SHOT-CHART JOURNEY: BEN MCLEMORE

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The LeBron James Decision Arrow

(By the time you read this, LeBron may have already signed somewhere. If this is the case, replace "LeBron" with "Carmelo Anthony" or the name of any other major free agent.)

Think about LeBron James's free agency decision as a free floating arrow pointing towards an infinite arc of the future:

The arc represents all of the possible outcomes. In the middle is "Playing basketball in Miami" or "Playing Basketball in Cleveland." Go further out, "Play basketball somewhere else" then "Play football" then "Retire from sports altogether" then "I am becoming a monk" and on and on into infinitely more unlikely scenarios. ("Eat poop until I die from shit poisoning, etc. etc. etc.)

LeBron is at the front of this arrow that points towards the future because more than anyone he has knowledge and control of what he is going to do. Then his family, who we can safely assume are probably the people in his life he is most concerned with and probably have the most knowledge of and input in his decision. 

Then we see his agents and business advisers, people he trusts with the management of his career and assets; they're not shaping LeBron's priorities or influencing his opinions as much as his family, but he wouldn't hire them if he didn't trust them. Then, the teams that he is talking to, who have an idea through both him and his representation about what he is looking for and are striving to accommodate that. 

Then we get to dudes he knows: friends, teammates, who are familiar with his thinking because they've talked about it. LeBron probably trusts these people enough to solicit their opinions but not enough to make those opinions the basis of what his decision is going to be the person he tells his intentions to. Then, reporters who tare talking to people in the last three sections: his agents, teams and his friends, and working them for information. They are reporting whatever they get right now but they're not so dumb that they don't know what's reliable and what isn't. 

Then, after all of those people who have even kind of an idea about where LeBron is going, is everyone else in the entire world who absolutely do not know at all. This includes you. As a matter of fact, you might be on the very back end of everyone in the world, because I could tell someone with only a cursory knowledge of basketball "LeBron James is choosing between Miami and Cleveland" and their 50/50 guess about where he is going is probably better than your educated guess because your guess is weighed down by giant heaping piles of assumptions and bullshit that you've been fed by reporters drawing information from all up and down the middle of the spectrum and flattening that information's origin into "Sources."

This is all to say, "Stop guessing, it's obnoxious." Where you think LeBron is going says way more about you than LeBron.

1. If you think he is going to Cleveland you think that the universe has a dominant narrative arc. LeBron left, he reveled and succeeded and dominated, and now he is coming home to reclaim such and such. Life has order and redemption.

2. If you think Maimi, you think that the universe is stagnant. LeBron will sit on southern Florida until he collapses all of the gravity around his mass and the whole state will be consumed by his black hole and eventually we will be wiped out by the heat death of the universe. Life is non-movement until everything collapses, there is no order but the mathematics of death.

NBA Videos and Highlights

I was searching for Summer League highlights when I came across a YouTube account that rattled me to my very soul. It's called "NBA Videos and Highlights." It's a depository of NBA.com content but it's all wrong.

The quality is terrible, of course. But there are hundreds of YouTube accounts that re-purpose commercially produced video at a shitty resolution. It's the way the image wanders from the middle of the screen, giving you a sense of the videographer.

The best I can figure, this person is using a very very old camera that shoots 144p, and holding the camera in front of his computer screen to capture and upload these videos. Sometimes, you can see him move the camera to focus on the part of the screen But then why do they sound okay? Does his camera have a little microphone input that he connects to his computer? Does this horrible camera have a weirdly excellent microphone? Is he taking the audio from these videos separately from the video and mixing them together in an editing program? 

Take in our man's re-purposing of this officially produced highlight mix. Tim Duncan, Hall of Fame basketball player, the Lion in Winter. He's there right in front of you, maybe? You can recognize him a little. But what is he doing? The announcer says there's a block on Chris Bosh and you have a vague sense of the two men colliding. When you watch a highlight mix you're watching what was once live footage being captured at a real life event. The new context that "NBA Videos and Highlights" brings makes you all aware of the distance that was always there. Tim Ducncan is playing basketball and a camera is capturing this and a man captures that video and condenses it into highlights and those highlights go into into the eye of NBA Videos and Highlights's camera and onto the internet and into your eyes. When does it REALLY lost all of the context necessary to truly understand what's happening? When NBA Videos and Highlights's terrible camera shoots it? When the broader game is condensed into highlights? When the camera captures Duncan in the first place? When anyone stands outside of Tim Duncan himself, watching him play basketball, be it in person or on  television? Does Tim Duncan himself even understand? 

