On this Sunday afternoon, as J.R. Smith floated his way around Madison Square Garden in his first game since returning from his self-imposed exile in the only country big enough to contain all of his persona, viewers could only grin, comforted by the fact that all was right again in our jangling, pieced-together NBA culture. While Earl chucked countless threes on his way toward fifty-plus scoring nights in a basketball land so brilliantly upside-down that Stephon Marbury both feels at home and seems to be a model citizen, the NBA wanted desperately for our screw-ups, our knuckleheads. So many eras have come and gone post-Jordan, overlapping over one another messily, that the time when tattoos and snarls dominated headlines as threats to society rather than eye-roll-worthy commonalities feels about as far away as China itself, but not too long ago, this was a league of thugs and rapscallions, let the right onlookers tell it. How did we move so far from the Time of the Ne’er Do Well, and what did we do with all of the flotsam since?
Looking at a list of current NBA free agents reads like a Who’s Who of guys who were purported “not to get it”: Antoine Walker, Gilbert Arenas, Rasheed Wallace (retired but reportedly wanting for a comeback), and the crown prince of these lost men, Allen Iverson. While age and lack of productivity can just as easily be blamed for the passing on each of these players by GMs leaguewide, a stain marks every one of them as creatures of another time, one David Stern is only too happy to see passed. Anyone who thinks a talent like Iverson couldn’t still contribute at a minimal level, at least, to an NBA team has not been very attentively watching the last few years of the careers of guys like Grant Hill, Tracy McGrady and Shaquille O’Neal, one-time MVP-level talents that are so naturally gifted that they’ve each found (or in Shaq’s case, did find) their respective niches in which they’ve thrived. The read on Iverson does not simply state that he can’t play anymore; instead, his history of bad decision-making, both on and off-court, and his remarkably bad reputation have led him to scrounging for D-League minutes. Pushing aside all personal allegiance to a guy that defined what I loved about basketball in the Aughts, even if it was plenty of reasonable people despised, how the hell did he go from gifted troublemaker to locker-room poison so quickly? Just three years ago, this guy was starting in All-Star Games, even if the fans seemed to be voting him in out of nostalgia rather than any new highlight footage. Now soccer teams offer him pricy contracts as publicity stunts because, you know, maybe he’ll take it?
Maybe it’s my own conflated wistfulness for this lot that’s stirring up such a response, but this gentrification of the NBA has done some considerable damage to a league once built on its bizarre personalities. Yes, Portland and Indiana had to deal with year’s of season-ticket-sale rebuilding thanks to their respective eras of numbskullery, but in the process, we’re now entering almost-NFL-levels of banality when it comes to player’s personalities. In this new golden era of talent, endless stars have emerged out of recent drafts, from Derrick Rose to John Wall to Kyrie Irving to Kevin Love, but where are the weirdos, the guys that every reporter goes to for a quote that will lift up that night’s copy to something more than just a recollection of stats and lead changes? Even those who show a bit of tenacity, your Russell Westbrooks and Blake Griffins and Demarcus Cousinses, immediately become vilified when they shift from the milquetoast-type of stardom that Peyton Manning turned into years of soporific television endorsements to something more meaningful: a real person.
The only thing resembling the JailBlazers of the this era or that brand of brilliant idiocy is the Washington Wizards, who, due to their miserable record and unwatchable play, are honestly more depressing than idiosyncratic. Obviously a devotee of the Rasheed Wallace School of Conditioning and Shot Selection, Andray Blatche nightly turns a diverse array of talents into some sort of PSA against taking oneself too seriously after limited success (so, so limited). Jordan Crawford and Nick Young are almost certainly jumpers somewhere right now, no matter at what time you read this, and JaVale McGee sadly seems like a sitcom trope instead of a true, sensible human being. I’m sure that many who criticize my argument as reminiscing over past misery will look to the WIzards, screaming, “Is this what you want?”, but remember, the Blazers of the early part of the 2000′s played well. As did those Pacers, the Melo-Iverson Nuggets, the “We believe” Warriors and most of the misfits many among us have loved. We only cared about their eccentricities because they could ball, and what passes for dysfunction these days in the NBA is just that: dysfunctional.
Perhaps the advanced stats movement did it, killed off an era of men for whom taking an ill-advised jumper was making a point rather than a coherent decision. The Daryl Morey crew simply will not abide such recklessness in the name of character or watchability or anything so intangible. Maybe Ron Artest or Stephen Jackson or Stern himself closed the lid on them whenever they played into every one of those racist, dehumanizing stereotypes that pervaded discussion of post-Jordan ball on that fateful Detroit night, knocking out plenty of drunk fans and any goodwill that had accompanied their brand of ball. The deluge of stars that followed them has quickly made their memories fade like so many AI shots at the end of a shot clock, replacing them with guys who request their steaks well done and cut up before served and slap stickers with Bible verses onto backboards. It’s probably for the better, probably made the game easier to watch, more efficient, less cluttered with racial tension, certainly more profitable, given it a higher profile. But every time you see a superstar take a remarkably poorly articulated media question this postseason and watch the mental gymnastics that the player goes through lest he respond back too rudely, remember: Sheed would have said something.
