-clinching games against Miami and Atlanta, he bowed out two games into the Eastern Conference Finals against the Pacers with a torn Achilles.)

Everyone was happy to call Ewing a "warrior." He would be revered as a tireless fighter, but never be viewed as an ultimate victor. Any Knick fan would gladly claim him as our proudest standard-bearer, but we all had to realize he'd never be the gold standard. Everything about Patrick Ewing's essence as a basketball player was thick with the sweat of labor, literally and metaphorically, and monarchs never perspire.

In a way that Jordan's off-guard ominpotence never could, Hakeem's brilliance laid bare the flaws in Ewing's game and determined his fate: When the game got immortal, he'd forever be second-class.

At least Patrick wasn't the only one.



The other best pivot of the era came out of the Naval Academy with the first pick in the 1987 NBA Draft. David Robinson was a rippling marvel who ran the floor like a 5-foot-9 scatback. He could use outmaneuver plodding defenders on the block to get to the basket, elevate above traffic down low to clear the glass, erase teammates' defensive mistakes at the rim, and do it all with matter-of-fact ease. On top of that, he cut a warm, compelling figure, forever flashing a smile that swelled like a symphony. He was intelligent, accountable and phenomenal. Superman in high tops. Your grandma's favorite basketball player.

And after leading his San Antonio Spurs to an NBA-best 62 wins and the top seed in the Western Conference during the 1994-95 season, he was named the NBA's Most Valuable Player, a well-deserved reward for a race well run.

Except, y'know, not really.



To his credit, Robinson fared better in the 1995 Western Conference Finals than Ewing had one year earlier, averaging 23.8 points per game on 44.9 percent shooting to go with 11.3 rebounds, 2.7 assists, 2.2 blocks and 1.5 steals in 41.7 minutes of nightly work. Thing is, Olajuwon was an utterly insolvable equation, a different animal than even the one the Knicks saw -- the legend attributes this to Olajuwon seeing red after watching Robinson receive his MVP award before the start of the series -- and he made Robinson look flat-out stumped. In 43.5 minutes per game, Olajuwon torched the Admiral for 35.3 points (shooting 56 percent from the floor and 80.6 percent from the line), 12.5 rebounds, 5 assists, 4.2 blocks and 1.3 steals.

More than that, Hakeem showcased the kind of iron will that could independently decide outcomes. With the series knotted at two games apiece and a slot in the Finals hanging in the balance, the Dream took the onus on himself and straight-up beasted, posting 81 total points, 26 rebounds, 11 assists and 10 blocks in Games 5 and 6. It was complete, borderline ridiculous domination, the kind of thing that just doesn't happen to players of Robinson's stature -- at least, until they meet their mismatch.

I'd never deign to fall back on the basketball/jazz canard, especially not here, but there was an elemental stylistic difference between Olajuwon and Robinson revealed in that series that evokes at least the spirit of that too-easy comparison. Watch the way Hakeem attacks Robinson in that video -- the fluidity of his movement, the way his offensive approach straddles the line between fundamental and freestyle. He initiates, Robinson works to make the proper prescribed play to take away the Dream's best option, Olajuwon calmly responds with an evil array of counters and pivots, and by the time Robinson can calculate the altered trajectory, the ball's already in the net.

Robinson always appeared to be the perfect specimen, the test-tube All-Star, programmed for greatness. But in the heat of the moment, he had no answers to combat the relentlessness, improvisation and immediacy of Hakeem's offensive attack. Call it instinct vs. education, nature vs. nurture, art vs. math, whatever -- while Robinson's greatness felt bound by a very precise machine logic, Hakeem could color outside the lines. That made the difference. Rockets in six.

Robinson's performance in the series' final two games? Forty-one total points, 22 rebounds, seven blocks and five assists. Respectable numbers -- real good against anybody else, and good enough to win against most of the league's other centers. But not good enough here, and not good enough to lift his team by himself, especially when his counterpart was finding daylight every time the Rockets fed the post.

Fairly or unfairly, that's how we remember Robinson in the context of all-timers. Very nice player, very nice skills, very nice career -- especially that late part, after the Spurs drafted Tim Duncan, the best power forward of all time, when they won two titles (lest we forget, the only two that Robinson won). I mean, sure, he didn't get the job done as the top dog in the year he got the MVP and had the best team with the best record and home court advantage. And sure, faced with a coin-flip opportunity to take control of a 2-2 series with Game 5 at home after clawing back to even-par on the road, put his squad on his back and push the Spurs into the Finals, he got destroyed in back-to-back games. But yeah. What a nice player.



