Basketball Archives - Page 8 of 13

What is the key in basketball and why is it called that?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is the key in basketball and why is it called that? I don’t watch a lot of basketball but I was watching with a girlfriend of mine who is a Memphis Grizzlies fan and I kept hearing her shout about the key.

Thanks,
Melissa

Dear Melissa,

The key is one of the name given to an area below and in front of the basketball hoop. It’s also commonly called the paint or the lane. That area is special because players in it have to obey slightly different rules than those outside of it. It’s called the key because when it was first instituted in 1936 it was shaped roughly like a… well, not a key honestly, but an old fashioned key hole — a narrow rectangle opening up into a circle. Over time, the area has been enlarged, specifically the rectangle at the base of the key, until the circle at the top is either the same width as the rectangle or smaller. Here are the rules that apply differently within the key:

Three second rule: Offensive players are only allowed to hang out in the key for three seconds, whether they have the ball or not. In the National Basketball Association, defenders may also not be in the key for more than three seconds unless they are directly guarding an offensive player. This rule is intended to limit cherry picking, otherwise a team could theoretically win by hiring a nine-foot tall guy to stand under the basket, catch passes and drop them into the basket. Amirite?
On free throws: The key also designates where players are allowed to stand during a free throw attempt. The player shooting the ball has to be in the top half of the circle at the top of the key and the other players waiting to pounce on the rebound if the shooter misses have to be lined up on the outside of the key.
On jump balls: When something happens where possession of the ball (in the NBA, college has a different way of dealing with this) cannot be determined but the position of the ball was definitely in one team’s end, a jump ball takes place. The ref will throw the ball up in the air in a neutral spot between two jumpers who try to tip the ball to their teammates. This takes place at the center of the circle at the top of the key and everyone except the jumpers and the ref have to stay out of the circle until the ball is touched.

I’m not sure who first called this area the key. In the NBA rule book, it is referred to as the “free throw lane”, a term you’ll basically never hear any living, breathing basketball fan use. Nonetheless, it’s a nice coincidence or a clever pun because the key has a double meaning. Now you know about the original shape of the free throw area but as you watch or play more basketball, you’ll quickly realize that the key is often the key to who wins and who loses. Shots from within the key are the highest probability shots. Most rebounds are grabbed by players within the key. Just dribbling hard into the key often results in free throws for the team that does it best. Your friend’s favorite team, the Memphis Grizzlies, have two dominating big men, Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph who are masters within the key. If she was shouting about it, my guess is that she was celebrating their dominance.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

What is a pick and roll in basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a pick and roll in basketball? I hear about it all the time when I watch NBA games but I don’t think that I understand it 100%. Can you help?

Thanks,
Rosie

Dear Rosie,

The pick and roll is a two-person basketball play which seeks to create a little room between one of the offensive players and the defensive player who is guarding them. The pick and roll is one of the foundational tactics in basketball. Understand it once and you’ll begin to see it and variations of it all over the place. Or, at least, you’ll see it a lot in basketball games. Maybe once in a while at the grocery store or in the subway too. The principles of the pick and roll are the same principles that underly a lot of other tactical decisions in basketball, so understanding the pick and roll will help you make sense out of basketball in general. Let’s get down to business. We’ll start with the principles that underly the pick and roll.

Principle 1: It’s very hard to get away from a defender in basketball. Basketball courts are not that big and, at least in high-quality leagues like the NBA, WNBA, FIBA, and college basketball, opponents are of relative equality in terms of athletic ability. Sometimes, if there’s a scramble on one end of the court and the defense gets the ball and is able to quickly transition to offense, you will see players running on offense free of a defender, but most of the time, defensive players are never more than a step from an offensive player.

Principle 2: It’s hard to score if a defender is close by. This is true at all levels of basketball. In my own rec-league basketball experience, I get almost totally paralyzed trying to shoot if a defender is near me. Even professionals find it much more difficult to score with a defender close to them. Even if the defender doesn’t block the shot, they will likely be able to “alter” the shot (force you to shoot at an angle you’re not comfortable with) by “contesting it” by sticking their hand in your face or near the natural release point of your shot as you’re shooting.

