Who Will Entertain in America? Pt 2: NBA - The Return
The good Dale is in the Bubble
I’ve had a hard time watching TV the last three years. I’ve had less time to do it, sure, but I think the problem is more complicated than that. The shows I have watched ended in disgrace (Game of Thrones) or felt, no matter how good they were, incomplete. Like a crucial piece was missing from their construction. The more I’ve thought about it, this constant absence might not be the fault of Dark, Watchmen, or Mindhunter, but the reflection of something missing in me. Maybe the part of me that actively desired something from TV has been hollowed out, the nerve endings reaching there singed off as if overloaded.
Maybe this is because I watched Twin Peaks: The Return.
Twin Peaks: The Return is the third season of David Lynch & Mark Frost’s cult classic Twin Peaks, which was unceremoniously cancelled in 1991. I make this distinction in naming because despite The Return being set in the same world, populated by many of the same characters, and continuing the same story as the original, it is a profoundly different show. This is by design. Twin Peaks, groundbreaking and great as it was, was constructed out of recognizable television stories. High school melodrama, police procedural, soap opera romance, etc. What made it special was how it bent those tropes to its own purpose, to build a place, in the show’s own words, “both beautiful and strange.”
The Return, which aired in 2017, narrows in on the ugly and mundane. Actions that could be conveyed in a cut, the floor being swept or shovels spray painted, instead take up entire scenes. The vibrant Northwestern aesthetics replaced with the drab interiors of office reception rooms and cheap hotels. Where Twin Peaks was alluring, mysterious, and sensual The Return is dry, brutal, and mean. Its characters wander through the world hobbled by age and lacking a clear direction. You’re watching a world where the core has stopped spinning. Whatever you thought you were getting by returning to Twin Peaks will only appear in flashes. The show that arrived in its place is something else, something that should not be.
So you can imagine the dread that washed over me when I fired up ABC for the first televised basketball games in five months and saw hovering over an empty court the words NBA: The Return.
In late February/early March, the NBA began to weigh its options as concerns about the Coronavirus spread, some teams electing to play games without fans. When asked about this in an interview, Rudy “The French Rejection” Gobert, star center of the Utah Jazz, proceeded to bend over and breath directly on the microphones placed in front of him. On March 12th he and other members of the Utah Jazz tested positive for COVID-19 while preparing for a game. The NBA promptly cancelled its schedule until further notice, in what felt like the USA’s first public reckoning with the year to come. While the owners, commissioner, and player’s union deliberated behind the scenes about the future of the season the NBA killed time with a video game tournament, a socially distanced HORSE competition, and a month long hagiography of Michael Jordan. Only one of these will be remembered outside of COVID recaps like this.
The league eventually settled on what they would prefer we call a campus but what the press and players immediately dubbed the Bubble. 22 teams with a reasonable chance of making the playoffs would all be flown into a single location, quarantined, tested regularly, and would grind out a shortened end to the season before a conventional playoffs.
The Bubble was a tall ask, but with the players income hanging in the balance both sides had reason to try it. It would require the players to be away from home for at most three months, and rigorously quarantined if they needed to leave for urgent matters. Time in quarantine means time off the court, which could have a direct effect on a player’s next contract. If the games failed to happen at all, same thing. Fewer televised games would mean less income for the league and thus a lower salary cap (the artificial limit placed on how much a team can pay out their players in a given season). And so the players union and the league settled on Disney World in Orlando, Florida as the location for the Bubble, full steam ahead into the zone in the middle of summer.
But, this being the United States of America in the year 2020, things were not so simple as that. These negotiations were taking place in the backdrop of the largest sustained protest movement against police brutality that I have seen in my lifetime. Players were spotted all over the country protesting the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, just as they had organized displays of protest after the death of Eric Garner. To make matters even more complicated, Florida was in the midst of a spike in COVID cases. Which means that the following was about to happen:
A group of billionaire owners, most of them white, were going to send the players, most of them black, into a group of Disney owned hotels and gyms staffed by people living in an area particularly at risk during a pandemic, away from their families for three months while the rest of the country was flooded with protests against the extrajudicial murder of black Americans, all to fulfill TV contracts, including to channels like ABC and ESPN that are owned by Disney, so that these billionaire owners could make disproportionately more money than either the players or the staff working there. Get the fuck out of here.
Many players said as much. Well intentioned weirdo Kyrie Irving convened a massive video conference with other players to float the possibility of refusing to play and forming their own league. Other players like Avery Bradly and Davis Bertans excused themselves from contention for health concerns ahead of new contracts, and many more expressed a desire to remain involved in the protest movement even in the Bubble.