Two seasons, two legendary rivals, two decisive victories, three legacies set in stone: Ewing as wounded warrior, Robinson as secondary specimen, Olajuwon as conquering crucible. Olajuwon's performances against his era's two greatest counterparts defined the way a generation viewed the basketball hierarchy. They also made a convincing argument that for a time, however fleeting, he was the most dominant basketball power on the planet, Birmingham included.

You Will Be Slaughtered

Words from the janitor: Read the Works today, which includes one of the best things I've written on LeBron. For those of you who asked where the feed went, try here.

Neither Eric Freeman nor myself attended any media days. That doesn’t mean, however, that we aren’t NBA writers. Or really lazy, which might explain why we didn’t go the nearest team media day with our pants on fire and our hi-tops on. As luck would have it, we discovered -- thanks to none of our older, more distinguished colleagues -- that media day is a clearinghouse for laziness, an ode to it, a gigantic, seaweed-powered factory churning out bits of storyline for the benefit of writer laziness. The point of media day is to feed story idea to the, well, the media. And why not? It saves us work; the season is long; puff pieces make the world go ‘round; and really, is there any better explanation for the photos that came out of this week’s festivities.

Taking a scant bit of initiative, Eric and I have endeavored to get the jump on our more grizzled peers, read between lines, and lay claim to the stories that land someone -- maybe the player, maybe some scruffy reporter, maybe the two holding hands in a stockcar -- on ESPN in January, or maybe even as part of an ABC halftime segment. You see visual nonsense; we see messages telegraphed straight from the public relations office, just in code, a code of symbols and expressionistic cues that only a real journalist can latch onto and suck all the blood out of, drawing sustenance and meaning from it like a lamprey stuck in a picnic basket. Put me in coach, I’m ready to play!



As far back as he can remember, Daniel Orton had trouble in school. The day he started the third-grade, Daniel lit an apple on fire, thinking it was a pencil. All he wanted to do was give it to his teach, old, blind Ms. Abernathy, to try and make her see again. That way, maybe this year would be easier. He struggled through high school, just barely qualifying for admission into Kentucky, and it was rumored, left after one sliver of a season off the bench because he was facing ineligibility.

However, Eric Bledsoe’s bum transcripts aren’t the only academic shocker to come to light in the House of Cal’s this summer. As it turns out, Orton tested at near-genius levels on all four major standardized tests, and learned that all along, he has been the victim not of poor schools, or an undiagnosed learning issue, but poor record-keeping. Vets like Rashard Lewis, who jumped straight from high school, have taken to calling Orton “The Wiz”; this offseason, he has started aggressively pursuing a degree at UCF, with an emphasis on science, math, and his favorite topic, physics. That apple? No longer a painful memory, this unassuming fruit is now a reminder of Sir Isaac Newton, also misunderstood as a child and very nearly burned at the stake before an apple set him free. Just don’t ask his more religious teammates in on the conversation, Orton jokes. (BS)



For the first five seasons of his career, Monta Ellis was an enigma, a talented scorer who often seemed uninterested in the rigors of defense and being his team’s leader. Now, a married man and NBA veteran, he has taken up the mantle and led his charges out of the wilderness. But few thought he would do so as the leader of a dystopic future world hell-bent on fighting off a coming alien invasion. At the bridge of his spaceship, he waits, ready to take on any extraterrestrials that look to penetrate our atmosphere. (EF)



As a player, Nick Van Exel was not someone you would have expected to take on a coaching role after his days on the court were over. Despite his penchant for late-game heroics, Van Exel was a bristly personality who often seemed disconnected from his teammates. With the Hawks, his methods have been far from conventional. But he has a secret weapon and conversation starter: the first pants ever to combine pleats and belt-loops. (EF)



Don Nelson is gone; long live Don Nelson. At least, coming into camp, that was the fear for some in the Golden State Warriors organization. After all, no man is as synonymous with the francise as the one they call Nellie; his up-tempo, experimental brand of ball, and eccentric behavior, are the closest it has ever come to a league-wide brand. But as with the couple in Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (including the clay-mation miniseries streamed on Welsh PPV), even the most passionate, rocky, relationships must come to an end. Coming into camp, though, new head coach Keith Smart wonder, and worried, how he could get his men to work past the charismatic rush -- and some would say, the beaten-puppy trauma -- of life under Nellie. What did their insides look like? How did they understand the sport of basketball? How, from chaos, can you start to mine order?