One natural conclusion from these two principles is that any tactic that creates even a little bit of separation between an offensive player and her defender is a valuable one. The pick and roll does this through creating an obstacle on the court that defenders have to run around. The play involves two attackers and two defenders. One attacker has the ball and one does not. The offensive player without the ball stands still (basketball rules prohibit intentionally getting in someone’s way unless you’re standing still.) The player with the ball dribbles quickly towards the player who has transformed into an obstacle and passes very, very close to him or her, on the side farthest from the basket they are trying to score on. This is the first half of the play. The player on offense without the ball has just executed a pick by standing still and allowing the ball-handler to run around him. Before we move on to the second half, let’s examine what this first half has done.

The first half of the pick and roll puts the defender who is marking the player with the ball in quite a pickle. If he follows the player with the ball around the obstacle of the player setting the pick, this motion will likely put him a step behind the player with the ball instead of a step ahead, with his body between the player with the ball and the basket he is defending. This is called going “over” the pick. If she chooses to go “under” the pick, this means that instead of chasing the player with the ball, she’s sliding to the other side of the pick and hopes to catch up to the player with the ball on the other side. This is risky because in that second it takes to regain coverage of the player with the ball, the ball-handler may be able to shoot or pass the ball or change direction or pace and drive to the basket unopposed. The last option is for the defenders to switch which player they are guarding. The defender following the ball-handler takes the player setting the pick while the defender on the player setting the pick slides off of that assignment and onto guarding the ball-handler as they come around the pick. The potential downside of this is that usually the picking player is a bigger player than the one handling the ball and therefore has a bigger defender. Switching often gives the offense a mismatch (or two, really) with a bigger, slower player guarding a small, fast one and a smaller player trying to match the physicality of a bigger player.

Now that you understand the plight a good pick puts a basketball defense in, we can move on to the second half of the pick and roll, the roll. As the ball-handler goes around the player setting the pick, the player setting the pick turns and runs towards the basket. That’s the roll. This serves to turn up the pressure on the defense even farther and opens up an easy option to score for the offense. The rolling motion forces a defender to go with the picking player, who, until recently was just a static obstacle. That way, regardless of what the defense does, but particularly if the defense switches, there’s a good chance that the player who just set the pick will be open for a pass that leads him towards the basket for an easy layout.

If you want to see how these options work in real, three dimension life, this instructional video filmed by the 1980s Boston Celtics is an awesome way to learn:

Finally, why is it called a pick and roll? According to the Online Etymology Dictionary this use of the word pick could come from its meaning of “a blow with a pointed instrument.” In basketball terms, the pointed instrument is the player setting the pick and the blow is the easy basket that often follows. As for the roll? Well, that’s the motion of the player who sets a pick and then rolls their body towards the basket.

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

How does NBA TV fan night work?

While I was recording yesterday’s sports forecast podcast (say that ten times fast) I remarked that, opposed to the NHL’s national television schedulers, who chose a bummer of a game between the San Jose Sharks and the Buffalo Sabres, the NBA schedulers had gotten it exactly right by choosing the game between the Sacramento Kings and New Orleans Pelicans. What a difference, I though, that the NBA somehow managed to figure out before the season that this would be a close game between two exciting young teams. And between two teams without much pedigree also. Man, those NBA schedulers are smart. I watched about ten minutes of the game last night and while I enjoyed the action, something was nagging me, tugging at the back of my mind. What was this addition to the NBA TV scoreboard graphic at the bottom of the screen? Why did it say “Fan Night” in big, bold letters? What about this made it more of a night for fans than any other night on NBA TV. So, I looked it up.

