Let’s get ready for basketball season together. The National Basketball Association (NBA) season starts tomorrow. To help get excited AND prepared for the new season, here is a collection of our best writing about basketball:
The basics
Even the least familiar person with basketball knows a few things about the game: it’s played by teams of five who try to shoot a round ball into a metal hoop which hangs ten feet up in the air off of a plexiglass backboard. Beyond that though, things can get pretty fuzzy, pretty fast. That’s why we’ve covered a few of the next level questions in these basic posts about basketball.
What are the positions in basketball?
In this post, I run through how all the basketball positions work in this post as well as how they’ve evolved over the last twenty years. Basketball has generally transformed in that time to have more interchangeable parts. There’s less differentiation between positions than ever. This change has been reflected by a shift from referring to positions by name (power forward, shooting guard, etc.) to number.
How long is an NBA basketball game?
Talk about the basics, this post covers how long an NBA game is. Spoiler alert, it’s 48 minutes, divided into four quarters of 12 minutes each. There’s a multiples of four motif throughout basketball — the shot clock is 24 seconds and teams have eight seconds to get the ball across half court. In the past month, the NBA experimented with reducing the
Are basketball fouls really arbitrary?
They certainly seem arbitrary, don’t they? Of all the sports, basketball fouls are probably the hardest to identify and the most open to interpretation. Well, all the major televised sports anyhow, water-polo, for instance seems to have almost constantly confusing foul calls. The truth is that the more you know about a sport and its rules, the less the rules and the foul calls that follow from them seem arbitrary. This post helps explain some of the most common foul calls.
Vocabulary
All sports, basketball included, have their own technical terms. Understanding the technical and expressive elements of basketball language is essential to enjoying the game.
What does it mean to have a foul to give?
Having a “foul to give” is something you’ll hear basketball announcers say about a team at least a few times a game but none of them ever stop to explain what that means to casual or beginner fans. Luckily, this post has you covered.
What does “and one” mean in basketball?
At any given moment, the cry of “and one” is indignantly echoing around a gym somewhere in the country, shouted by someone who feels righteous and over-confident at that moment. My colleague, Dean Russell Bell took this question and turned his answer into an opus well worth reading.
What does “ball don’t lie” mean in basketball?
Seldom has a piece of sports slang been so tied in association to a single player as “ball don’t lie” is to Rasheed Wallace. Find out why and what it means in this post.
The NBA season begins on Tuesday with three games, two of which are televised on TNT. The games are the Orlando Magic at the New Orleans Pelicans at 8 p.m. ET, the Dallas Mavericks at the defending champion San Antonio Spurs at 8 p.m ET on TNT, and the Houston Rockets at the Los Angeles Lakers at 10:30 p.m. ET on TNT. That’s just the first three of 1,230 games this season. I hope these posts help you enjoy at least one of them a little bit more than you otherwise would.