#nba rivalry

[bballinspiration]

Is LeBron James vs Kawhi Leonard the NEXT great NBA rivalry? 🔥

[joelekm]

Inside the Knicks Raptors Data Theft: A Shocking Betrayal | NBA Chronicles

I just watched this mind-blowing video about how the Knicks’ crucial data was stolen, giving their rivals, the Raptors, an unfair advantage. It’s a story full of betrayal and corporate espionage. The dark side of sports data is revealed as one mole turned everything upside down. Don't miss out on this shocking tale!

[2girls1ball]

#11: Why there Has to be Bad Blood in the NBA

#NBAdventCalendar. Ad-vent: the coming, or arrival, especially of something extremely important. The NBA season is almost upon us, and we don’t know about you, but we’re hopelessly consumed by meaningless pre-season matchups (down to compulsively refreshing our browsers to see who won that thrilling OT game).  It is in that spirit that we’ve decided to unleash that pent up anticipation and count down the last two weeks before the 2012-2013 season tips off by highlighting some of the things that we’re oh so giddy to see.

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The FreeDarko Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac manifesto boldly states the following:

In an age less advanced, man's allegiance was determined by proximity alone. Tribalism and peer pressure conspired to make the fan see only "us" and "them," no matter what genius wore the color of the enemy. We believe that these are the ways of provincials and fascists, and in this brave century man must stand on his own and open his fandom to new possibilities.

This is what the intellectual backlash to the mainstream sports establishment looks like; it proposes we loosen the grip of the Old Boys' Network monopoly and its Jackie Christie tyranny on the way we experience sports --through the narrow and suffocating prism of wins and losses and all the mindless barking that accompanies it.

Honestly, I don't fully buy or endorse the liberated fan doctrine.  

***

This past summer, we saw the following happen in sequential order with very little time separating all three events: LeBron James vanquishes the loud cannon of dissenting voices to clinch his first championship at the expense of Kevin Durant's Thunder.  Unfortunately for Durant, he then has to cozy up to James during the Olympics team training.  Voicing his mild discomfort with the idea that he would be getting in bed with the enemy, Durant says:

He's my teammate now. I'm a team player. I can't let that affect this. This is bigger than that. It's tough to lose in the Finals and play with the guy you've been going up against for five games who beat you. 

We all felt for Durant -- who would be able to tolerate such a thing? As the Olympics grew nearer, however, the team understandably got closer. And then Team USA took care of business and won gold, the penultimate team bonding experience. Some of us assumed that what happened in London would stay in London; surely that victory hadn't softened Duran't heart or washed away memories of the devastating Finals series. Or had it? No sooner than the team was back on American soil, we were made privy to Durant and James teaming up to get ready for the upcoming season (which, in the players' defense, was the second year of their grueling pre-season regimen and not something that sprang out of their brief stint as Olympics teammates). Some fans (among which the populist pitchfork holders) were dismayed, and others were predictably annoyed that anyone should care about on-court rivals compartmentalizing their basketball feuds. 

In the excellent piece, "Will There Be Blood", Steve McPherson argues that despite Magic and Bird's storied rivalry, the two grew to be very close. Surely that didn't affect Magic vengefully supplanting the Celtics in the 1987 Finals, Steve pointed out as a corroborating fact to the theory that on and off court friendships need not be coupled. 

This bit of narrative embellishment serves his argument well, but here's where the characterization of cherished rivalries loses its footing; While Larry Bird and Magic did in fact share something special during the 1986 Converse shoot, which was held at the request of Bird in his hometown of French Lick, Indiana, that kinship did not spill over into the season. In Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals, Magic mentions inviting Bird out to dinner while he was in town to play the Celtics. Bird, to his astonishment, refused. He had drawn the line; It didn't matter what kind of experience the two had shared in French Lick that summer, there was to be no in-season socializing. (Jackie MacMullan has often made the comparison between Rondo and Bird's sour personalities to defend Rondo from claims that he's a toxic influence on the team. I mention this in case you are tempted to extrapolate Magic-Bird to Durant-James, two entirely different personalities that are closer to Magic in temperament.) 

*** 

The broadcast and digital revolution that has made it possible to watch, learn more about and scrutinize any and all players and teams, has spawned a more educated, hence enlightened evolutionary fan. Is this new model for fandom akin to a monk's detachment from the material world, a rebuke against the Angry Fan that's blind to anything that hasn't been passed down to him through the pull of geography and family? Given the pitiful and polarizing state of sports discourse, I understand the motivation, but I neither agree with it nor do I think that rivalries in any way reduce our appreciation of the aesthetics of the game.

There are many dimensions to consider in the debate about the latest generation of NBA rivalries and whether the dynamic between foes has changed in any substantive way that goes beyond the tweets, the nefarious AAU format and the fraternal spirit among the newer generation of players. 

But where is JVG's Rough-and-Tumble NBA (the one he gripes about so fondly on the air)? Does it still exist?

With James and Durant, we had the best player in the world and the best scorer in the world going toe-to-toe positionally for five hard-fought games that would crown either Durant or James NBA Champion. This is by definition a zero-sum game which naturally lends itself to forging the rivalries some of us still long for in our sports viewing experience.  It's most likely that the 2012 NBA Finals was just a teaser reel of a matchup that will with each subsequent meeting, create new story lines, new frictions as well as exacerbate old ones. Despite the relatively short series, think back to Game 2 of the Finals where James got away with engaging Durant in a square dance on a drive that could have tied the game and given the Thunder a decisive 2-0 lead (you will recall that onlythree teams in NBA history have ever come back from a 2-0 deficit in the Finals to win it all). Should Durant fall to James again, would he react the same way he did this past summer? Part of me thinks that Durant went into those workouts with James, confident in the Thunder's ability to overcome the Heat in their next go-around. An added defeat could change the complexion of this baby, burgeoning rivalry and how each player chooses to approach it (independently of how the league manufactures a parallel narrative of rivalry that we are sometimes guilty of conflating with the real thing). 

Ferdinand De Saussure teaches us that "the binary opposition is the means by which language has value or meaning; each language unit is defined in reciprocal determination with another term, as in binary code".  The example that is often given to explain this notion of duality is good and evil. How do we define a concept if we do not understand its semantic polar opposite?  

In other words, what does "winning" represent in the absence of "losing"? What is "black" without "white", or "James" without "Durant"? We haven't yet reached that point, but as someone who enjoys every facet of the game and none more than the ones charged with binary tension, I certainly hope we do.