NBA TV Fan Night works like this. Each week, fans can vote on which game they want to see next week. The NBA provides three choices and the one that gets the most votes by Saturday of the previous week, is shown nationally on NBA TV that Tuesday. Yesterday’s game between the Pelicans and Kings beat out two other games: the New York Knicks at the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers at the Atlanta Hawks. This week, the race is between these three games: the Atlanta Hawks at Washington Wizards, the Golden State Warriors at the Miami Heat, and the Detroit Pistons at the Milwaukee Bucks. Right now the voting stands at 84% for the game between the Warriors and Heat, 10% for the Hawks and the Wizards, and only 6% for the Bucks and the Knicks.

This, for a few reasons, is pretty cool. First of all, I love the idea of allowing fans to control which games get nationally televised. After all, why shouldn’t the fans have a say? For big-time national television channels like ESPN, TNT, Fox, CBS, NBC, CBS, etc. they are always showing games televised with their own team of announcers, camera people, and producers. For them, it makes sense that you’d need to plan ahead for logistical reasons. But NBA TV, like similar networks for other leagues, often simply carries regional televised games on a national platform. It’s awesome that the NBA decided to let fans choose which games to see, at least one night a week. It’s also smart — the alternative is that more people will cut the cable cord and go full-time to watching games on the internet through services like NBA League Pass, NHL Game Center, etc. The leagues benefit from these sales but television is still far more lucrative. NBA TV Fan Night is also really great for two non-commercial reasons. One, I love seeing how the voting is going for next week. What a fun little game-without-the-game! Fans of the Hawks, Wizards, Bucks, and Kings should feel a little depressed that so few unaffiliated fans want to see their games. It’s kind of a diss, isn’t it? And fans of the Pelicans, Kings, Warriors, and Heat should feel great that people are catching on to how much fun their teams are to watch. I also particularly find it interesting, at least for these two weeks, how closely my instincts about what games would be interested are shared by the majority. What does that mean? Are we all a product of the sports-media hive mind? Or do we just know good basketball?

I’m going to keep my eye on this for the next few weeks and see if there are any close races or interesting conclusions to be drawn.

Take this job and shove it. Sports style.

Sometimes it all gets to be too much and you have no choice but to do what the characters in the classic movie Office Space do and find an alternative.

Whether you’re a corporate lawyer, an NFL football player, or a feline mascot, the lesson from the guys at Initech holds true. Here are their stories.

I love bad teams and I recently quit my job to experiment with building a career in sports, but even I think what this Knicks fan is doing is a little wacky. Fired from his job as a corporate lawyer, Dennis Doyle decided to go to every Knicks game this season.

Living Out Knicks Dream, Complete With Nightmares

by Scott Cacciola for The New York Times

Few Knicks fans (if any) have chosen to express their existential crises by committing to attend 82 straight games. During a rebuilding season. And paying for it, in more ways than one.

“I could kind of understand if someone had wanted to follow LeBron around in Miami for a year,” Doyle said. “That sounds kind of nice, actually.”

The Knicks, on the other hand — well, Doyle has prepared himself for a long season.

Former NFL player Jason Brown left his own job as an NFL player to start a farm… even though he didn’t know how to farm! Not to worry, he’s a smart guy and youtube exists. No problem. Now he lives happily and gracefully as a farmer.

Why a star football player traded NFL career for a tractor

by Steve Hartman for CBS News

Jason Brown quit football to be a plain, old farmer — even though he’d never farmed a day a in his life.

Asked how he learned to even know what to do, Brown said:

“Get on the Internet. Watch Youtube videos.”

His plan for this farm, which he calls “First Fruits Farm,” is to donate the first fruits of every harvest to food pantries. Today it’s all five acres–100,000 pounds–of sweet potatoes.

Even if you can’t actually speak, you can still go on a work stoppage. That’s what Mike the Tiger has done this season down in Louisiana. He’s simply refused to get into the trailer which brings him to LSU home football games and his trainers, to their credit, refuse to force him. Nice work!