The answer was easy: stacking. This centuries-old sport, favorted primarily by autistic kids (and Dutch people) and their weird dads, consists of piling up objects, in a set form, at a rapid pace. The demons of Don Nelson are exorcised, and youngsters like Stephen Curry learn that fast doesn’t necessarily mean chaotic, and that you can build yourself -- and your team -- back up without a return to plodding basics. Maybe it’s a sport for the wee ones, but as Curry put it, Nellie made us feel like kids in a bad way. This is the first step of the long journey home, to safety and security -- both on the court and in their minds. (BS)



In the 1998 film Patch Adams, Robin Williams heals sick people through the power of laughter. Fighting against an impersonal health-care system that treats human beings like cogs in a money-making machine, he turns an arsenal of funny voices and a giant vat of spaghetti into the best treatment this side of the MRI machine. For years, NBA defense has been defined by a similarly cold and angry calculus. But don’t tell that to the Clippers, whose regular team-wide hug sessions have brought a new sense of togetherness and the most surprisingly effective defensive rotations in the league. (EF)



Amar’e Stoudemire’s commitment to Jewish culture turned out to be short-lived. Once he learned what observing Shabbat actually meant and tasted gefilte fish for the first time, he realized that the world he saw in Israel was far different from that of his new home of New York City, where insecurity triumphs over strength. Yet all hope is not lost as Amar’e explores the world outside our borders. Impressed by Marion Cotillard’s performance in Inception, he attacked the world of French cinema with uncommon vigor this fall. Now, with the help of teammate Ronny Turiaf, he’s learning that French culture goes far beyond baguettes and brie. C’est la vie, indeed! (EF)



In the offseason, most NBA player return to the place that they really call home. It may be a small town in Missippi or Vermont where they were born, or a posh suburb of Atlanta where they have settled with their families. Maybe it’s rented Gulfstream, circling the globe, with occasional stops in Asia for sneaker promotion. For Miami Heat center Zydrunas Ilguaskas, better known as Big Z, that place is the mouth of hell, where he lives in the transplanted ruins of Count Dracula’s forbidden castle. The brotherhood of basketball is an enlightened one. It’s been years since Charles Barkley called Angola’s players “spear chuckers”. That, and the grueling journey endured by many pros from the former Eastern Bloc, explains why there haven’t been nearly enough Dracula jokes in this so-called global renaissance. I say, so what? Dracula was a great movie. If they’re going to talk that way, they should be ready for some good-natured ribbing. If you can dish it out, take it. If my daughter was a vampire, like in Let Me In (great flick!), I would probably send her to those parts to get in touch with her roots. But for now, come on. Vampires are the enemy. They take our blood. Don’t they deserve a little grief?

None of this matters to Ilguaskas. He arrived in the NBA abruptly because he turned into a bat and flew over to America. His early career injuries are largely attributable to a lack of healthy teammates that he could eat. With the Cavs, he siphoned off of the nutrient-rich bloodstream of LeBron James, and it kept him upright and effective. That, as much as any desire for a ring or friendship with LBJ, is why he followed him to Miami. Back home in hell, though, none of this matters to Ilguaskas. He can’t change who he is, nor does expect his teammates, or fans, to ever understand. But he’s sick, as they say, of living in the darkness. Big Z is ready to come into the light, and set the record straight on who he his, his past, and how you balance a castle already in shambles on exact point where one dimension ends and another begins (for obvious reasons, he can’t go all the way yet). Actually, given Ilguaskas’s unique set of concerns, maybe he wants us to come into the dark with him, since he likely wouldn’t want to be caught out in the light. Good luck convincing this reporter to chase down that lead! (BS)



On the court, fans know Steve Nash as one of the greatest distributors of his generation. He creates passing angles out of thing air with the skill of a well-trained wizard. But there’s a darker side to Nash that people rarely see. The man who seems all too willing on the court is much more selfish behind closed doors. To get a taste of his true personality, just watch him at the team’s post-game spread. And don’t look away, because that fruit plate might vanish before your eyes. (EF)



Robin Lopez has never struck anyone as a serious guy. With his Sideshow-Bob hair and love of comic books, he sometimes resembles a rowdy sixth-grader more than an adult. But behind that goofy exterior lies the mind of a scholar who, lest we forget, opted to spend two years at Stanford rather than a more typical basketball power like UCLA or Arizona. With the help of his twin brother Brook, Robin has created one of the hottest apps on the smart phone market. The next time you’re able to access your favorite childhood cartoons to pass the time on your morning commute, thank Phoenix’s shot-blocking center. (EF)



“Us .... us .... us ... us ... us ... and them .... them ... them ... them ... them ... them/But after all, we’re all just ordinary men” -- Pink Floyd, “Dark Side of the Moon”

(BREAKING CHARACTER: How fucking dumb is it that every single post-Syd Barrett Floyd record is, on some level, about Barrett, an idealized and romanticized version of Syd that at once celebrates and laments his descent into madness and the brilliance it wreaked along the way. But those assholes kicked him out! Blech. Okay, back to reporting.)