When Tim Duncan dies radio waves containing his highlights will still be moving through space at the speed of light until the universe collapses. Tim Duncan's flesh is rotting in the ground but he lives forever an electric ghost in space.

The video looks terrible, but the audio sounds fine. When we consume basketball, we think we're "Watching the game." That's true, to a degree but we're also being inundated with rhetoric that's easier to understand than anything happening on the court. 80% of the time it takes me several viewings of a play that resulted in a wide open dunk to understand what mistakes a defense made or next level play someone on the offense made to make that dunk happen. But when a Summer League game features Isiah Thomas mouthing off about toughness and shit ("Clear Path Fouls should be Legal," says ex-ballplayer, real-ass tough guy) that's all immediately accessible to me. There's been a ton of talk/complaining about the silliness of free agency madness. The out-of-season "Lebron to Cavs would make the Cavs a lot better" is an easier concept to grasp than the in-season's "Lebron's ability to read cuts creates open looks at the rim off of high pick and roll action." The game is obscure and blurry but the talk is clear as a bell.

SUMMER LEAGUE, un film de Fredrick Weisman

The Orlando Summer league takes place in an empty practice gym filled with coaches, scouts and reporters. THis makes a different kind of television product than the sort we are used to in the NBA. The camera is set up at a very low angle, because there’s no space to set up a wide shot. This makes understanding broader player movements more difficult but gives you a more acute sense of the bigness of the human beings who play in the NBA. You can hear everything on the court: shoes screeching, bodies crashing, players calling out defensive assignments. The only people who react after baskets are the coaches and teammates.

The experience of watching OSL is more clinical and less visceral. All of the feelings coming out of your television is generated by the players on the court instead of the braying and hand-slapping of a hyper-stimulated crowd of consumers. There’s less for the viewer to lean on as a narrative crutch it’s just a basketball game, not fuel for the circus of emotions in the arena. It's basketball for no audience, sketches of strategies playing out in front of people watching for information, not thrills. The NBA brought to you by Fredrick Weisman. The players make the juice, not the crowd.

In today’s game between Orlando and Detroit’s summer league teams, Victor Oladipo was juicing.

An empty gym and no stakes but he was still crushing, picking off passes (the steal at 26 seconds is a straight snatch), getting into it interpersonally with Casper Ware (Ware seemed to bait him into a terrible “Shut-em-up” iso-brick at the end of the first half), making some good looks. In the second half he gave everyone watching a skip of breath when he took a tumble after twisting his ankle. It wasn’t a big deal; he waved off a substitution and kept playing, even though there was nothing at stake and no one to impress.

Pierre Jackson also went down in this game, but it was a big deal. The D-League stand out, in line for a permanent spot in an NBA rotation this year, ruptured his Achilles tendon in the first half. It’s truly the worst thing that can happen in an exhibition season, so awful that even writing about it feels glib. Jackson was so good in the D-League last year that his non-promotion to the Pelicans and a healthy NBA payday was regarded as a minor injustice by D-League watchers.

If the empty gym made Olidipo’s in-game intensity more palpable, it also made Jackson’s injury worse to watch. The announcer pegged what happened immediately: a non-contact injury that took him out at the ankles, telltale Achilles tear. Without a crowd there, it was just Jackson, a bright future right ahead of him, stopped in his tracks and lying on the ground, unable to get himself off the court under his own strength. There was no crowd to “Take the air out of the building.” Everyone in the gym had seen a horrible basketball injury before, there wasn’t a mass disassociation or confusion. Not a shocking scene that scandalizes everyone in attendance, just a human being on the ground in pain on television.

Sandsketball!

The beach is great. Sand feels awesome on your feet. Rocks and cliffs are very cool. The ocean has created in every person who ever saw it simultaneous feelings of expansive wonder and oppressive dread at its enormity and your own insignificance. Saltwater opens up your head, gets the sinuses all clear and open. Running in the sand has a lower impact on your joints while stiffening resistance against your muscles. The only problem with the beach is that it completely lacks arable land or any space to build reliable permanent structures; and that’s not even really a problem, because it makes the beach into a permanent work-free zone. It’s awesome!