The Mascot Will Sit This One Out, Thanks

by Jonathan Martin for The New York Times

When the No. 14 Tigers took the field Saturday night for a nationally televised game against No. 4 Alabama with playoff implications, their beloved mascot once again did not join them. For all seven home games this season, Mike has refused to leave his well-appointed residence for the mobile cage that would take him into the stadium.

[LSU public address announcer, Dan] Borne, however, said he could not blame Mike for staying home. After all, more than a few college football fans enjoy sitting outside stadiums alongside their vehicles, watching games on television while enjoying beverages and food fare far superior to the offerings inside.

“My vision of Mike,” Borne said, “is that he’s inside there, he’s got four or five high-def screens, a remote control the size of Vermont for that big paw, and he’s just watching all the great football going on on Saturdays.”

Stadium prints for sports fans

We’re always on the look-out for tasteful ways to represent beloved sports teams in home decor. Items that fit this bill are worth their weight in, well, not gold at current prices, but aluminum at least. They give the sports fan in the household a way to express pride and love while simultaneously giving their family, partner, or housemates a chance to express their own tasteful sense of home propriety. The large selection of colorful stadium prints from City Prints fits the bill on every detail.

City Prints is an online fine-art print shop founded and operated by Tony and Katie Rodono that specializes in prints of places. The idea for City Prints came to them years after Tony started a traffic counting company. That business didn’t take off but Tony took away an enjoyment of drawing intersections. When the couple had a child, Tony writes on the about page of the City Prints website, he “realized the importance of place” and the idea of making fine-art prints out of locations was born. City Prints sells a wide variety of map-art. I’ve personally purchased one of the few non-map prints, an Apple II computer schematic, so I can vouch for the quality of their work. Most of what they produce are maps of areas as large as the earth and as small as a sports stadium or race track.

All of the prints are available as 12 x 12 prints alone, matted, or matted and framed. You can also get them in 30 x 30 Gallery-Wrapped canvases. Here are some of my favorites with links to the specific product and category so that you can hunt for the print that’s most meaningful to you or the sports fan in your life.

Race Tracks

Churchill Downs — the legendary site of the Kentucky Derby. Put this print up in your living room and mix some refreshing mint juleps.

Talladega Track — for the NASCAR/Will Farrell fan in you(r life.)

College Football

Michigan Stadium — called the Big House, this is one of the original and ultimate bowls in sports.

College Basketball

Cameron Indoor Stadium — the home of the Duke Blue Devils, where Coach Krzyzewski roams the floor and the students stand the entire game.

Dean E. Smith Center — home of Duke’s main Rivals, the North Carolina Tarheels. This is a fair and balanced blog.

NFL Football

Lambeau Field — home to the only collectively owned major professional sports franchise, the Green Bay Packers, Lambeau field is a national treasure.

NBA Basketball

Madison Square Garden — called basketball’s Mecca, Madison Square Garden in Manhattan is home to the New York Knicks but has also been an important location for the history of college basketball. It hosted the Big East championships for decades.

NHL Hockey

Bell Centre — What the New York Yankees are to baseball, the Montreal Canadiens are to hockey. The legendary franchise has won almost exactly one quarter of all the Stanley Cups in history.

Soccer

White Hart Lane — City Prints has a wide selection of international and domestic soccer stadiums but if you’re looking for a typically British design, the map of Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium is unmatched.

Why are sports teams from locations?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why are sports teams from locations? I mean, it sounds like a silly question, but it’s not like the players or the coaches are from there. What’s the point of having a team from New York or Tennessee if you let people from all over play on it?

Thanks,
Jesse

Dear Jesse,

This is one of those questions that makes complete logical sense but, because it challenges a foundational aspect of the sports world in our country, is difficult for a fan to understand and answer. The fact that teams are tied to locations and that they represent the city, state, or region they’re from seems like an unassailable truth of sports. It’s not though. After doing some research on the topic, I’ve found an interesting example of one league that works completely differently. Let’s start with a little history, move on to the way things work now, and then look at an interesting exception that may be a harbinger of things to come.

