“If I could have 82 games in the Garden I would because it’s the Mecca of basketball” – LeBron James.
Such were the words of the NBA’s biggest name at All-Star week. It is taken to be an a priori truth that New York is the spiritual epicenter of the basketball universe. Sure, it still leads the world in courts per square mile, but there’s been a serious decline in the quality and the quantity of hoops savants at all levels that called the city home or learned the game here, and this decline has been driven by both economic, societal, and governmental forces beyond the scope of the NBA. It’s not the Knicks’ fault, is what I’m saying
It’s almost silly to question LeBron’s statement or wonder if he believes it’s true. The idea that he and the hoi polloi have made a pilgrimage to some kind of Mecca is the marketing strategy du jour, and LeBron the pitchman always nails his lines. More to the point, business appears to be pretty darn good. This is All Star Weekend 2015, and the NBA has planted its flag in pretty much every single crack in the sidewalks (and that’s just a small sampling).
It was everywhere and it was constant, dwarfing even New York Fashion Week in terms of presence, if not cultural importance. (And yes, the NBA held a fashion show too. JR Smith won.) But if the history-slash-fantasy of New York basketball was the marketing strategy or the wrapping paper for this particular product, what was inside? That’s harder to say for sure, but I tried to attend as many of the scheduled events as humanly possible, whether it was actual basketball, or things that were only tangentially related to basketball, to find out.
Wednesday 10 February
They built a theme park. No, really. In the dilapidated, decaying skeleton of Moynihan Station (and at the LIU/Brooklyn Paramount Theater, though I didn’t do any comparison shopping), every available inch of real estate was filled with some kind of hoops-ish activity or ride that had been cleverly tied in with one of the league’s many corporate sponsors. There was a State Farm booth where you could get a personalized lanyard with a photo of yourself retouched to create your very own Cliff/Chris Paul insurance-slinging doppelganger. You could loft shots at a 20-foot high rim, thanks to the kind folks at Sprint. See, they’re offing a half-off discount if you bring a cell phone from another provider, and if you slice half off 20 you get a regulation-height hoop, and now I’ve gone on way too long here.
Kumho Tires had a mini court where a hard-ass old school coach would gruffly ride you like a prized recruit to work the kinks out of your footwork as you stepped through... wait for it... tires. There were Samsung Galaxy Life lounges, NBA2K15 lounges, Panini pop-a-shot booths, BBVA Compass photo booths, Kia show cars, personalized All-Star jerseys available for purchase, actual free-throw competitions, three-point competitions, cheerleaders, and stilt-walkers making balloon animals, oh my!
And it was weirdly entertaining. The shamelessly cloying attempt by the NBA and its corporate partners to buy something was definitely draining. Not at that particular moment, mind you. The bulk of the goodies were given away for free. Still, it was like having a salesman perched directly behind your shoulder, smiling politely, always soft-peddling any actual sale, until his face was frozen in a rictus grin.
But maybe that’s just me. There were kids everywhere, and they were having a sugary, over-stimulated good time. With good reason; the games themselves were kind of goofily enjoyable. I shot a bunch of jumpers and I even got my own lanyard. For free!
Friday 13 February
I went to the NBA All-Star Celebrity game. Mo’ne Davis did something cool. As for the rest of the evening, we shall not speak of it again.
Saturday 14 February
It’s not yet at Super Bowl levels, but the NBA held plenty of press scrums and chances to answer questions behind logo-festooned daises. On the rare occasion, something interesting happens, but for the most part , you get why Marshawn Lynch said he was “just here so I don’t get fined.” , Kevin Durant engaged in similar truth telling in front of the assembled media horde, saying, “You guys really don’t know shit,” and channeling Lynch: “I’m only here talking to y’all because I have to.”
Durant is not a robot, but is in fact a human being, one who is still growing and learning. Then again, he does have to do some pretty robotic things, many of which feel dehumanizing and tedious. Hell, after just a few days of attending all of these loosely basketball-related events, I was downright exhausted, and all I was doing was standing in the back scribbling notes. Imagine being at the center of this maelstrom, like Durant is, not only for media day, but the afternoon post-practice media session, and the questions he’ll be hit with before the game, and after the game, and for the rest of the season, day after day, to the last syllable of recorded time.
A big chunk of Durant’s job is to speak as blandly as possible without giving away any actual real information about himself, yet somehow still crafting something that still projects, “character” or “integrity” or “leadership” or whatever, even when he’s struggling with injuries or simply exhausted after a gruelling second night of a back-to-back on the road.
If and when Durant does blurt out something off-script, let alone a cuss word, it’s only going to bring more scrutiny and more niggling, peevish questions as to whether he “regrets” it or whatever, and the whole silly machine begins churning all over again.
Yes, it is his job, and all jobs have particularly unpleasant un-fun and often deeply draining components. But if your reaction is to start caterwauling about the millions Durant or any other athlete earns that isn’t really the point.
