There is an active NBA player whose career is already the envy of many of his peers. This player has:
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Been a starter in multiple NBA Finals
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Been All-Defensive First Team
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Finished second for Defensive Player of the Year
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Been his team’s leading scorer (26 points per game)
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Been his team’s second-leading scorer
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Been his team’s fourth-leading scorer
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Had top-20 seasons in points, field goals, shooting %, 3-point %, free-throw %, steals & lowest turnover %
By 2050, when climate and social chaos have killed off pro sports, this player will be long-forgotten. If not before.
That player is not Kenny Sears, inactive from the NBA since 1964 and the mortal coil since 2017. I mention Sears because he is an ur-example of the sands of time disappearing all trace of a legend. Man spent six-plus seasons as a Knickerbocker. Twice he was an All-Star. One year when he wasn’t, he still finished eighth for MVP, a feat he accomplished twice in New York. He led the league in shooting twice, including a healthy 10 points above the league average (49%-39%) in 1959.
Now, nobody knows him.
Go on, look up the numbers. Dismiss. Deride. “There were only, like, 15 players back then anyway. Of course he was an All-Star; everybody was!” A combo forward who didn’t tip the scales at 200 pounds, lighter than Mikal Bridges, barely bulkier than Landry Shamet. Dude looked like he couldn’t dunk a donut, much less a basketball. Still, Sears’ biggest failing dwarfs all those. He wasn’t superficial.
I don’t mean he wasn’t shallow. I don’t mean that he was, either; I’ve no idea what Sears was like as a person. I mean he wasn’t where the fans’ eyes went first — that’d have been Carl Braun, Richie Guerin, Dick McGuire, Harry Gallatin. When we first see someone we see the surface of them, what’s sparkly and obvious. Braun was named to five All-Star teams. Guerin made six. McGuire and Gallatin? Seven. Compared to them, Sears wasn’t even Fredo to Sonny and Michael, more de Gaulle to Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. Maybe you’re a big deal back in Lille, but this is Yalta, son.
As fun as it is to just sit around and remember random NBA guys (Yinka Dare!), I’m not suggesting you have to. You’d probably like it, though. It’s fun, even if only as an apertif or chaser. I’m asking you to remember the specific players you do. Get together with your people and talk about them. Talk over drinks. Pop some eds. Write about the players who struck you, even if you only a note pad, a lily pad.
Some personal faves? Drazen Petrović. P.J. Tucker. Manute Bol. Jamal Crawford. And it’s cliche, but Toronto Vince Carter . . . Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, VC and if I’m honest Victor Wembanyama are maybe the only NBA players I’ve ever seen who look like cheat codes in a video game.
Magic was a magician, but a magician is a person who’s mastered anticipation and deception. Kyrie Irving can make any shot from any angle at any point in his jump or descent anywhere on the court, thanks to repetition of however many drills and skills it takes to become second-nature. But the nature is, by definition, secondary and not primary.
Jordan was literally brighter than everyone else on the floor. He moved differently. If you didn’t see it, I’m sorry, because I doubt it shows up on a computer screen. But on the TV in your living room in 1992, I am telling you that man glowed and he flowed. It wasn’t just me.
Shaq was like the actual Hulk. Like the league had been full of Captain Americas and Black Panthers and a few Things, and then one day the Hulk showed up. The contrast, that erasure of a long-held sense of scale — it took your breath away. The biggest centers looked like forwards next to him. This is not normal.
Carter leads the super-super short list of NBA athletes so athletic they make NBA athletes look like amateurs. Imagine St. John’s is playing UConn next winter and somehow Anthony Edwards is on the Red Storm. Connecticut has top athletes, but Ant *actually is* in a different league. Carter looked like he belonged in whatever alien basketball league was a level up from the NBA.
What makes them unforgettable? Because there are stories only you can tell. You decide which to carry with you, which to share with others. Example: in a March 1993 game between Miami and Washington, the then-Bullets collected 30 rebounds. The Heat’s Rony Seikaly had 34 by himself.