From the very beginning of organized athletic competitions, sports have been a way for competing political groups to safely play out conflict. The ancient Olympics were dominated by individual events like running, boxing, wrestling, and chariot racing. Nonetheless, the competitors were there to represent the city-states they came from. Wikipedia’s article on the ancient Olympics states that the “Olympic Games were established in [a] political context and served as a venue for representatives of the city-states to peacefully compete against each other.” In the United Kingdom, some medieval soccer-like traditions survive and are still played. The Ashbourne game is a two-day epic played over 16 hours and two days each year that pits the Up’Ards against the Down’Ards. Instead of being the instantiation of a international or inter-city conflict, this game is a (at this point) relatively friendly version of a rivalry between city neighborhoods. There’s a natural human tendency to define oneself by splitting the world into “us” and “other” and where you live or where you come from is the obvious way to do this. Sports has always provided an outlet for group identity and simulated conflict.

Much of the early history of sport in the Americas is a history of college athletics. College sports, by their nature, are tied to a location and (however inappropriately) to an institution. The identification of teams with cities has also been present in American professional sports from the beginning. In baseball, the first professional team was the Cincinatti Red Stockings in 1869. The first professional hockey team was the Canadian Soo from Sault Ste. Marie in Ontario, Canada. Confusingly enough, the Canadian Soo played its first game in 1904 against the American Soo Indians from Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan, United States of America. Wha?? Football has an interesting professional history in the United States. For over forty years, there were professional players but no professional teams. Individual players were being paid to play on teams that were nominally amateur teams. It wasn’t until 1920 that the first professional football league came into being. The American Professional Football Association had teams from Akron, Buffalo, Muncie, Rochester, and Dayton. Basketball is a much newer professional sport. Its first game was played between teams representing Toronto and New York in 1946.

Even early on, teams were not made up of players from the team’s location. One reason is that some areas simply produce more top-level talent in some sports than others. It’s not financially smart for a league to only have teams in the core player producing areas, so instead, the players themselves travel and become ambassadors for spreading the game. For example, every single player on the 1940 Stanley Cup hockey champion New York Rangers team was from Canada. The 1949 Minneapolis Lakers may have had a slight over-representation of players who went to college in Minnesota with three, but the rest of their players went to schools around the country in California and Utah and Indiana. The famous 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only National Football League team to go undefeated throughout the regular season and playoffs, only had two Floridians in a roster of 50+ players. Aside from some areas just growing better athletes in some sports, the implementation of player drafts to balance the selection of players by professional teams and eventually free-agency to allow players some say in where they play serve to scatter players throughout the country.

As the big four American sports have spread throughout the world and our professional leagues have simultaneously gotten better at finding talented international players, the division of players from team location has become even more obvious. The NHL and NBA wouldn’t be half as good without players mostly from Europe, nor would Major League Baseball be as compelling without its (mostly) Central American and Japanese imports. While some teams have specialized in finding players from a particular region — think the 1990s Detroit Red Wings and Russia or the current Red Wings and Sweeden — international players have played anywhere and everywhere.

The idea of having teams made up of only players from the city or region they represent is a fun one and there are many counter-factual thought experiments around the internet in this vein. Yahoo recently posted a ranking of NBA teams if made up of only players from the team’s area. Max Preps published a map showing current NFL players by home state. It’s clear from the map that California, Florida, and Texas rule supreme, but I’d like to see the stats controlled by population to see which state is most efficient at producing NFL players. Quant Hockey has two interesting visuals about where NHL players come from. The first is a history of NHL players by home country, showing the increasing internationalization of the game and league. The second is an interactive map where you can look up the home towns of all your favorite (and least favorite for that matter) NHL players. The official NBA site has a similar map for NBA players. That the league itself bothered to put this together is an example of how important it feels the international nature of its sport is.

