My friends think it is a bit daft when I stay up until 1 a.m. to watch two back-to-back NBA playoff games. After all, we have no local skin in the game. Professional basketball is not a sport that garners much attention in Southwestern Pennsylvania.
I am not as dedicated as my New Jersey family, who follow the New York Knicks with great passion throughout the whole season. However, when the NBA playoffs roll around, all the games are must-see entertainment. For two months, political talk shows, streaming my favorite programs, and reading novels take a back seat to professional basketball.
Three events in the spring and summer of 2020 made me a permanent fan of the NBA playoffs. First, the pandemic interrupted other sporting events normally on the broadcast schedule. The NBA finished its regular season and the playoffs by creating a bio-secure bubble at a live-in facility near Walt Disney World. Nearly $190 million was invested to set up a secure environment where players and their families could stay until their team was eliminated.
The league produced a rulebook of more than 100 pages to protect its players in an attempt to salvage the remainder of the season. Strict directives included isolation protocols, testing requirements, and the potential for financial penalties. Isolated players had to forego participating in the games until they were medically cleared.
The experiment was a great success.
Sports fans like me who rarely watched the NBA were stuck at home with little to do. Many of us became enamored with the sport and quickly learned that two-and-a-half hours of NBA playoff basketball offered 10 times the excitement of a major league baseball game.
The second event took place on August 26, 2020, when the NBA Milwaukee Bucks canceled an in-the-bubble playoff game against the Orlando Magic. This action was taken in response to the shooting of an unarmed Black man, not far from the Bucks’ Milwaukee home court. The bubble-confined players realized that basketball was not the priority until the NBA could collectively agree on how to respond to police shootings of unarmed Black men.
Within hours, the NBA was effectively shut down for several days, giving the players, coaches, and owners time to reflect on racism in America. In solidarity, games in other professional sporting events were also canceled. Many professional and college football teams suspended summer practices to show their support. White players, without hesitation, backed their Black teammates.
For two days, I divided my attention between the NBA channel, ESPN, and the radio sports talk shows. The discussions were profound, emotional, and cathartic. One after another, strong, proud, normally stoic athletes bared their souls and explained what it is like to grow up Black in America. I came to appreciate Black athletes for more than their athletic abilities and to admire their advocacy for social justice.
The third event was my introduction to “Inside the NBA” on the TNT cable channel, where many of the playoff games are broadcast. It did not take long for me to agree with the critics that this professional basketball program is among the best sports analysis shows on television. “Inside the NBA” has won 17 sports Emmy Awards since its inception. No other sports show has the level of knowledge, experience, and humor. It caters to both casual observers like my spouse and to die-hard fans.
The chemistry on the set of “Inside the NBA” provides the right mix of wisdom and wit. The ringmaster is longtime mainstay Ernie Johnson, the son of a pitcher, who is a statistical genius, and the perfect straight man. Kenny Smith, the smooth New York City point guard, provides real-time analysis. Charles Barkley, “the round mound,” often disagrees with the consensus and drops explosive observations. Lastly, Shaquille O’Neal plays the quiet agitator, an unexpected role given his large, 7-foot frame. No matter how one-sided the actual basketball game, “Inside the NBA,” always provides a pre-game and halftime performance that has listeners talking the next day.
I belong to the camp of sports fans who believe that the regular NBA season is too long and mostly irrelevant. Sixteen teams make the playoffs. Each team plays 82 regular season games to determine seeding and home-court advantage. During the regular season, the best players are often withheld from competition to avoid injury. Many regular season games are one-sided, lackluster affairs.
Once the playoffs begin, all bets are off, and the intensity of play is ratcheted up. Players are diving for balls, taking brutal “charges” and “going to the rim” through a defensive gauntlet of arms and body blows. To keep up the adrenaline, playoff games are usually won or lost in the final minutes of play.
Gary Stout is a Washington attorney.