With public scrutiny at an all time high and sentiment likely to side with the players in the event of a labor dispute, the League conceded to a public image that could coexist with the aesthetics of the Black Lives Matter movement. Those very words, Black Lives Matter, would be placed dead center on the court during all games. Players would be allowed to choose from a selection of pre-approved phrases to appear on the back of their jerseys, and would face no repercussions for protesting during the national anthem. On the material front, the League owners pledged to donate $300 million over the next decade to black communities across the country.
Exactly how impressive you find that $300 million figure will depend on your familiarity with those owners, so let’s spend a minute talking about them. First and foremost, they are all outrageously wealthy. No matter how overpaid you think NBA players are, most are nowhere close to the wealth accumulated by the League’s 30 owners. Some notable names; James Dolan, owner of Madison Square Garden and amateur blues singer. Steve Balmer, formerly of Microsoft, big fan of developers. Dan Gilbert, who types in Comic Sans and owns Quicken Loans. Josh Harris of Apollo Global Management. Tillman Fertitta, who’s food conglomerate Landry’s would also be selling food in the Bubble. Mark Cuban, reality TV star and loudmouth tech guy. Dan DeVos, yes that kind of DeVos, who owns the Orlando Magic, the closest thing to a home team in the Bubble.
As you can imagine, not exactly the most progressive bunch. According to reporting by The Ringer (who are owned by Spotify), NBA owners have donated $14.9 million to Republican campaigns over the last five years, while only donating $5 million to Democrats over the same period of time (not counting the nearly $7 million that the Balmer family donated to a gun violence advocacy group this year. Ballmer is so rich that he throws all of these scales out of whack). This naturally puts them at odds against the more progressive advocates for prison reform, racial equality, and voter enfranchisement among the players.
It should be no surprise then that the compromise reached for the Bubble had little in the way of material changes, either for the League itself where coaching and front office staff remains majority white, or for the communities that the players sought to represent. While seeing the phrase “Black Lives Matter” on the court of one America’s most popular sports would have been unthinkable in the immediate wake of the Ferguson protests, it represented little more than a weather vane for the state of public relations in 2020. Interspersing clips of players chanting arm in arm with protesters during commercial breaks may have helped soften the image of the movement to the average American spooked by the prospect of looting and riots, but in doing so removed any reference to the calls for the abolishment of the police.
Regardless of the hollow progressive aesthetics, it is still a league where black men (and a large number of men from the Balkans, which is a whole other can of worms) sacrifice their bodies in the employ of white billionaires for entertainment filtered through a largely white media class. The league’s attempts to paper over this reality, by showing footage of the players goofing off in Disney World or talking to their children on FaceTime, only highlighted the absurdity of the spectacle by putting the corporate synergy and domestic upheaval the Bubble required front and center.
And yet, after a stirring speech by rapper and prison reform advocate Meek Mill, the games resumed and were without question dope as hell. With the worst teams in the league absent (including my beloved Chicago Bulls), the quality of play exceeded even the most optimistic expectations. Despite, or maybe as a result of the long break in play, younger stars returned with vastly improved skills. TJ Warren, Jamal Murray, Devin Booker, Michael Porter Jr., and Ja Morant all looked like new players, and through their improvement bucked conventional wisdom about which teams would emerge victorious. The layoff also helped players like Jusuf “The Bosnian Beast” Nurkic recover from injuries. Nurkic’s return in particular, along with the consistently spectacular play of Damian Lillard, pushed the Portland Trailblazers from the bottom of the standings into real playoff contention.
Games ran throughout the day, perfect for the doldrums of working from home in the summer. The constant flood of new results also invigorated the already robust content ecosystem that has sprung up on the NBA’s side. Blogs, podcasts, meme accounts, video analysts, twitter pundits, arrogaters, pieces like these, all soaking up vast quantities of attention. Each of these takes the core of basketball, the individual players performing against each other with all of the creativity, skill, and effort that this requires, and refracts it. Plays lose their context in short clips. Arbitrary facial expressions on the side lines are repurposed for personal expression by fans. Counting statistics form the basis of incomplete comparison, weighted to serve biases of allegiance or cultural values. Real reporting and off court rumor mongering commingle, famously Lou Williams missed games after being spotted eating at a strip club in Atlanta while on leave from the Bubble for a personal matter, and both form the basis of a meta narrative that hovers over the games. It is this narrative that the League sells to the world. And none of it would exist without the players.
The players made this clear. After Jacob Blake was murdered in Kenosha, Wisconsin the Milwaukee Bucks refused to play against the Orlando Magic, sparking a wildcat strike that rippled out from the NBA to the WNBA, MLB, NHL, and the US Tennis Association. There followed two days of meetings which were resolved after Barack Obama called and urged the players to resume play. The League, having staked their public good will on their perceived social awareness, made a conciliatory gesture by opening up its empty arenas to become polling sites. You may have some recency bias in regards to that last bit, but at the time it felt like the bare minimum. The brief hold that the players had on the situation appeared to be given away for less than it was worth.