Sports teams aren’t all tied to locations. If we take a brief detour to the basketball crazy country of the Philippines, we find one of the most unique sports leagues out there, the Philippine Basketball Association. This league is made up of twelve teams. Team names are made up of three parts — a “company name, then [a] product, then a nickname – usually connected to the business of the company.” My favorite example is the six time champion Rain or Shine Elasto Painters owned by Asian Coatings Philippines, Inc. Teams are completely divorced from regional affiliation and play in whatever region the league rents for them to play in. This may seem like it’s completely crazy to those of us who are used to leagues in the United States, but it could be the future. Consider the increasing visibility of corporate sponsorships. In all leagues here, we have stadiums that are named after companies. The Los Angeles Lakers share the Staples Center with the Los Angeles Clippers and hockey’s Kings. The Carolina Panthers in the NFL play in the Bank of America Stadium. This isn’t a new fangled thing, remember that baseball’s historic stadium in Chicago, Wrigley field bears the name of the chewing gum its owner in the 1920s sold. The next likely step in the process is having corporate sponsorships show up on the jerseys of sports teams. This has already happened for most soccer leagues. Scott Allen wrote a nice history of this process for Mental Floss. The process has taken a long time, from the first corporate jersey in Uruguay in the 1950s to the final capitulation of the famous Barcelona football club in 2006. Allen provides several funny sponsorship stories, including my favorite, about the soccer team West Bromwich Albion:

From 1984 to 1986, the West Midlands Health Authority paid to have the universal No Smoking sign placed on the front of West Bromwich Albion’s jerseys. The campaign featured the slogan, “Be like Albion – kick the smoking habit.”

While the NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB have resisted giving up their jerseys to their sponsors, speculation is out there that they soon will. Total Pro Sports has even designed a series of NBA jerseys with each team’s corporate sponsor on the front in anticipation.

Will the future be a complete takeover of teams from their old regional identities to new corporate ones? Or will we remain in an uneasy compromise between location and corporation?

We’ll find out together,
Ezra Fischer

Why are game sevens so great?

If you’re a sports fan, there is nothing better than a game seven. If you’re a fan of the team in the game seven, it’s the most dramatic, heart-wrenching, nerve-wracking, squeal inducing sports situation your team can possibly be in. If you’re simply a fan of sports but don’t have a rooting interest one way or another, game seven is a joy. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about and why game sevens are so great, read on.

Sports has developed a wide variety of ways to decide which team or person is the best. The most common ways of doing this are round-robin tournaments, single-elimination tournaments, multiple-elimination tournaments, and three, five, or seven game series. Sometimes a combination of these approaches are used. There is something to be said for each form of playoff but the one we are concerned with today is a seven game series. In a single elimination tournament, like March Madness in college basketball, a team that loses once is eliminated forever. In a double-elimination tournament, a team that loses twice is eliminated forever. This could go on to infinity if you wanted it to. In a quadruple elimination tournament, a team that lost four times would be out. In an undecuple (yes) elimination tournament, a team that loses eleven times would be eliminated from the tournament. The seven game series is a version of a quadruple elimination tournament where two teams play each other in successive games until one team has won (and the other team has lost) four games.

Just reaching game seven in a seven game series tells you so many things about the series. For one thing, both teams have won (and lost) three games. The two teams are close to even in skill and determination, otherwise one would have been eliminated before then. There have been lots of ups and downs during the series. There’s been enough time for the players on the opposing teams to get to know each other and (usually) develop an explosive mixture of begrudging respect and bubbling disdain. This is magnified in sports like hockey where so much physicality is allowed during the game. It’s also magnified the farther you go in the playoffs. A first round game seven is not as dramatic as a second round game seven. Some sports, like baseball, recognize this and save the seven game series for later rounds, using shorter series earlier on. A game seven in the Stanley Cup finals, the NBA finals, or the World Series is the absolute pinnacle of sporting drama. The team that wins these game sevens are achieving life-long dreams and reaching the highest professional success possible.

