In college a friend of mine said something about my passion for basketball that has stuck for all of these years. I was rooting for the Knicks one night or maybe it was the Clippers, who cares, that’s the point — it’s not important, and he thought it was a demerit that I was rooting for a team that wasn’t the team I was a “fan of.” Aka the Lakers.
It’s true my first basketball memories were from my grandparent’s carpet, watching Magic Johnson dazzle through the playoffs. But when my friend said that I thought it was weird, even then. Perhaps because he was a Knicks fan, I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
To root for one team has always sounded ridiculous. Yet the message I was getting as a Lakers fan during the Finals was that I shouldn’t even be watching the games because the Celtics were in them. Why?
I’m not gonna lie. There’s a certain nostalgia to rooting for a single team. It’s like a bygone thing of rotary phones and Arcade games at the Beverly Center. But the truth is rooting for one team feels sort of antiquated to me, like arcade games. The NBA is just too juicy and good for one single team to have my attention.
You might love Anthony Edwards one night, and then Wembanyama the next. Lonzo Ball, and then Lebron.
Am I supposed to not root for the Spurs because they’re not my home team, even when they have one of the most exciting young players alive? That’s like only listening to one style of music. And yet entire podcast episodes have been dedicated to skipping the finals just because the Celtics are in them — I didn’t get it then and I don’t get it now.
You hear this word rivalry thrown around from time to time in the NBA like it’s a badge of honor. The Celtics apparently have a “rivalry” with the Lakers, one that I personally have never felt or understood outside of being told it exists. They tell me it’s based on championships won, that the two teams with the most championship banners are naturally going to be rivals who hate each other.
How immature and absurd.
Again, in close to four decades of rooting for the Lakers I have never felt any animosity to the Celtics or someone who liked them. Boston is a fine city with many charms. Ben Affleck, accents, fish. Sure I want the Lakers to beat the Celtics, but I also want the Celtics to beat the Warriors. I despise the Warriors because I hate San Francisco but love Steph Curry and root for him relentlessly.
Sports can feel so stuck in the mud sometimes, and this idea of rivalries is one of the ways.
Whether you’re someone who likes rivalries or not, it’s inconsequential. The NBA’s entire business model is based around superstars. It’s why trade season is such a hot topic. No one outside of Boston even cares anymore that the Celtics won, social media and the NBA content machine have moved on to Alex Caruso being traded for Josh Giddey. We can debate whether or not this is good, but the reality is that we fans of the NBA abandoned the rivalry thing for trade season and NBA memes a long time ago.
The reasons are varied: Teams are owned by super billionaires who might not have a connection to the city their team is in. The player empowerment thing gave star players the power to break contracts and change teams at will, and teams themselves have become vanilla — multi-layered corporate structures that run like Fortune 500 companies too full of press releases to actually lean into conflict.
Pretty soon we’ll be rooting for player rivalries, maybe even owner rivalries, but team rivalries seem more and more like a thing of the past.
I’m not saying that localized fandom is a bad thing. Children are always going to love their hometown teams. But to manufacture rivalries out of thin air, or lean into rivalries from the 1900s, that’s as dead as the tape deck. And maybe it’a a good thing. After all, who among us has ever benefited from holding on to a grudge?