Growing up, Devin Harris always knew he was different. He didn’t get in trouble. He got good grades. His friends on his AAU team, the Wisconsin Blasters, had cousins in jail, problems getting admitted into school, and always got stopped by the cops. Devin just didn’t get it. He loved his Packers, tried to be a good son and better boyfriend, and went to the school of his dreams. He lived with two female friends, prompting rumors that he was a pimp, queer, soft, a mama’s boy, or indecisive. Devin laughed it off easily because to him, it all seemed so distant. Above all else, though, Devin knows the value of giving back to the community.

When the Nets moved to Newark, that responsibility took on an entirely different tenor than it had when they played ... in a swamp, and ministered to alligators, rens, shopping malls, the memory of dead mobsters, and area schools with at least one black kid for the photo op. Newark, though, is a very different, a world Harris has never known. Teammate Terrence Williams compared it to Seattle’s “BD”, though he probably meant “CD”, where all the non-serial murders in Seattle occur even though, at this point, only four blocks of it aren’t gentrified. This season, Devin plans to finally cross that line, to discover that world that has seemed so close, yet so far away, throughout his charmed life as a star athlete. That is, unless he gets traded first. (BS)



The Orlando Magic once had a depth problem. With so many highly-paid players on the roster, it was often hard for Stan Van Gundy to find enough minutes to go around. Brandon Bass and several others who came (or came back) to Orlando expecting to be a contributor to a championship contender, languished on the bench. This team needed leadership badly, and it came from an unlikely source: swingman Mickael Pietrus. A man who once seemed like a replaceable role player is now an irreplaceable part of the Magic attack. With the guidance of this Frenchman, this team is finally making beautiful music together. (EF)



The Celtics always knew that signing Shaquille O’Neal would be a risk. With his outsized personality and need for attention, Shaq can often serve as The Big Distraction, particularly for a team that’s been all business for the past three seasons. He can contribute on the court, but it might not always be worth it. For proof, just look at the building rift between O’Neal and dimunitive guard Nate Robinson. The man who once made everyone laugh with his “Shrek and Donkey” nickname now sees his joke turf being invaded by one of the biggest pranksters in the NBA. This locker room may not be big enough for the both of them. (EF)



By now, you know Ben Wallace’s story. How he grew up on a tiny farm in an impoverished Southern state, where he passed him time building his muscles. He smashed things for work and play, and sometimes just to pass the time. He broke up old furniture for firewood, then smashed an old barn so his ten siblings could build a new living room set. The stories spread far and wide of the kid from the dirt road, whose mailbox came and went with the hounds, and his astounding muscle. When he first met Charles Oakley, it was because Oakley -- no stranger to big arms and outlandish boasts -- wanted to challenge this backwoods phenom to a lumberjack contest. He took one look at Wallace, sledgehammer in hand, and politely changed his tune. Oakley offered, instead, to make Ben into an NBA player.

It worked, but only because Ben kept hammering. He’s been hammering ever since. And now, as his career enters its twilight phase, Wallace is going back to his roots, the way we become more and more like babies as we age (no Benjamin Button), or start going to church the day we learn we’re going to die. Sheed had the championship belt, the perfect summation of what pro sports had made him, and vice-versa. Wallace, hanging on till the end like ol’ John Henry battling that steam machine, is bringing back the hammer like never before. Sometimes, you’ll see it in the locker room. Sometimes, by the bench. It’s not if Big Ben has a hammer, but when. Let’s just hope Ron Artest isn’t in the building. (BS)



The Heat’s Big Three earned their fair share of criticism this summer for the way they came together in Miami. Beyond that arrogance, though, was a need to be loved verging on the pathological. With that in mind, they’ve made a concerted effort to reach out to the community and show they know how to take a little criticism. That’s why they held the league’s first team roast last night, where everyone from superfan Jimmy Buffett to teammate Carlos Arroyo got their digs in at Miami’s most popular trio. Don’t miss the broadcast on ESPN next Sunday, because Mario Chalmers does a Chris Bosh impression that you have to see to believe. (EF)



Once upon a time, the Mavericks had amenities unrivaled by any other team in the NBA. Of course, that was before Mark Cuban lost all his money by giving it away on poorly conceived reality shows. These days, the scene in Dallas is quite grim. The franchise’s army of trainers has now been whittled down to one guy with a bottle of Tylenol and some tape. Personal DVD players have been replaced by a communal TV with no cable and a few bootleg Entourage DVDs. And the team’s personal chef? Well, Dirk Nowitzki tries to make spaetzle, but it just comes out as a doughy mush. (EF)

(NF note: I thought this was Dirk at an all-white party with a bottle of Hypno until I zoomed in. What a story that would have made!)



