a blog by Ian Kennedy
Whenever I want to describe my appreciation and admiration for the athletes in the NBA, I pull up this clip from a game last year.
Look how Luka steals falls down as he steals the ball and looks up and sees Kyrie. Luka passes it off to him with a casual, over-the-shoulder backhand and then Kyrie runs it down the court for what would seem to be a dunk but, sensing someone is behind him is a quick tip up so his teammate can slam the alley-oop.
Here it is again, in slow-motion.
How do you squeeze that extra bit of effort when you’re already at the highest levels of a sport? Top athletes have a competitive streak that they can tap on demand to push them beyond. Having the ability to summon that competitive drive and harness it to drive you to further heights is the secret to a sustainable athletic career. A top athlete must respect the power of competition and that begins with respect for your opponent who is the source
We saw this respect the other night as Jimmy Butler and Grant Williams locked horns in the final minutes of Game Two in the playoffs at Boston.
Listen to Jimmy Butler’s response to a reporter asking about the incident and the respect he has not only for the power of competition to drive him further but also the respect he holds for his rivals that he pushes against to get him there.
And here’s Grant Williams on the other side,
I have such admiration for those that have the confidence to transform adversary into motivation. It’s not about right or wrong, good or evil, it’s about driving each other to be better. We could all learn for this.
I am really looking forward the next chapter tonight at 8:30 in Miami. #goceltics!
Going through some old boxes during the holidays I came across this old press pass which has a funny story behind it which I’ll share for posterity.
In 1996, the then New Jersey Nets came to Tokyo to play against the Orlando Magic. The NBA was reaching to Japan to expand awareness of the sport and this was the fourth time two NBA teams traveled to Japan to play a regular season game in front of a Japanese crowd. Shaq had recently decamped for the Los Angeles Lakers but the Magic was still the team to watch with Penny Hardaway as the man to watch.
My friend Kimiaki Tanaka was a reporter for China Television and called me in the morning to ask if I wanted to join her at the game and tag along as her “cameraman.” I didn’t have a proper camera beyond a small Olympus Mju so there I was, down under the basket, at the Tokyo Dome, with all the other international press and their 400 mm zoom lenses.
Here are a couple of photos from that I found from that roll of film. I don’t think I’ll ever get that close to a professional game again.
Flash forward 26 years and my son Tyler is working at what is now the Brooklyn Nets and seeing many games (one of the benefits in working for the team). He did make it courtside recently and caught these photos of, you guessed it, the Nets going up against the Magic.
So the Warriors won, again.
More accurately, the Celtics lost. Tyler re-introduced the family to this year’s team and we watched them battle their way through the playoff. After they swept the Nets, we threw our support behind them fully as they took on Giannis and the Bucks and Jimmy Butler and the Heat and scraped and clawed there way to a spot in the Finals.
An NBA Finals between the Oakland San Francisco Warriors and Boston Celtics was the perfect match up. Our old home vs. the new. To me the Warriors are like an Italian racing car – well-funded, perfectly tuned, and unstoppable. On the straights when everything is running smoothly there is no contest. Contrast that with this young Boston team, playing rough around the edges, adjusting to their opponents and squeaking out wins after having their backs pushed up against a wall. This young team fought their way through a tough East Coast division to take the regional title. To me, the Celtics were the sand that would get into the Warrior’s drive train, I really thought this young and scrappy 2022 Celtics team might have a chance.
But they did not.
After the Celtics pulled off one win at home and another in San Francisco, the Golden State machine re-calibrated itself and there was no stopping them. With the unstoppable efficiency of a Japanese Gundam, the threes rained down mercilessly.
“They faced the Golden State Warriors in a rematch of the 1964 Finals, which the Celtics won in five games in an attempt to win their 18th championship and first since 2008. However the Celtics would lose in six games despite taking a 2-1 lead.” The Wikipedia summary of the post-season is brutal in its judgement.
While it was the turnovers that ultimately caused Boston to lose, it was those uncontested threes from the Warriors that really hurt. Swish…Swish…Swish – they put microphones on the net so the sound comes through loud and clear on the broadcast. The sound of a basketball going in without hitting the rim is the most visceral sound for a basketball fan, it’s the sweet sound of victory for one, the dagger of defeat for the other.
It was even more painful to be back in San Francisco, first at a San Francisco Giants game and then a second time, in a bar in downtown San Francisco. Everyone around me couldn’t figure out why I was pulling for the bad boys from Boston.
Misery loves company so it only makes sense to finish with this excerpt from Bill Simmons recalling the defeat of his Celtics to LeBron James at the 2012 Eastern Conference Finals.
I don’t know what happened. I just know the shots wouldn’t stop going in. After about the fifth dagger in a row (he made 10 straight), the crowd started groaning on every make — shades of Philly’s Andrew Toney ripping our hearts out 30 years ago. If you’ve ever been in the building for one of those games, you know there isn’t a deadlier sound. He single-handedly murdered one of the giddiest Celtics crowds I can remember. Thirty points in the first half. Thirty! All with that blank look on his face. It was like watching surveillance video of a serial killer coldly dismembering a body and sticking the parts in the fridge. Only we were right there.