Even if you put all the other factors aside, game sevens are still really cool because of their emotional resonance for the players. One common complaint about professional sports is that the fans care more about the teams than the players do; that the players are mercenaries who do it just for the money. In a game seven, you know that every player who steps on the pitchers mound or the batting box, every player who vaults over the boards onto the ice, every player who grabs a rebound or makes a layup, somewhere, in the back of their heads is thinking “Game seven, World Series/Stanley Cup final/NBA final…” just like they did when they were nine years-old in their backyards playing with a friend or two. Game sevens have a way of reducing sports back down to their essentials. Box out. Dump the puck. Make contact. Keep your eye on the ball.

Tonight the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants play in game seven of the World Series. Let’s enjoy it.

NBA Player Art

There’s something about sports that encourages a pursuit of completeness. Sports fans seem to like knowing everything about something. It’s not often that you hear them talk about knowing some of the starters from an old championship team by heart or wanting to learn the history of a few teams in a league. Nope, sports fans want to know everything about their favorite team, they want to collect all of the baseball cards from the 1972 Expos, they want a photo collage of all the uniforms in their team’s history. Nowhere is this drive for completeness more obvious than in today’s featured source of gifts for sports fans, EveryPlayerInTheLeague.

EveryPlayerInTheLeague is an art project by Seattle-based illustrator Matthew Hollister. His mission is to create an illustrated rectangular drawing of every basketball player in the National Basketball Association. I love his style. The bulk of the image is in a arch shaped frame. Hollister shows his knowledge about the league by capturing the personalities of each NBA player by showing them doing some action characteristic to them. The backgrounds are made up of partially abstract shapes that are evocative of NBA stadiums while also seeming kind of funky in a 1960-70s kind of way. Team colors are used throughout, within the images and on the periphery of the artwork where they adorn the player’s name as well has his team’s.

Here are a few of my favorite pieces:

Tim Duncan – The Big Fundamental, keeping the ball up at his elbow where it’s far from the hands of prying defenders.

Blake Griffin – This one concentrates not on Griffin’s dynamic athleticism but on his hunted quality. For some reason, people in the NBA love to do nothing more than antagonize Griffin and this image captures his reaction.

Stephen Curry – Curry is the deadliest shooter in the league. This drawing catches him in mid-shot, fully concentrated on sinking another three-pointer despite the effort of the players guarding him.

Kevin Garnett – Garnett is the league’s longest running and most enjoyable freak show. Even at 28 years old, entering his 20th season, he’s the most intense guy out there. ALL THE TIME

DeMarcus Cousins – Cousins is a divisive player. People either love him or hate him. He’s got incredible talent but also a big streak of self-destruction. He tantalizes the fans with his skills and annoys them with his attitude. I love how Hollister captures the duality of Cousins throughout the image, even using a two-toned uniform to cement the characterization.

Kenneth Faried – Faried is all over the place all the time, hair and elbows flying. He’s a prime example of a player who earns his keep by hustling all the time, Faried just happens to be supremely talented as well. He starred on the US World Cup of Basketball team this summer and I’m looking forward to seeing him grow as a player this year.

You can pick up some of Hollister’s artwork in his shop at Society6. He doesn’t seem to have all of his prints for sale but my guess is that you could request a particular player if you had your heart set on him. The prints are for sale as art prints for $17.68, framed art prints for $35, and the always elegant canvas print for $85.

Happy browsing, happy buying!

Why do people like basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do people like basketball?

Thanks,
Henry

Dear Henry,

Basketball is a wonderful mixture of finesse and strength, style and substance, offense, offense, offense, and defense. People like basketball for so many different reasons. Here is a list of my top reasons for why people like basketball.