You might think that Carlos Boozer -- born and raised in Alaska, then sent to preppy Duke to ball -- would lean to the right politically. He went to play in Utah, after all. However, now that he’s in the free and open environs of Chicago, we’re getting to see real Carlos Boozer, a arch political satirist who, in one image, shrewdly suggests the cultural intersection of the Tea Party and the Village People. Who better to tackle these topics than Alaska’s fifth-most famous public figure, and a power forward often accused of being “soft”? TROPES FOR DAYS. (BS)



Mike Dunleavy has been ridiculed for many things, among them, looking like he was twelve. That’s why, for the last few months, he has been living in a strange, reverse-biodome, that sucks the life out of its victim and causes him to age faster than usual, at least on a superficial level. Hence the new set of wrinkles, which give him some gravitas in a way that muscles never did, and a look of perpetual horror that no longer suggests an unspoilt childhood growing up with an NBA journeyman. You can judge a black vet by his tats. For the white race, all they have is the stories their faces tell. (BS)



BREAKING: Anthony Randolph straddles scorer’s table to down a box of NERDS between interviews. What flavor? (BS)

Tales Within Tales

In the inverse spirit of the Black-comedy-as-penned-by-a-Jew (most recently typified in Neil Berman’s appearance on I Know Black People) and Jews-writing-about-Asians (um, Flower Drum Song?) we present Robert Levertis-Bell (not a Jew) and Jay Caspian Kang (not a Jew) and their feature film treatments of the Amar'e Stoudemire (not a Jew?) pilgrimage. Follow the not-Jews on twitter at @thatkidicarus (Robert) and @maxpower51 (Jay).

There is also a contest! Anyone who wishes to film a scene from either Robert or Jay’s screenplays can submit it to freedarko-at-gmail-dot-com. Don’t worry about racial or religious accuracy—we can all suspend our disbelief, at least that much. The winner will receive a free copy of both FreeDarko books: The Macrophenomal Pro Basketball Almanac and the upcoming Undisputed Guide to Basketball History. These best of the best will also have their work featured on this very site!!!

Furthermore, you should check out Shoals and Spencer Hall on FDPTDOCNBAPC, and consider getting in touch with FD about app development.

THE ALL STARS OF DAVID
a romantic comedy by Jay Caspian Kang.

After missing a last-second lay-up that would have won the Knicks their first NBA championship in over forty years, twenty-nine year old DAVID PERCY (Chris Webber) drinks away his sorrows at Scores. When we first meet him, it is five in the morning. At a floura-lit table near the back, the strippers are stacking their singles. His teammates are nowhere to be seen. After being told by a bouncer that closing time has long since passed, Percy, a notorious carouser and serial womanizer, takes out his cell phone, punches in a long-forgotten number and leaves a weepy, drunken message.

The next afternoon, Percy wakes up and listens to his voice mail. Along with the expected consolations from his agent, his manager, and Knicks team-owner-and-former-President-Barack Obama, there is a message from a timid woman. She says she watched the game and wonders if he is doing okay. This woman is EVE KEDEM (Marissa Tomei), Percy's girlfriend from college who he dumped on draft night. Convinced that the material world was to blame for the cessation of their love, Eve rediscovered her Hasidic Jewish roots and moved out to Long Island.

The two meet in a diner under an ugly bridge. Eve listens to Percy talk about his growing disillusionment. He says, "It used to be about the love of the game, you know, back when we were a thing. But now, it's just about me, about my need to be great. What I realized last night in that strip club is that I don't love the game anymore. I only love what the game does for me." He confesses that he envies Eve and the peace her devotion to G-d has brought. She almost-touches his head and says, "men like you always seek out comfort from old girlfriends because you want to remember that even before you became you, that there was something worth loving."

Then she looks him straight in the eyes, does that Marissa Tomei squint-thing, and says, "There was something to love, Percy. But it's been too long for me to know if that something is still there."

What follows is a montage of Percy in famous New York spots: eating corn outside Cafe Habana, drinks w/ Jay-Z at 40/40, at various nightclubs w/ NBA stars KEVIN DURANT, RAY ALLEN, DWIGHT HOWARD and YAO MING. In each shot, Percy's mood is pensive, reflective. His hand is frequently in contact with his chin, which, as we know, is C-Webb’s go-to move when he wants to look pensive. When the montage spills out, Percy is sitting with JALEN ROSE at Katz's Deli. He is looking up at the sign that points out the exact spot where Meg Ryan faked her orgasm. After a hazy moment of reverie, he bolts upright and runs out of the deli, leaving behind a confused Jalen Rose and a very large non-Kosher reuben.



Outside, he pulls out his cell phone and demands Eve come meet him back at that diner under that ugly bridge. She says yes. At the diner, the two sloppily confess their love for one another and say some stuff about remembrance. Percy blurts out a marriage proposal. Eve goes cold. She says that she can only marry someone who is Jewish. Percy says he will convert. Eve shakes her head and says that the new young Rabbi at her synagogue has strictly forbidden marriage with outsiders. To be even considered, Percy must be able to prove that he can trace his bloodline back to Moses on Mount Sinai. Percy erupts at the news and the two have a long, serious discussion about racism and religion.