You can’t imagine what this was like to witness in person. I know Michael Jordan had similarly astonishing games, and others, too, but not with stakes like that. This wasn’t just an elimination game. This was LeBron James’s entire career being put on trial … and it only took an hour for him to tell the jury, “Go home. I’m one of the best players ever. Stop picking me apart. Stop talking about the things I can’t do. Stop holding me to standards that have never been applied to any other NBA player. Stop blaming me for an admittedly dumb decision I never should have made. Stop saying I’m weak. Stop saying that I don’t want to win. Stop. Just … stop.”
As a Celtics fan, I was devastated. As a basketball fan, I appreciated the performance for what it was. One of the greatest players ever was playing one of his greatest games ever. He swallowed up every other relevant story line. Needless to say, the Celtics couldn’t match him — especially Pierce, who’s worn down from four weeks of battling Andre Iguodala, Shane Battier and LeBron on one leg and appears to be running on fumes of his fumes’ fumes at this point. The fans were so shell-shocked that many (including me and my father) filed out with three minutes remaining, not because we were lousy fans, not to beat the traffic, but because we didn’t want to be there anymore. We wanted to get away from LeBron. He ruined what should have been a magical night. We never really had a chance to cheer, swing the game, rally our guys, anything. He pointed a remote control at us and pressed “MUTE.” It was like being in a car accident. LeBron James ran over 18,000 people.
The Consequences of Caring
Nothing but respect for the Warriors. Italian racing machine that they are, there is no doubt they were impressive. Painful as it was, they are an amazing team to watch. They are an experienced Finals team
Check out this clip from The latest episode of the Draymond Green Show where Draymond explains why he thinks the Celtics will be back again.
Time to reset. I’ll be rooting once again next year, for the Brooklyn Nets, then the Celtics. See you then.
“the most irrational and hysterically rude shots you will ever see” – Deadline
Also see: It’s in the Details: Hidden Highlights From Damian Lillard’s Buzzer-Beater
What an amazing game played by UCF against Duke yesterday. I keep coming back to the final basket, those final seconds when everything hung in the balance, how it almost made it in, just a slightly-softer-touch. UCF was so close to upsetting a #1 seeded championship team. It was never supposed to be that close.
“It was up there forever, I felt like, in slow motion,” he said. “Once I saw it go past the midpoint and roll out, there was, at that point, nothing left to do.”
Heartbroken UCF proud it pushed No. 1 Duke during close NCAA Tournament loss
Then today I saw the locker room speech by the UCF coach, Johnny Dawkins, father of the player who just missed that last basket and a former player for Duke, the team that won. You can hear the sniffling in the background and really feel their loss. These boys, some of them seniors, were playing in the last game of their entire basketball career. They are at the peak of their career, if they are not getting picked up by a pro team, this is it.
For me it was an exciting game and an close loss. Exciting for sure but my bracket’s intact, I’m moving on. Just a close call. But to these kids, the loss must have been devastating. So many years invested up to that one final moment.
There is an annual high school baseball tournament in Japan that is very much like the March Madness tournament here in the United States. 4000+ teams across the country play in a national tournament that ends up with less than 20 teams going to a the famous Koshien Stadium in Japan in mid-August. The entire nation turns in during the hot summer evenings to watch their nation’s youth play their hearts out.
March Madness is our Koshien
We all saw Steph Curry’s game-winning basket to win against Oklahoma in overtime…in the last second…while running down the court…shooting from a few feet inside half-court…and swishing a three pointer…to tie the NBA record for most three-pointers in a single game.
So this morning we launched a Basketball channel on SmartNews. The stories that make it into this channel are driven by an algorithm that reads through millions of articles each day and “knows” if a story is about basketball and places it there. Part of the challenge of teaching this algorithm is that it takes a training set of articles to “teach” it what collection of words, phrases, and headlines make up a basketball story and uses that pattern when it looks for new stories to add to the collection.
The beauty of this once you get it right is that once it’s working, the discovery process is really almost like magic. As it happens, right when we turned it on, SmartNews immediately discovered a story about Steph Curry in the literary magazine, The Paris Review.
It is in this way, SmartNews discovers new content for it’s readers who may not know what the Paris Review thinks of basketball. And in turn, SmartNews brings a new audience of readers to the Paris Review magazine, an audience beyond their usual core audience. Discovery on both ends, that’s what makes SmartNews an engine for the curious.
Here’s an excerpt from Hoops and the Abstract Truth by Rowan Ricardo Phillips (who covers basketball for The Paris Review regularly).
So let’s look at that game-winning three-pointer as a work of art. Suffering—as Auden wrote in his study of Brueghel, “Musée des Beaux Arts”—is a “human position” to understand. You might find it at the center of the scene or at the periphery, but even if it’s not front and center, it’s there: “the dreadful martyrdom must run its course / Anyhow in a corner … ” Look to one corner of Curry’s canvas and you’ll spot Andre Roberson, a role player who earns his roster spot playing defense, doing exactly what the textbook tells you to do: he tried to hustle back to the three-point line in order to position himself to defend from there. But Curry’s frame of reference is neither the arc painted on the court, nor Roberson’s, nor the textbook’s. As Roberson backtracked, his body betrayed its doubt about what it should be doing. His are the motions of someone in a high-leverage situation who’s unsure whether to step back or step up, unsure if he’s defending the past or the future.
Poetry in Motion