Jazz Center Rudy Gobert was on my fantasy team this year but the first time I actually saw him on TV was in March. Crouched like a daddy long legs over a podium, he wiped his hands on the press conference mics to make a joke about the Coronavirus Pandemic. He later became the first NBA player diagnosed with COVID-19, leading to the cancellation of the season.
It was his most dominating performance of the season.
The cancellation of the NBA season and Tom Hanks and Rita Wilsons’ announcement that they’d contracted the virus marked the moment where it sank into the wider public in the United States that there was a global pandemic on the march, and life would not carry on like normal.
For me, it was the moment that my latest obsession – my fantasy basketball team and the 2019-2020 season – were erased, instantly. The next day was my last at work (at the office) as Israel’s first lockdown and our first experiment in homeschooling our children began. I deleted the Yahoo Sports app in the days to come, but I still remember most of my roster:
Anthony Davis, Los Angeles Lakers
Kemba Walker, Boston Celtics
Jamal Murray, Denver Nuggets
Rudy Gobert, Utah Jazz
Chris Paul, Oklahoma City Thunder
Eric Bledsoe, Milwaukee Bucks
John Collins, Atlanta Hawks
Spencer Dimwiddie, Brooklyn Nets
Patrick Beverly, Los Angeles Clippers
Gary Harris, Denver Nuggets
Danuel House Jr, Houston Rockets
Josh Richardson, Philadelphia 76ers
From late October until March 11th, The fantasy team, NBA twitter, and the few games I managed to watch on TV (or record and rewatch the next day) were a great diversion at home after my kids went to sleep, on my commute to work, and during down moments at my old job.
It was all gone in an instant, the season erased after it was about three quarters over.
A distant second to football in terms of popularity, wealth, and power, after a four month hiatus it was time for basketball to be the vanguard of the return of professional sports in America. The NBA was the first professional sports league in the US to cancel its season – but it would also be the first to return.
It took the greatest, most complicated and bizarre sports experiment of my lifetime – the NBA Bubble in Orlando – to make it happen. The Bubble brought 22 teams to the ESPN campus at Disneyworld on July 7th, bringing back professional sports in America at a time when we all needed an escape more than ever before.
But well before then, I had to actually start to care about basketball again.
- The Driveway
If I were to think of my first basketball memory it would probably be my dad doing Kareem’s “skyhook” in our driveway during the heyday of the Showtime Lakers, around the same time UH’s “Phi Slamma Jamma” teams were on the rampage. Those two teams – and the mid-90s back-to-back championship “Clutch City” Rockets were his favorite basketball teams of all time, along with maybe the US basketball team that was robbed in the 1972 olympics.
I remember being probably only 7 or 8 years old, watching a Jordan video on our VCR and trying to recreate dunks in our driveway, and in high school, watching Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp – my favorite duo to play as on NBA Jam – beat the Bulls in two games in the 96 finals. Then, in Jordan’s final season with the Bulls, my best friend and I scored tickets to see him play the Spurs at the Alamodome. Jordan scored 30, the Bulls won, and that’s I think my last really vivid basketball memory of my youth – except for the nights during and after my senior year when I’d play pickup basketball with my best friend and his cousins at an outdoor court at St. Edward’s University in South Austin. (I was an ok rebounder with no shot, my game was to play defense, annoy people, talk shit, etc., a proto-Patrick Beverley)
In the years to come it was pretty much just football, and almost exclusively college football. Nearly all of my best sports memories are from Saturdays in the fall, or New Year’s Day with my dad. The Longhorns were at the center of so many of those memories, though for most of my life they were wandering in the wilderness of college football, a behemoth with endless money and delusions of grandeur. But they were Austin’s only team, and the good memories remain.
It was about 2, maybe 3 years ago that basketball started to really come back into my life. It was mainly because of twitter, where basketball twitter is – for me – the most entertaining part about the website and one of the only parts of my timeline that has not been taken over by the Trump era. Without watching almost any basketball, on Twitter I got caught up on the league and the names and faces beyond LeBron and (UT alum) Durant.
Then the 2019 offseason happened and it was one of the most exciting things in sports in years. A battery of new, supermax contract superduos (or something similar) across the league – LeBron and AD, Durant and Kyrie, Harden and Westbrook, Kawhi and Paul George, and some other major moves that are escaping me. It was clear that basketball was the sport that I needed to be following.
(Also, for the last few years shooting hoops at the park has pretty much my only regular exercise. I listen to music, take a hundred shots or so, make 5-10 of them, and go home. The courts are now all closed, just like in the first lockdown, and just like they will be in the third one as well.)
Then, a couple months before the season started, I got a message from an acquaintance on Facebook (since upgraded to “friend”) asking if I wanted to join his fantasy basketball league. I’d never played any fantasy sports, but I was hooked from day one, with a new way to waste time on my phone, until Rudy Gobert’s hot infected mic moment.