Crestfallen, Percy returns to his hedonistic ways. Chris Isaak’s "Wicked Game" plays in the background. The NBA season starts and he plays terribly. TV sports personalities (SKIP BAYLESS, JIM ROME, MICHAEL WILBON) all wonder if the great David Percy might still be shell-shocked from missing that lay-up. The team's leadership begins to shift over to TONY STAPLETON (Tristan Wilds). After a particularly bad game against the Celtics, Percy gets drunk at a nightclub and calls his mother. He explains what has happened with Eve.

The next morning, he wakes to the buzzing of his phone. It is his mother. She reminds him that it is important to be yourself, but that yourself is never exactly what we think it is. Sometimes, she says, yourself is what yourself was and its important to understand that that was has never left, but has simply been sitting patiently for us to notice its absence. She says she will always love Jesus, but that she has always known that Percy has only ever been able to love Eve. Devotion and faith, she says, means doing what it takes to properly love who you love.

Percy touches his chin and purses his lips, grimly.

The next morning, Percy drives out to Long Island and meets with the new young Rabbi (TAMIR GOODMAN). He demands a chance to convert. The rabbi is hesitant, but when Percy refuses to leave his office, the rabbi sees the good in him and asks, "Why do you want to do this, my son?" Percy sets his jaw and says, "Love." The Rabbi nods and sighs. He says, "I was in love once..." and tells a story about a girl he once knew. He agrees, but under one condition-- Percy must walk the straight-and-narrow. One slip-up and the education will end.



Percy moves into a humble one-room apartment above a pickle shop. Everything smells of brine. He lays down on the short couch and takes it in.

Montage 2: Percy getting fitted for a wool suit, Percy learning the Hebrew alphabet, Percy and Eve walking in Central Park hand-not-in-hand, a laughing Percy playing pick-up hoops with a group of Hasidic kids, Percy pulling down the hair around his temples, imagining the sidelocks of his future, a shot of Jim Rome saying that Percy David's shot selection has become more economical, clips of Jay Mariotti making military metaphors about Percy's refusal to play on Saturdays, Percy at the bar with his teammates with a glass of grape juice, Percy playing chess with the Rabbi, Percy at Second Avenue Deli with Eve-- this time he opens up a corned beef sandwich to reveal the absence of cheese, Percy appreciating half-sour pickles, Percy putting the “chhhhhhuuuh” in "chutzpah." Spliced in all these scenes are short clips of Percy scoring all over the league and bonding with his teammates. We see his play progress. We see the Knicks make the finals.

Game 7 of the NBA Finals is scheduled for a Saturday. His teammates who, strangely enough, have just kind of overlooked the montaged Saturdays of the season, plead with Percy to play. He does not know what to do. In the locker room, Tony Stapleton sidles up next to Percy and tells him that when he was growing up, Percy David was his hero because he played basketball like it was a religion. The respect he showed for the game, the heart he showed on the nightly—all of it was the closest thing the young Tony had to church.

Backed by the opening bars to Ghostface's "All that I Got Is You," Stapleton says, "It's hard sometimes, man, to see God in the neighborhoods where we grew up. You look and he isn't there. At least not always and so you look harder and then you see him, man, in what you've always loved. When I was coming up, man, I saw that in your game. Take us to that next level, man. Make up for the past. Write the resurrection for your career. This is Easter, man, this is our reckoning day."



Conflicted, Percy visits the Rabbi. The Rabbi says that he agrees with young Tony Stapelton—God exposes himself in all the things we love, but devotion to what we love is always honed through discipline. He reminds Percy of all the days he spent practicing free throws, all the parties he skipped, all the sweat and blood lost in the gym. If Percy is to love G-d, the Rabbi says, he must abide by his rules. But, he says, our only freedom in this world is our freedom to point our heart in whatever direction we choose. He tells Percy that because he, the Rabbi, has chosen to point his heart towards G-d, he will not be able to tolerate Percy's decision to work on a Saturday and that if he does indeed play, his Jewish education will end.

Percy returns to the apartment above the pickle shop and lies back down on the couch. He calls Eve. She tells him about the moment when she first fell in love with him—it was their sophomore year at Tech U. Her boyfriend-at-the-time had dragged her to see a game. In front of the adoring crowd, Percy dropped 45 points against Duke and even though ESPN was there and the cameras were on and the game was close throughout, he played the entire game with a C-Webb smile on his face. She had never seen a man so blessed-- who else, but basketball players, bring so much joy to people through a beautiful act? How could that ever be called work?

