Let’s say the N.B.A. as newly streamed on Amazon Prime and Peacock led you to check in on a few games for the first time since Michael Jordan willed a slashing Scottie Pippen and the relentless rebound machine Dennis Rodman to the Chicago Bulls’ last championship, in 1998. What would you see?
Was it the league’s intensely weird commissioner, Adam Silver, who ordered refs to gaze and speak directly into a courtside camera when pronouncing a ruling on an infraction? Because it’s painful to watch. The other night one of them mugged so badly, so dramatically, that a member of the broadcast team mockingly asked, “Do you do audiobooks?”
The jibe stood out because it strayed from the new normal for the announcers, which is cheerleading. (Come on, Peacock, Snoop Dogg is doing color commentary?)
The lack of, shall we say, gravitas extends to the players. Back when he was general manager of the Indiana Pacers, Larry Bird once lamented the prima donna nature of overpaid hoopsters who “won’t even pump their own gas,” but instead have one of their many hangers-on do it for them.
Players haven’t always sat on their leather couches and played video games. Bird stands out in Dan Shaughnessy’s “Wish It Lasted Forever,” about the great 1980s Boston Celtics teams, as a barfly and occasional smoker who cut his own grass.
Larry Bird and the L.A. Lakers’ Magic Johnson made the N.B.A. flashy, popular, cool, and rich, but when Bird was new to the league, newspaper reporters like The Boston Globe’s Shaughnessy still rode the buses and planes with the players, stayed in the same second-rate hotels, drank beer with them, and had access and established an intimacy unthinkable today.
That’s not all that’s changed. “NBA teams today routinely take more than 40 percent of their shots from beyond the [three-point] arc,” Shaughnessy wrote in 2021. “The three-point shot in 1986 was largely a gimmick, never the focus of a team’s offense. Bird led the NBA with 194 three-point attempts in 1985-86. In 2018-19, James Harden [of the Houston Rockets] launched 1,028 threes.”
Forget the give-and-go. Bombs away.
The author lingers on 1985-86 because that’s the season when Boston added sweet-passing 7-foot Bill Walton to selflessly play the high post off the bench behind the best front court the game has ever seen, with Robert Parish, who could run the court like no other big man, Kevin McHale, who had unstoppable dipping, twisting moves in the low post, and Bird, who was not only a lights-out marksman but could dish, steal, and position his heft in such a way to crash the boards with the best of them and without much in the way of jumping ability.
“If it was the rules of 2020, half of us would foul out in the first five minutes,” McHale said of the best-ever debate. “But if they would allow us to bang and push and shove the shit out of people and offensive rebound and be bigger, stronger, and faster than the other team, yeah, we win that.”
No brag. Fact.