Things returned to normal, the play remained great. The strike was an aberration in the narrative, but not a rupture. Time would move beyond it, replacing it with the unexpected success of the Miami Heat and the extremely expected success of LeBron James’ Lakers upon reaching the Finals. And despite the heroic efforts of a mustache twirling Jimmy Butler, the Lakers prevailed. Cue the confetti. Order is restored out of chaos. A happy ending.
But like Audrey Horne having her song called at the Twin Peaks Roadhouse, something was off.
I haven’t talked much about what these games looked like, in part because my brain watched enough of the Bubble to have its peculiarities fade into the background. But trust me, it was deeply fucking weird. Fans were replaced with what essentially amounted to Zoom screens, where their inflated and pixelated faces reacted out of sync with the action on the courts. The court itself was also strangely lifeless, no longer adorned with the often goofy logos of NBA teams, or the various local colors that parade across the floor during breaks in the game. To make up for the eerie silence in their absence, DJs pumped music into the gyms and broadcasters piped in fake crowd noise. Like the virtual fans, these pre-recorded crowd reactions never quite seemed to match the action on the court. Instead both evoked the idea of a basketball game without ever feeling like one.
Normally this would be the paragraph where I switch to describing the positives of the Bubble aesthetics, and I will do that, but the tricky thing is that the stuff that I like gives me even worse vibes than the stuff that I don’t. Despite the Bubble courts being bland and lifeless, they also cut a great deal of the grotesque pageantry that distracts from the brilliance of the game itself. No more paeans to the US military, no more t-shirt guns, no more celebrities and ultra-rich goobers lining the court. This isn’t just some culture war bias either, the change in venue had a positive impact on the play itself. Without camera operators and photographers crowding the space behind each basket players were free to drive to the basket at full speed with no fear of crashing into a pile of metal and flesh. No travel and no home crowds also meant that the games were played on about as equal a footing as is possible, and there was even speculation that the smaller gyms resulted in better shooting for lack of distraction.
So why would I find any of this disconcerting? Surely I wasn’t clamoring for cheerleaders to storm the court and smile like they were at gunpoint while some bozo screamed at the top of his lungs about a local car dealership? Shouldn’t I, a purported lover of the game, celebrate this undiluted and pure version of NBA basketball? Ah, but that word, pure, always sets alarms off in my brain. What is “pure NBA basketball” and what is removed for the sake of it? I can’t help but worry that purity in this context just means “data with less noise.” An NBA where every game is played under the same conditions, no distractions, no human messiness to interfere with the accumulation of stats and play itself. This is the analytics wet dream come true. A sterilized and streamlined version of basketball where only the elements that truly impact outcomes enter into the game. This version of the game is closer to the mathematical ideal of basketball, mana to the NBA’s increasingly technocratic front offices.
I dread what could come of this vision of basketball. A League that constricts players into the most logically correct shots, and holds their contracts at stake in the process. One that reduces players to their statistical outputs measured against financial burdens. Abstractions measured by utility.
“I was just in a dark place. I wasn’t really here, I checked out,” Paul George of the Los Angeles Clippers after a cold streak.
After scoring 50 points in a must win game on the day of the Breonna Taylor verdict Jamal Murray struggled through the obligatory post game interview. Exhausted physically and emotionally staggered through his opening answer before dropping his head with his hands on his knees. Collecting himself he delivered the following:
I do not want an NBA that asks players to be data first and humans second.
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“To give people some kind of understanding of life, I try and deliver some type of message or story through my music,” Meek Mill began his speech before the first games in the Bubble. If this is the thesis of NBA: The Return, what story was told here?
The Phoenix Suns valiantly going 8-0 despite having no shot of making the playoffs.
The Portland Trailblazers gritting their way into the 8th seed only to get demolished by the superstar Lakers.
The Miami Heat overcoming the prohibitive favorites through ingenuity and execution.
The Denver Nuggets never losing hope and trusting in their play to eventually come around, until it didn’t.
The Los Angeles Lakers, with all the baggage of Kobe Bryant’s recent death hanging over them, dominating despite front office ineptitude because LeBron James chose them, and thus re-oriented the competitive balance of the entire league.
The Milwaukee Bucks, disappointing on the court (too easy to crack their scheme when they never change it) but a beacon of what could be done off of it. Even if their strike did not last long enough, did not in a single stroke enact the change they wanted to see, it demonstrated that a player strike was possible to begin with. Not a silver bullet, but a warning shot.
All of these stories exist concurrently. It is up to the viewer to make sense of them and determine which ones matter and which ones don’t. The owners of the League and the channels cannot do this for you. The ball is in your court.
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The “Who Will Entertain in America” series will conclude with a return to the subject of music, this time to a band that straddles the line between the present and the past. Are they an echo or something new? Next up… CODE ORANGE.