A look of great, epiphanic relief falls over Percy's face. He calls Tony Stapelton and tells him he'll be playing in Game 7. He then calls his COACH (Chad Coleman) and tells him that he will not be collecting a check for the game.

The Garden is packed for Game 7. Percy, smiling the entire time, drops 50 on the Lakers, but he is matched by an equally spry and thinly disguised Kobe Bryant-type named SEAN FLASH (Sean Combs). With time running out, the Knicks find themselves down by 2. The Coach draws up a play for Percy. In the huddle, Tony Stapleton says, "we got one shot, we got one chance here, let's go one time!" He turns to Percy and says, "One love, one love." Percy shakes his head, smiles, and holds up three fingers. He says, "Three loves."

The ball is inbounded, Percy, in super-slow motion, catches it, fakes twice, steps behind the three point line and drains a three. The Garden erupts.

His teammates mob him. He holds up three fingers as he is carried off the court.

EPILOGUE: As the credits roll, under the watchful eye of the Rabbi, Eve and Percy stomp on the glass and everyone yells Mazel Tov!

Then, the horah.

MESHUGGAH
Feature Film Treatment
Robert Levertis-Bell



ACT ONE:

The film opens on a basketball game in progress, the St. Louis Canucks at the New York Knights. MARK JACKSON, STAN VAN GUNDY, and MIKE BREEN are announcing. It's in the fourth quarter with only a minute to go. The Canucks are up 97-72. DON NELSON is standing the Canucks sideline, he's yelling at the court, hammering with roll of paper. One might think he was overdoing the pantomime as a manner of contradicting reports that this was, indeed, his final game as an NBF coach. MESHUGGAH SMITH (Mehcad Brooks) is playing for the Canucks, the camera follows him as the announcers wrap up the game:

BREEN: The clock is winding down in this final regular season game for these two middle-of-the-pack teams. Neither will make the playoffs and the game is completely meaningless…

VAN GUNDY (interrupting): But what about Meshugga Smith?! Nobody told him this game was meaningless.

JACKSON: 55 points?! Are you kidding me? Mama there goes that man!

BREEN: Yes, a phenomenal night, but still a disappointing season by Meshuggah Smith—whose off-court issues are very well-known. And, even despite this great performance here in New York, you have to wonder if Meshuggah will find a team this summer in free agency.

VAN GUNDY: Absolutely, a player of his calib...

Zap. We pull out from a television inside a luxury box in the same arena. Inside, the Russian oligarch SERGEI BAZAROV (Vladimir Cuk) and PAUL MCCARTNEY (Ricky Gervais) are sitting with the Knights' current majority owner DANIEL GREEN (Paul Lieberstein) and his financial advisor DIPESH CHATTERJEE (Aasif Mandvi). The foreigners have offered Green a staggering $2 Billion to purchase the New York Knights, one of the most storied franchises in professional basketball history, in order to relocate the team to London. They wish to create, in the British Knights, the Old Country’s sole representative in the National Basketball Federation, and a singular magnet for European talent from Ljubljana to Buenos Aires. Green and Chatterjee are very receptive to the offer as they have recently lost their shirts building an as yet unoccupied office park with money embezzled from the Knights.

They are especially skittish as Knights employee, MINDY ROSEN (Bar Refaeli), has started to ask questions about missing funds and Green and Chatterjee are eager to cover up their crime. However, they inform Bazarov and McCartney that, though they wish to sell, the team is far too beloved by the people of New York — especially the black and Jewish fans — and by the league’s commissioner to ever allow such an important team to leave the city. Bazarov replies that he has already witnessed, over the years, that Green has a knack for mismanagement and squandering the good will of Knights fans. He and McCartney can wait a year. McCartney asks Dipesh and Green: “Do you think you can turn the city and the commissioner against the team enough to allow the sale in a single year?” “Yes,” they reply in unison.



Meshuggah in street clothes visiting his MOTHER (Khandi Alexander, with a green wig) at the hospital. She is dying of breast cancer and is lying on the bed while Meshuggah and his fiancé ASHA (Kat Stacks) argue over the remote. She wants to watch the playoffs, he wants to watch Life is Beautiful. They switch back and forth between the NBF Finals and the film and they don’t notice at first that his mother is calling him to her side. They finally hear her summons just as the television switches for the last time to the NBA Finals. He rushes to her bed.

“I have to tell you something, Meshuggah…” “What is it mom?” “It’s about who you are, who we are, something I’ve never told you before and that you’ve never guessed…” “OK?” “Something that will change everything about the way you live from now on…” “Mama, what is it?” He leans in and listens. His eyes widen. “You’re Jewish!”