That’s not life-changing information. Your pulse didn’t climb. But before I knew that, all I remembered of Seikaly was he was a famously favorite target of Patrick Ewing, and he was married to an SI swimsuit cover model. He was a far better offensive big than the Benoit Benjamins and Sam Bowies of his day, though clearly below Ewing, Hakeem Olajuwon and David Robinson. Still, don’t lose the lead: how many people walking around the planet ever out-rebounded an NBA team?
I was too young and dumb to properly appreciate Seikaly. Back in the day I could only see the Heat on TV when they were playing the Knicks, Nets or Bulls (this being the glorious age before Miami ever sniffed the playoffs). So how badly was I overlooking others? How many? And if I could be so wrong about people I watched play, what to make of my thoughts about all those I never did?
How easily we forgot how great “pretty good” players were. Did you know Shaq once finished tied in MVP voting with Anthony Mason? Mase’s career didn’t take off till he was 25, but by the time he retired he’d been on an All-NBA Team with Shaq, Penny Hardaway and John Stockton, won Sixth Man of the Year, finished top-10 for DPOY three times and top-15 for MVP twice. Someday someone will compare him with Malik Rose.
I don’t blame people. We mostly all have bigger issues in life. Underrating NBA players doesn’t matter, except that it does as part of the same flattening we do with the past. The 1920s weren’t just flappers, nor the ’40s WWII, nor the ’60s hippies, etcetera. If your idea of gumbo is broth, the cooking is gonna suffer. As are those you feed.
Once upon a time, a player made All-NBA First Team his first 10 years. Starting in his second season, he averaged 25 to 31 points a game for a decade, twice leading the league; in that same stretch he averaged 15-20 rebounds per night. He was MVP twice, runner-up twice and top-four eight times. Nobody remembers him.
How about the guy who won more scoring titles than the NBA’s all-time leading scorer and more blocks titles than its all-time leading shot blocker? He’s got more MVPs than Michael and more rings than LeBron, but is at best an afterthought in GOAT debates, at worst an also-ran — who pays homage to an even more dismissed all-timer.
Bob Cousy gets written off for playing against plumbers by a catch-and-shoot specialist who spent half his career coming off the bench. Wilt was only great because there weren’t any other 7-footers back then. Magic and Bird went from Jordan’s mountaintop in 1990 to dust in his wake by 2000. MJ wasn’t even really athletic, he just played when everybody else was a literal toilet. Draymond Green thinks he could’ve guarded Shaq.
If you never watched the old Knicks, watch an old game. Basketball-reference can’t capture Bill Bradley’s incessant movement, its impact on the opponent’s defense. The stats can tell you Willis Reed was better than the average bear, but can’t convey his combination of silk and steel. Check out Kareem his first years in Milwaukee. Even late-stage Wilt Chamberlain was doing things that make you rewind because you can’t believe it.
But you have to dig in. They say the devil’s in the details. They also say hell has all the best musicians. So if you wanna have fun, ya gotta go deep.
Don’t ever forget Mikal Bridges’ midrange movement and mastery, or the multiple, multiple, multiple playoff games he’s already *won* with his defense. Don’t ever let Mitchell Robinson be reduced to a rim-runner who couldn’t shoot free throws. By all things holy, guard against the erosion of Josh Hart’s impact over time. How many fans today have any inkling the importance that Alvin Robertson, Joe Dumars and Horace Grant held for their sides? If you don’t tell the story of Hart, and keep it warm and alive inside, rest assured he’ll morph for the ignorant from a cornerstone to a backpack.
I don’t think I’m often clear why something matters to me, and why I think it should matter to you. More and more of our lived experience and made memories come from screens. We neuter more and more of our senses as our eyes dominate our perceptions. One of the strangest experiences I had as a professor was seeing students go 80 minutes without writing down a thing we talked about in class, then after it was over snapping a photo of the whiteboard. That. Isn’t. The. Same. Thing.
We live in an age when more than ever before we can’t trust our own eyes. And where there’s people who can’t see, there’s people selling something promising slivers and glints of light, for a price. Don’t buy it. Re-learn what you know. Re-love what you’ve loved. One day your now is everybody’s then, and all you’ll have left of it is whatever you took the time to keep. It matters in basketball. Not just in basketball.
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