- Like Biodome, but good
The return of basketball was a crucial step in returning some normalcy to the lives of sports fans – but the way it came back was anything but normal.
The NBA Bubble was a massive operation that required bringing hundreds of players, coaching staff, trainers, sportswriters, and barbers into a safe zone, and keeping it a sterile environment for three months. It brought together 22 teams for a “regular season” and then a 16-team playoffs across three arenas at Disneyworld. It required the deployment of a complicated system of testing and isolation, and all types of gadgets including smart thermometers and pulse oximeters to monitor players’ oxygen levels, and the $300 Oura “smart ring” to measure pulse rate, activity, heart rate, and skin temperature. The NBA also deployed the MyHealth app for players and coaching staff to record their temperature on a daily basis, and proximity detectors were worn by bubble residents – beeping to signal whenever they spent too much time within 6 feet of anyone else wearing a sensor.
The Bubble also saw the use of a snitch line to inform on infractions, the founding of a NBA players wine club, and Jimmy Butler’s moonlighting as a barista. And other than a few infractions – like Lou Williams sneaking out for wings at Magic City and Danuel House having “an unauthorized guest in his room” – the players knew the stakes and acted accordingly.
The NBA Bubble seemed at first an impossible and arguably immoral proposition. Putting all those players (and coaches and supporting staff) on an island of sorts to risk infection and injury, to entertain the quarantined folks at home – and make tons of money for the league and the owners. It seemed almost like something a Bond villain would cook up, and there was no way it could work.
In the end it was an incredible success. There were no infections in the Bubble, which was ultimately a far safer place to be than the White House. It showed what people can pull off when there is enough money at stake, and when they come together for a very specific, very bold purpose. It wasn’t quite the space program, but it was audacious, impossible, and it worked.
There is definitely a very cynical take on the NBA Bubble – while countless everyday Americans don’t have access to testing or medical treatment, millionaire athletes and the teams they work for can have unlimited access to rapid testing and state-of-the-art technology to allow them to continue to go to work safely, at the same time that millions of Americans had no choice but to go to work and risk infection.
To me it was inspiring, and an amazing diversion at a time when sports were cancelled, and there were almost no distractions to take our lives off this mess we’re stuck in. At a time when most of us still felt helpless, and with no idea what if anything we could do to protect ourselves and preserve our everyday lives and hobbies, the NBA showed that with enough willpower, money, solidarity, and ingenuity, it could be done – even if just on the grounds of an amusement park in Florida.
The NBA Bubble began after the Black Lives Matter protests swept the country at the beginning of the summer, calling the whole exercise into question. The players, led by LeBron and Chris Paul, instead of calling it all off – which would have been understandable – decided to use the platform to advocate for the cause, and to push for real social change. And when the players held a wildcat strike in August following the shooting of Jacob Blake, they found a way to use their position as leverage.
There seem to be two camps in American society when it comes to their attitude towards professional athletes – those who see them as members of their community with a real responsibility, and those who view them as spoiled millionaires who should shut up and dribble. The players in the Bubble sent a resounding message that politics are sports go hand in hand, they will use their position to help the people in the country and communities they grew up in, and whoever wants to boycott the league can go ahead and turn off the TV.
And the basketball itself was memorable. It was bookended by two great head to head matchups between incredible players – Dame Lillard vs Ja Morant in the play-in game and LeBron vs Jimmy Butler in the Finals. And there were memorable moments throughout – Jamal Murray becoming unstoppable, Luka’s game winner, Bam’s block, Tyler Herro scoring 37, Dame scoring 61, and LeBron, a man only 5 years younger than me, somehow still being the best player on earth, and taking the title and the Finals MVP trophy home to do dirty things to it.
Through it all the games were without crowds and you could hear the players talking shit and joking around, and the whole thing looked a lot like a video game. It was the weirdest, most fascinating thing I’ve ever seen in US professional sports.
- Till Next Year
I don’t know where we’ll be by next season, when it will start, how it will look, and if there will be crowds in the stands. But I think it’s clear I have to go all in on basketball.
This has become more apparent in recent years as we learn more about the long-term damage caused by playing football, and as I become more steadfast in my belief that college players need to be paid, and the whole “amateur athletes” shtick is a form of mass-scale robbery built on the bodies of mainly black men.
And baseball? I loved it when I was a kid, but today? Mike Trout could stand next to me at a bus stop and I would not recognize him. Contrast this to when I was a kid, and the Simpsons “Homer at the Bat” episode from 1992 featured 10 MLB stars, at least 7 of which were household names.
Basketball though?
It’s a sport with global appeal, where the players speak their minds, they lean in on politics, they realize their worth, and as far as I can see it – they’re getting better every year.
I shouldn’t have stayed gone so long.