Grace and power in the air — No athletes in any sport fly with the power and grace of basketball players. Oh, sure, you could pull out ski jumping to argue with me if you wanted, but in a pure, unassisted way, basketball players fly like no one else. They jump and hang in the air in a way that seems totally inhuman and impossible to people like you and me. A powerful slam dunk jolts the viewer out of her chair with its power and audacity. Watched in slow motion, you can appreciate the incredible control basketball players have over their bodies. They’re able to twist and turn, to aim, adjust, and re-aim in mid-air. Basketball players leap with the beauty of a ballet dancer and the strength of a lion springing at its prey.
Personalities abound – Basketball players are the most personally accessible of all the major sports. On most teams, there are six or seven players who play most of the game. Wearing nothing more than sneakers, shorts, and a tank-top, it’s easy to see them sweat and grimace and scream and celebrate and try. Compare that with football players who are obscured by full helmets and a league that seems determined to dehumanize them or baseball with its culture that punishes emotional expression on the field or hockey where players play for 45 seconds only to be replaced by another swarming over the bench. When you watch basketball, you really get to know the players you’re watching.
Never more than one player away from contending – Another function of basketball’s smaller number of players on the court, is that a single player can make an enormous difference to a team’s fortunes. Even the worst teams are never more than one player away from being legitimately good. This means the fire of hope in a basketball fan’s heart may be banked for a season or two or three but it’s always ready to come back, burning stronger than ever.
Teamwork has its say – Basketball is dominated by super-star players with strong personalities and even stronger play. You almost never see a championship won in college or the NBA without one truly great player on the winning team. At the same time, even the greatest players can’t do it without being a part of a cohesive team. Basketball punishes teams who rely too heavily on the personal greatness of one player and rewards teams that play as a unit, moving the ball around the court until they find an open shot or a mismatch in size or skill to exploit.
Basketball is pop culture – More than any other sport, basketball is tied thoroughly into pop culture. From the Notorious B.I.G. rapping about having an affair with the girlfriend of a New York Knick, to Jay-Z using basketball players’ numbers as code words for the going price of wholesale drugs, to Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s wonderful cameos in Airplane, to the gobs of celebrities that sit court side at NBA games, basketball is pop culture and pop culture is basketball. There’s a particular parallel that fans love to draw between basketball and black music. It’s easy to see the improvisation of jazz and the brashness of hip-hop in basketball play.
Trading, drafting, and signing intrigue – If teams are only ever one player away, then player movement becomes a fascinating topic for fans to obsess over. We’ve all lived through and enjoyed (to some extent) the where-is-LeBron-going intrigue over the bast several years. LeBron is an extreme example, but every team has its dramas every year. Will this player re-sign with the team? Who will they draft? Will the draft pick be as good as hoped? One wrinkle that the NBA has as a league, which makes player movement even more fascinating to obsess over, is a salary cap structure which leads teams to make all sorts of trades for financial reasons in addition or instead of basketball reasons.
March Madness is awesome – March Madness, the annual college basketball championship tournament, is many people’s favorite sporting event of the year. It’s hard for anything to match its first few days when 64 teams play each other in single elimination games. If you’re a college basketball fan, you start figuring out how to wrangle watching those day-time games weeks in advance. March Madness is so great, we wrote a post just about it.
Players can be good in a variety of ways – Basketball is a versatile sport. There are so many different ways to be great in basketball. If you’re small (relatively) you can become a great passer like or you can throw yourself recklessly at the bigger players or you can be a great shooter. If you’re medium-sized, you can dominate with athletic dunks or shut-down defense or by facilitating other people’s play. If you’re a giant among giants, you still have options. You can develop great moves close to the basket, scoring in a variety of ways, or you might have an excellent outside shot, or you can specialize in the grittier aspects of play, setting picks and getting rebounds. There’s so many ways to be a great basketball player and they’re all represented by players in college and the NBA.
A supported women’s league – The NBA is one of the more enlightened leagues when it comes to many social issues, including the support of women’s sport. The WNBA is owned and operated (and subsidized) by the NBA. I know it’s not required by Title IX because professional leagues don’t take federal money but I think every men’s professional league should do what the NBA has done to support women in the same sport.

Those are my top reasons. What are yours?

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Let's get ready for basketball season

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.