To Be
Continued:
The NBA
Is Back

Inevitable is none of these things. It’s impersonal, rote, and bureaucratic. Nobody can embrace it or lose themselves in it. Inevitable is the way things have to be, not because anyone wants them to be that way, but because there’s no other conceivable outcome at hand and therefore no tension at play.

When the NBA first floated the idea of resuming its 2019-20 season, it was supposed to be a case study in the unstoppable.The pandemic was in full swing in some locales and had yet to even hit others but for some reason—if only wishfully—there was a consensus reached that the end of the pandemic was within sight (which was different from believing that it had never even existed in the first place). The NBA would take the lead in a return to normalcy by both modeling resilience and picking up right where it had left off. Things would be the same, except this time they would be special.

In retrospect, the NBA “restart” (faulty nomenclature that’s stuck) was never going to be normal. How could it be? Even in this most optimistic scenario, COVID-19 would still cast a long shadow over the proceedings. The schedule would be truncated. Games would take place at a single neutral site, which turned out to be Disney World. There would be no fans in the stands. Players would be tested regularly and live for months in what quickly, and as it would turn out, erroneously, was deemed a “bubble,” an ominous bit of language that sounded like the title of a 1970s sci-fi thriller that audiences found very dark and disturbing at the time.

As these details emerged, the narrative shifted from the NBA modeling normalcy to it throwing a lifeline to a general public that was starved for anything that merely reminded them of normal. Things would be different around the game but the game itself would be compelling as ever. Rather than offering itself up as a possibility in our own lives, it would dangle inspiration in front of us like a shiny object.

Then, things got bleak. As Florida’s infection rates sky-rocketed, putting the bubble in Orlando was at once tone-deaf and unnecessarily risky. These concerns have been heightened by the fact that, as it turns out, the bubble is extremely porous, with both Disneyworld employees and league personnel coming and going on a daily basis. Once testing started, teams began losing players. When the Houston Rockets’ All-Star backcourt of James Harden and Russell Westbrook tested positive, it raised the question of how many key players could fall out of the picture without shredding the competitive landscape.

The bubble, which had already been downgraded from an affirmation to a wistful distraction, began to feel like a form of denial, and not just because its immediate surroundings were being ravaged by COVID-19. This summer’s BLM protests were, for a time, as front and center in the public consciousness as the pandemic and in late June, a contingent of players that included Kyrie Irving, Avery Bradley, Dwight Howard, and Lou Willams made some strong statements about the restart being both unsafe and an unwelcome distraction from the issues raised by the protests. Howard even got close to connecting the bubble’s exigent working conditions to the racial dynamics of the sport.

This dissent quickly, and silently, fell away. The NBPA union agreed to go ahead as planned and players were given the option of opting out of the bubble (thus forfeiting a chunk of their salary). LeBron James conveniently introduced the idea that the bubble provided a “platform” for players wanting to do politics. By the time the league announced that it would paint “Black Lives Matter” on the sidelines, and players could use the back of their jerseys to make “social justice statements,” there was no real dissent left. Maybe if there had been, someone might have taken issue with the NBA giving the players a pre-approved slate of “statements” to choose from—that is, other than Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who used the moment as an opportunity to accuse the league of hating cops and coddling China.

The restart became an inevitability. It effortlessly dispensed with every obstacle in a way that didn’t always add up. But shorn of all its noble intentions, and plowing on as if in a state of desperation, the restart showed its true colors. The bottom line was that it was always about the bottom line. The NBA is a business, and a failure to resume the season would have severe financial consequences for the league, individual franchises, and the players. Television money is one of the NBA’s key revenue streams, and if the sport didn’t come back, the league would not have fulfilled its contract. This would have a significant impact on the league’s overall revenue, which would in turn limit the amount of money owners could pay players without incurring significant penalties, which would bring about both a seismic redistribution of talent and drive down salaries, a scenario that, within the current structure of the NBA, was practically unimaginable.