His mother flatlines… “Beeeeeeep.” His mom expires and when he looks up, he sees his arch nemesis PRINCE HALL (Carlos Boozer) score the championship winning shot over RON ARTEST in order to lead the San Diego Wolverines to the championship. Hall’s teammates mob him. Green and Chatterjee in their office brainstorming what they can do to alienate their fans and the commissioner so they can sell the team. They could field successively worse basketball teams. Tried it and the fans still show up. They could engineer an embarrassing sex scandal that affects both players and management. Tried it and the fans still show up. Something will come up, surely, Green announces and turns on his television, on which is Meshugga at a press conference on ESPN, wearing a yarmulke. He’s announcing that his mother told him that he’s a Jew on her deathbed and that he would from now on be living a Jewish life. “I think I got it,” Dipesh announces.

ACT TWO:

Green forces his GM, FRANK FRANCIS (Idris Elba, with an American accent) to sign Meshuggah Smith to a max one year contract. Posey is beside himself — Meshuggah is a notoriously bad teammate, won’t fit the offense, and is a known “headcase” — “remember that time he was arrested for using a Colt .45 on the Whack-a-Mole at Chuck E. Cheese?” — and is in the midst of a bunch of bad press for the bizarre claim that he’s Jewish. “Sign him or resign,” Green says. “Fine.”

Believing Meshuggah to be a member of one of the problematic Black Hebrew sects, who believe that blacks are "the real Jews," the plan is to encourage Meshuggah incite New York’s racial hostilities by making a public show of his “Jewish” identity while alienating the city’s “real” Jews. In the beginning, the whole thing works, Meshuggah makes a host of disastrous public comments, including one on the eve of his visit to the Western Wall. Asha is very skeptical of the whole enterprise and leaves him. The season starts and soon the team is attracting heat from the JDL and from an anti-Semitic black group headed by FAROUK SHAHAD (Wyatt Cenac) as Meshuggah very publicly “learns to be Jewish,” under Green’s tutorship.

On ESPN, with JIM ROME, Meshuggah announces that he’s been “learning Hebrew… making bagels…. doing standup comedy… and learning to balance his checkbook,” all things Green has told him to say. After this, the Post and Daily News let him have it. The Knights Arena has hordes of protesters outside but hardly anyone inside. Meshuggah, for his part is distraught over the whole thing but Green reminds him of the noble truths of Judaism: “life is suffering and that suffering comes from attachment — you have to let go, Meshuggah and walk your own path, who cares what the fans say, shake them Nazis off. Shalom!” Meshuggah gives another interview to ESPN, this time very stridently denouncing any and all critics as haters including the girl who he thought loved him, but left him because she was jealous of his faith.

After hearing this, Asha returns to confront Meshuggah. She tells him that she’s done some background checks and Green isn’t even himself Jewish — turns out that there are people with that name that aren’t Jewish — and he’s been getting a fake Jewish education all along. Meshuggah is distraught but it only makes his faith stronger, and he’s glad to have Asha back. He feels guilty for falling victim to the ruse but he can now focus on basketball.

ACT THREE:

The Knights begin to win games and the whole plan begins to backfire. Meshuggah’s conversion continues, in good faith now with Asha (a Catholic who clutches rosary beads during close ball games) and his new buddies JASON SCHWARTZMAN and OMRI CASSPI at his side. The Knights make the playoffs and Meshuggah-fever sweeps New York City. Fans leave the picket lines to enter the arena. When they return, the fans sport celebratory clip-on payos and hats and chant for the team in Yiddish. Black-Jewish relations (cf. Jeffrey Melnick) are at an all-time high in New York. Reconciliation montage: There’s a sign on the door of Sylvia’s that says “now 100% kosher!” The Post and Daily News are back on their side.



Meanwhile, the old and potential ownership groups get desperate and start trying, and failing, to astroturf a race war, even going so far as to anonymously funnel money and guns to Farouk Shahad, who stays in front of the arena with rifles and a megaphone denouncing Meshuggah as an affront to the black race. But when the Knights make the Finals, Shahad switches his tune “Meshuggah Smith should be at THE FRONT of the black race. Mazel Tov, my brother!” Frank, the GM, asks Mindy, the Knights employee, whether she’s sure she did the right thing; she says yes and they kiss. “I support you always,” Frank says to Mindy. “I support you always,” Asha says to Meshuggah.

The Finals come and Meshuggah ends up with a perfectly balanced stat sheet—“Just like his checkbook!” Jeff Van Gundy jokes. When he scores the series winning shot, over Prince Hall, the arena erupts into a round of “Hava Nagila.” As everyone is celebrating, the FBI show up to Green’s luxury box and haul off Dipesh and Green in cuffs. Paul McCartney looks at Bazarov, who’s looking down, and says “Oy Vey!”

Final scene: Meshuggah and Asha get married in a Jewish ceremony at Rucker Park. Those in attendance include Tamir Goodman, Larry Brown, and Jordan Farmar.