Hey everyone, how exciting, the start of the NBA season is only a few glorious weeks away, and soon we’ll have so much to dissect. The season has so many captivating storylines, all developed over the summer, and kinda rolling off that Damian Lillard to Milwaukee trade last week. Because of that we’ve got two monsters in the East, Milwaukee and Boston, who will be battling all season for dominance, and plenty of other intriguing storylines in the West — the Lakers, the Nuggets, and the San Antonio Spurs, to name just a few. It’s going to be a fantastic season and we’re going to be on the ride here at BasketballWeather.
Why is Michael Jordan crying?
Now, often what we do here is explore life through the NBA, so this is week I thought it wound be fun to explore life through a basketball player none of you have ever heard of before.
Me.
Other than a few sad years playing middle school ball, and on the B-team of my elementary school team, I have barely played basketball since about sophomore or junior year of high school. This isn’t to say I’m out of shape, I work out at the gym, and though I have not started lifting weights yet, met a doctor recently who says I’m awesome. Building muscle they tell me is healthy as you grow up.
The Backstory.
I recently joined this amateur Jewish basketball league.
Yeah. It probably won’t surprise you when I say that everyone on the amateur team sucks, I’m not sure how much more can be expected from a ragtag group of basketball players assembled out of the ether, and collected on a team the manager of the league dubbed the “Free Agents.”
The Free Agents, I had to laugh when I saw that come into my email the first time. An incomplete list of the players on this team are as follows, names changed out of respect of course.
Curly - A pot-bellied bruiser who only fist bumps.
Saul - A Frenchman with a degree in computer science.
Dan - A mute who may be a cop.
Lips - The best player on the team, and the youngest. He just graduated from college.
This is important because now that a few games have gone by and it’s become clear that we are easily the worst team in the league, Lips, the best player, decided to bring some of his “boys” with him to last night’s big game.
When I showed up to the game, it had already begun.
Mind you, the two extra players who Lips brought with him, “his boys,” had not signed up or paid to be a part of the team. Lips just thought they would help us win, which he was wrong about by the way.
Anyway, I checked myself into the game, played well with the new guys, who were not passing to anyone but each other, and all was well, stamina and game wise until I accidentally screwed up a defensive assignment and one of Lips’ boys got annoyed about it.
Fine, it happens. No big deal.
Cut to the second half.
I started on the bench again. Checked myself into the game after a few minutes, then checked myself out with about ten minutes left in the contest. Time kept ticking. The team was getting smoked, but having fun, so I let them continue for longer than I wanted to.
With about 5 min left in the game, I subbed myself in for that same dude who had been frustrated with me earlier for missing my defensive assignment. When he realized that he was the one going out, he couldn’t believe it, and showed his frustration by crying about it out loud, stammering off the court in disbelief like he was MJ being taken off the court in the NBA Finals.
I believe he actually said the phrase, “Me?!”
As in, HUH. And then demonstrably stammered off the court.
This time I wasn’t going to let him off the hook, so as I jogged by him I yelled something like, “Cut it out, man! We’re all here to have fun!”
To his credit, he immediately apologized, and then after the game finished, another 30+ point loss for the Free Agents, he apologized again. 🥇
For real, it got me thinking though. I’m not used to being the worst at what I do, and when you’re the worst, and/or suck you see the world from a very different pov than when you don’t. Sucking actually has real world value. By its very nature it humbles you and teaches you to be a team player. When you suck, what other choice do you have?
SO?
So, on the bench during the second half I was talking to Saul, one of my actual teammates, and we started to consider the definition of excellence in the context of the joke happening in front of us during the game.
Even Lips, the best player on our team, couldn’t ham it in college. And he can dribble the ball behind his back during an actual game!
That’s when Saul told me this little secret.
Apparently some NBA player from Espana, though Saul forgot who, is on record saying something like his skillset is much closer to Lebron James than almost any other player outside of the NBA, including college players.
That’s crazy if you think about it. An unknown NBA player is closer in skill to Lebron James than the best amateur players in the country? I think the NBA player even said “much closer.”
It’s hard to be in the 95th percentile of anything, but it’s even harder to be in the 96th, 97th, 98th, and so on. Pretty humbling.
So that brings me back to the game itself, and the immature-pee-pee attitude of the college kid who came with Lips to play in our game.
Yeah, he was trying to win. It’s understandable. I appreciate the competitive spirit as much as anyone, but at the end of the day the purpose of what we’re doing at the amateur Jewish basketball league, has less to do with competition than with fun, and even more importantly, tuh-tuh-tuh-teamwork.
Lips and “his boys,” all in their early 20s, haven’t gotten that memo. Big surprise.
But what about some of the others on the team who are in their 30s and 40s?
Same deal actually. I’ve been shocked to see how hung up they are on passing the ball to Lips and sacrificing their own dignity in the name of some nebulous concept of winning, rather than tryin to figure out a way to all play together and just have some fun.
This for a team that loses by 30+ points every game.
I guess it doesn’t matter.
People want to win. “Men” want to win. They want to give the ball to Lips so he can dribble behind his back and brick the shot, just so they don’t look like a bunch of punks in front of whom? America, man, where winning is always the most important part. Where the most successful documentaries on Netflix are about golf and football and Formula One racing, and real estate, and dating, every single one of them playing to that craven ambition we as American’s have been indoctrinated with since the second we came out of the womb.
Thus far, the most fun I had was at the one game where Lips didn’t play. I think he was interviewing for a job as an assistant at some real estate company somewhere, probably trying to get his foot in the door for his first job out of college.
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SOCK DRAWER
In my opinion, the most telling moments between people are in the silences. The way those silent moments are navigated say more about a relationship than all of the words in the world. Cu next time.
Why was MJ crying tho