From the beginning, the restart was inevitable, and in the end, it was left with nothing to disguise its intent. Viewing it without a healthy dose of cynicism seems next to impossible. But when the NBA returns today, people will watch. This is itself an inevitability. With no end to the pandemic in sight, people are feeling isolated, depressed, and demoralized. They are a captive audience grasping for something to do. They’re also largely indifferent to whatever’s in front of them, since, as a coping mechanism, they have forced themselves to forget how it feels to want. Sometimes you have to eat not because you’re hungry, or have any appetite, but because not eating is not an option. The content we consume now isn’t a matter of pleasure. It’s something we cling to even as we to some degree fail to appreciate it. It’s a matter of survival.

The prospect of watching basketball because I have no choice, and in a way that fails to differentiate it from any other content, fills me with dread. You want the things you care about to remain special and singular. If you were to replace them with a rough equivalent, something would be lost. Perhaps more importantly, we like to feel special and singular. Maybe what scares me about “flattening” the NBA into just another piece of content is that it effectively erases my role in the equation and by extension, some part of me. If you subscribe to a “you are what you eat” model of consumption, content or otherwise, then everybody eating the same thing because they have to, and with little regard for what would ordinarily make it desirable, turns consumption into its own opposite: a means by which we become indistinguishable from each other.

This could just be a “me” problem. When it comes to watching sports, I’ve always been an arch-individualist, and maybe even a solipsist. I’ve done a pretty good job of inventing my own narratives, developing my own interpretive lens, and deciding what to care about based on nothing other than what piques my interest. This version of consuming sports has been immensely rewarding for me. It’s been a source of joy throughout my entire adult life and I’ve basically built a career off of the sheer strangeness of it. But it also has its limitations. It can be isolating and feel decidedly unmoored. If sports only exists for you, and through you, is it even real?

The thing is, sports is very real, and its power lies in its communal aspect. Everybody consuming the same thing brings us closer together, that homogeneity is the same thing as, or at least a decent substitute for, unity. Despite attempts made to make sports polarizing—as if you’re either into them or you’re not—their enduring appeal lies in their accessibility. The casual fan and non-fan have more in common than the in-the-weeds elitist whose entire approach to consuming sports depends on having command of a language that nobody outside of them and their community can speak. If you only understand the broad strokes, you’re picking up at least on the universal themes and emotions they contain, which is ultimately why sports resonate with as many people as they do.

Maybe the restart isn’t wan or compromised. It may simply be highlighting this one aspect of watching sports at a time when that aspect is sorely needed. It’s both reassuring and emboldening knowing that everyone is experiencing the same thing in the same way as you are. The inevitability of the restarts resists affinity. But watching it can still have value. Similarly, while we’re likely all too beaten down to manage any real individual perspective or act of interpretation, it’s not clear we even want to do so. What sports itself is doing is less important than what we are able to make of it.

This underlying assumption—that content can be the great equalizer—has implications beyond sports. Not only has it helped us cope with the pandemic. It’s also been key to the public response to the protests. While the issues they raised were hardly new, the groundswell of public opinion was, and the only way to explain this shift was to believe that something had changed. The footage of police wailing on (white) protestors was new and, again, having this kind of captive audience was unprecedented. But what they saw only mattered because of how they watched: with an understanding that the rest of the world was watching as well.

With the notion of the individual in disarray, watching gave us something shared to cling to in its place. The need for shared experience was a source of individual comfort that gave way to a sense of commonality. When society is no longer viewed as a purely individualistic pursuit—in this case, it’s been reduced to the other extreme—we can’t help but see things as affecting a larger whole, or being a referendum on us all. The way we watch, rather than what we’re watching, is what defines us for the time being. Eventually this will all end, and we’ll be able to be ourselves again. Hopefully we’ll remember, though, that at least for a while, we were more the same than we are different, and that for a while, everything was different—and maybe in some ways, better.

I used to think my approach to fandom was deeply liberating. But especially now, when isolation is the norm, I’m wondering more than ever if I’ve missed the point, if understanding myself as a one-man vanguard has its limitations. What if, even under normal circumstances, consumption isn’t a binary choice between standing out and fitting in but an admission that there’s no individual identity without the platform of collective identity, that you, ahem, have to first fit in if you want to stand out? What if the way I’ve engaged with basketball all these years is making me feel less like myself rather than more? The restart will only be a disappointment if we pretend that everything is normal, or that a return to normalcy is imminent. At the moment, it may be exactly what we need sports to do.

Nathaniel Friedman is a founding member of FreeDarko and the former editor of Victory Journal.