Humankind’s natural love of the beach had led sporting federations around the world to create beach variations of beloved games. Beach volleyball, you likely know about: two players, limited touches. Soft sand cushions the impact. People don’t wear a lot of clothes and make you feel bad about your horrible and smelly body.

Beach Soccer you MAY know about. It’s played by fewer players on a smaller pitch, because running on sand is absolutely exhausting and there aren’t a lot of beaches that are consistently big enough to contain anything the size of a soccer field. The players score a lot more, because the sandy surface allows them to utilize the bare human foot’s rarely-utilized-in-sports digging capability and gift for cradling a ball to create an effective kicking angles on the ball.

Beach soccer is a higher scoring affair. The pitch is so small that there isn’t really a midfield game to speak of, and the ability to control the surface that the ball sits on makes lofting strikable passes a lot easier. It’s a version of the game enjoyed by the most desperate and needy of soccer junkies and by people completely lacking any significant attention span, like myself.

Then there’s footvolley, which is a combination of Beach Soccer and Beach volleyball. It is for showoffs.

C’mon fellas, no sport should be that hard to play.

As we speak, the state of Beach Basketball is dire. The World Beach Basketball Association’s website is hilariously outdated. They don’t have a Twitter account. Their version of the game utilizes a single central hoop with no backboard in a circular court, and players are allowed to take two and a half steps to move the ball. This takes the game much too far away from the basketball we know to be an interesting riff on an old favorite. It's more like "Dropball" than true basketball.

There is one Spanish language video on the internet of a group of gentlemen playing recognizable basketball on the beach. This grainy video is the clear way forward for a beach variation on the game.

In the creation and promotion of a beach basketball variant, the game would take an odd step backwards and more resemble the one that James Naismith created in the first place. Dribbling was not a Nasmith invention: it came about as the game evolved as a way of dispossessing oneself of the ball to move towards the hoop. Of course, you couldn’t dribble on a beach; the ball would just sit there in the sand if you tried to bounce it. Players would have to be in constant off-ball motion to get open looks at the rim.

I would like to make it perfectly clear that I am not some Senda Berenson anti-dribbling zealot. I don’t think dribbling has taken over basketball to the sport’s detriment. But much as clay court emphasizes a power game or beach soccer creates a blitzkrieg of shots on goal, a FIBA institutionalized beach variation would make for an interesting riff on modern basketball. Not better, just interesting.

In my vision, the ideal beach basketball player would probably be Marc Gasol. His passing exploits are likely well known by any reader of this blog. If you set a bunch a cutters going around that guy, you’re going to get some open shots. Not to mention his own shot, an all-upper body set shot set forth with feather touch. He’s not going to need to set his legs on uneven beach terrain, he can just flip one on up there when he’s open. He is also a very big and hairy human being, so you gotta imagine the stink he gets going out there on the beach. Other famous players with hidden beach basketball potential: Kareem (the all time king of the assisted hook shot), Kevin Love and Wes Unseld (outlets, outlets, outlets), Matt Bonner and Andre Miller (set shots, though the sand would neutralize Andre’s post game), JJ Reddick and Ray Allen (running off screens), Kirilenko and Josh Smith (cutting to the basket for alley oops) and Wilt Chamberlain. (Wilt just loves the beach, it would be cruel to not include him.)

We’re going to need some rule changes. FIBA could make crowding a person holding the ball above the painted area illegal to encourage ball movement. The three second rule would have to be strictly enforced to encourage cutting to the basket: maybe even drop the pretense of “unless you’re guarding someone” completely since penetration to the basket is going to be impossible.

Institutionalized beach basketball has a long way to go, and a natural corporate predator: shoe companies. A version of basketball where players are liberated from the tyranny of shoes is terrifying to every sneaker executive in the world. The corporate interest that prop up basketball on every level - from AAU, to College, to the NBA - are united in the purpose of hawking shoes. Beach basketball presents a threat to these interests. If this is ever going to take off the way that I know in my heart that it can, it’s going to have to start at the sandroots level. Go out there with a hoop and a basketball and something to mark lines and play a game. Share the joys of beach basketball with your friends. Spread the word. May this be the seed that creates a revolution.

(Thanks to Caitlin Obom for editing this post. She is a member of the sketch comedy group Drop the Root Beer and Run. They perform in and around Seattle.)