Nor should this be interpreted as a blanket condemnation of the press as a whole as some terrible, salacious hive-mind. Somewhere in this muddle, there is actual news to be gathered and disseminated, and many of the people involved do a great job and some are awful. You know, like any profession.
Whether press scrums are really the best way to go about this work is a question for another day. Still, the hot-take artists are out there, and the vicious, clickbait-y takedowns will inevitably resonate with the target of the scorn and derision far longer than solid journalism.
After listening to Durant, I kept flashing to another pervasive rumor that I burbled and buzzed throughout the week; that behind the sanctioned, corporate-friendly events that I was able to attend, and even beyond the semi-official fetes that I couldn’t for the life of me get into, there was always another curtain behind the curtain – an undiscovered oh-so-tantalizing country where no reporter would ever gain egress and probably never should.
Then again, this isn’t an NBA-only New York phenomenon. You can peel back layer after layer of this nightlife onion, if you have the right number of zeros in your bank account, and know the right people. No matter how deep you get, there’s always another, more heavily guarded, more exclusive room in the mansion.
Take Myles Brown’s GQ Interview with Lisa Ann, an ex-porn star turned fantasy sports aficionado, in which she tells tales of NBA players shilling out thousands of dollars to spend a truly private evening with a woman. It scans as kind of sad and definitely lonely – the idea that a financial transaction is the only way to ensure trust – but perhaps building an impregnable wall to keep out the madding crowd is really the only luxury indulgence worth paying for, even if that means paying for companionship.
My fanboy-ish desire to find Player X getting tattoos with impressionable Rookie Y and then tooling around in go-karts during the wee small hours somewhere in Jersey suddenly felt crass and rude, borderline offensive, even.
Sunday 15 February
Finally, the actual game arrived, and after days of all of this sponsored entertainment, fun, the finale some how managed to top it all. It was a delirious, overwrought spectacle that even dragged poor old Howard Cosell out of the grave just to add a soupçon more gravitas to the introductions. If nothing else, New York sure knows how to sell a romanticized self-important and self-aggrandizing version of itself to itself.
And given how nakedly the NBA used the city to burnish its claims of basketball authenticity, it’s important to note that there were very few actual New Yorkers in attendance.
“Tickets for the All-Star Game (on Sunday night at Madison Square Garden) and for the slam-dunk contest and other competitions (on Saturday evening at Barclays Center) were not made available for public sale for the fifth straight year, according to the New York Times. “Only a small percentage of the seats were even offered for purchase by season-ticket holders of the two host teams, the Knicks and the Nets.”
The rest had already already parceled out to their various co-presenters, as one might expect given the constant stream of cross-promotional opportunities of the week prior.
It was as if the entire event was pointed squarely at crafting one or a dozen ready-made viral moments, that could be easily transferred to gifs or memes or social media postings. But despite this the game itself, and the things that make people want to watch the game did emerge, if briefly. Maybe it’s because the NBA All-Stars themselves were aware that they were doing a weeklong infomercial. You could get angry at it, as Durant briefly did, or you could steal the show from the producers, because that’s what Russell Westbrook did.
Just like Zach LaVine smashed his way through a near-interminable sea of terrible Anthony Anderson routines to give us a dunk contest for the ages, Westbrook too the elements of this bloated colossus and made them his own. If nothing else, LaVine’s declaration that he decided he wanted to be a pro basketball player when he grew up after seeing the movie Space Jam, itself an hour and a half-long product placement spot in which the characters were indistinguishable from the products, including the league’s original branded human, Michael Jordan, really was perfect.
For the bulk of his career, Westbrook’s found himself besieged by critics who wanted to shoehorn him into the role of a traditional point guard, when he’s something else: more a akin to a shark that needs to constantly be in attack mode lest he die. It was almost comical earlier in the week, when asked what he was looking forward to most, Westbrook seemed bored by the entire experience, and said, “I’m just trying to find a way to get some rest.” That said, he also described his mindset on the court with one word: “Kill.”
There’s no off switch with Westbrook, which is what makes him so dazzling, such a terrifying force of nature. As was the case with most All Star games of recent vintage, for the bulk of the players, it was more or less a defense-free glorified scrimmage until the final few minutes. Sure, there was a slew of nifty dunks and mind-bending plays, but they more or less followed coach Steve Kerr’s intricate game plan.
But Westbrook took this opulent-yet-relatively-blank canvas and made it his own, scoring a record 27 points in only 11 minutes in the first half, draining threes, and attacking the rim like it owed him money. He’d finish with 41, one off Wilt Chamberlain’s record and snag the MVP award for his efforts.
It still was a just a show, an exhibition of Westbrook’s otherworldly skills, rather that the real deal, but if you let go of that, if you accepted that artifice was all that was to be found here, a shiny, bombastic teaser trailer for a TV show that you already like, it could still be a kind of exhausting, over-consumptive kind of fun.
Maybe not for five days in a row though.
