The Basketball Feelings Feeling of the Year (FOTY)

The 3rd annual year in review of this year in basketball by some of the industry's best (and friends of this newsletter).

Louisa Thomas, Author and Staff Writer, The New Yorker

One of the dumbest criticisms of any NBA analysis is that the analyst doesn’t know because she — let’s face it, it’s often a she — didn’t play in the NBA. And yet. There are times where I am keenly aware of what an interloper I am, and not just on a micro level.

My experience on the court began and ended during my senior year in high school, when I was the equipment co-manager for the J.V. girls’ basketball team. On the day before winter break, the team only had four players present. I put on a uniform, took the floor, and hit a free throw. We won by one point! Anyway, this summer, during the playoffs, when G Leaguers-turned Miami Heat(ers?) were hitting threes at will, and I was trying to sort out the tricky business of variance, I found myself wishing I knew more about what, precisely, goes into a three-point shot. Why, exactly, do even great shooters miss more than they make? A dumb question, maybe—but in the service of getting smarter, I told myself, this would be the year I wouldn’t be afraid to look dumb.

So I called my friend David Thorpe, a brilliant development coach who works with a bunch of great (and better-than-they-have-any-right-to-be) players. He gave me a brief lesson in physics.

Shot from that distance, he explained, there is little margin for error. If the ball hits one side of the rim, carrying so much energy, it is more likely to rebound out instead of rattling down, as a shorter, softer shot might. If the shot’s arc is flat, its aim has to be more accurate. But higher arcs are unforgiving too, because the ball gains speed as it drops, which, again, translates to more energy. Also: it helps for a player to be in rhythm. It helps to start from a standstill and jump straight up. If he is moving forward when he shoots, then the ball is already moving too, and he will have to calculate how to adjust the strength of his shot accordingly. If he’s moving right or left, he’ll have to account for the fact that the ball is traveling that way too. The release point also matters: let go of the ball late, and the ball falls as the shooter falls, and gravity works against them both. Oh, and, the power for a three point shot usually comes from the legs, and legs tire. Then there is the interference of relentless defenders, who, in the NBA, are some of the most long-limbed, athletic people in the world.

“Never shoot because you’re open,” David tells players, “only because you’re going to make it.” Right.

Jamel Johnson, Comedian and Host, Air Buds, The Brandon Jamel Show

I have a lot of feelings about James Harden.

The first one is “critical”. Historically James has made it very easy to question his decisions. And because I don’t wear shirts made out of parchment paper, I thought criticizing James was the right thing to do. I’ll take it further and say it was fun. When he accepted the MVP trophy in a cowhide I laughed. When he missed an entire training camp hanging out with Lil Baby I scoffed, but this summer when he called Daryl Morey a liar on his press tour in China I worried. The moment he got on that scooter was when the fun stopped because in this moment I also realized I was James Harden. 

From the ability to shoot long distances all the way down to the shaky employment history. When the Brooklyn Nets got together I joked that their roster was like when you have too many friends working at the same Gamestop because I am the friend that makes it too many. I would totally call out of several shifts to eat honey buns with Lil Baby in France. IT’S FRANCE BRO FOH. We both loved Trina, we both still love sour gummies without weed in them. I am literally James Bartholemew Harden. It’s actually James Edward Harden Jr., but he acts like it’s Bartholemew right? And so do I. 

Listen, as a man with a fear of success I thought James quitting the Sixers to go to the other side of the mall with the Clippers was going to be his last W-2. That this was the end of the road for James because that’s what roads ending has looked like in my life. And for a couple weeks it felt right. It appeared moving to Hollywood was a mistake and we both should’ve stayed in trade school, but then Russell Westbrook stepped in… and out of the starting lineup. I can only assume this included a conversation with James that went something like “Damn bro would you please take the ball and stop playing like an idiot? Fuck!” I’m paraphrasing obviously, but this is usually what it takes for me to act right. Russ’ move to the bench sparks a 9 game winning streak, the highlight of the streak being a 151-127 dispatching of the Indiana Pacers in which James hit 8 threes.

In this game The Beard gets bumped on his signature step back and makes snow angels on the court. When I saw this I felt hope. Hope for all of us who lose focus when the chips are down, not to mention those chips are down because we just kind of threw ‘em on the ground for no reason. Maybe things can work out for James this time, maybe I can stop eating french fries for a month, maybe the Intuit Dome has the perfect amount of bathrooms. Maybe I'm speaking too soon, but right now it feels good to be James Harden.

Kylie Cheung, Author and Writer, Jezebel

I don’t remember when, exactly, I became a James Harden super-fan, but suffice to say, it’s been a long, unforgiving past decade—essentially, the opposite-equivalent of LeBron’s “smiling through it all can’t believe this is my life” Instagram story every single play-off season. This year’s was, obviously, no different at the end of the day. And yet, I’ll forever hang on to the feeling, the out-of-body experience, that was Harden’s performance in the first game of the Sixers’ second-round series against the Boston Celtics. He exploded for 45 points in a game the Sixers were expected to lose handily sans Joel Embiid, and honestly, I have only fleeting, passing memories of the game itself that I mostly watched from behind my hands, trembling from both terror and adrenaline, my mind cutting in and out of consciousness out of pure anxiety.

I went into this game with zero expectations and little hope, yet I also knew I’d be crushed by a loss. It’s wild to me that through ~15 odd years of basketball fandom, the sport still evokes in me those seemingly conflicting feelings of impenetrable skepticism and desperate, grovelling reliance on my favorite players’ success for my mental well-being. I needed Harden to win. I also didn’t expect him to, let alone expect him to play like a resurrected 2018 version of himself after days of partying it up in Las Vegas between the Nets and Boston series. Harden showed up to T.D. Garden in one of the strangest outfits we’ve ever witnessed from him, a man renowned for his strange outfits, and he dominated to an extent we haven’t seen since perhaps 2018. I don’t know how to explain the feelings the game evoked in me with words—it was a religious experience. At the end of it I cried.

Over the years Harden’s style of play has changed; particularly after a hamstring injury in 2021 and a long season with little rest, he scaled back his trademark offensive dominance and leaned into playmaking and facilitating with aplomb. This game was special because it was a declaration to the world that that pivot was a choice, that he is still who he is, that when the haters sleep on you, that’s the best time to tuck them in. I love James Harden. When you’re a Harden fan, you’re not in this for the wins—though, those are nice, and I would like for them to happen, but alas. When you’re a Harden fan, you’re in this for the chaos and inconsistency, for the ups and downs and sheer humanity of it all, for pure love for one of the greatest basketball players of all time and the moments like this when his true self shows through. This game was special. I invite us all to live in its memory forever and forget everything that happened thereafter.

Tas Melas, Host, No Dunks

Rob Mahoney, Senior Writer, The Ringer

Even after all these years of basketball scholars studying and debating and re-studying and re-debating the hot hand, the only thing we really know about that particular phenomenon is that it ends. A scorching-hot shooter will eventually come back down to earth. And in the world of the NBA news cycle—my world, at work—our primary means of engaging with a player who has managed to reach some higher plane of existence is usually to analyze when they might return to ours. Logically, I understand why; we’re all just grasping to understand something, anything, on our little rock as we hurtle through the universe, and the idea that a workaday role player could suddenly transform into a game-breaking force is a bit challenging to our sense of basketball reality.

So we explain it away. We note that it won’t last, that it can’t. We wait for the regression to the mean, and for the moment when what we think we know squares more neatly with what we see in front of us. Yet the longer I live with this game, the more I want to live in those moments before everything is neatly returned to its place. Is a player who made his last three shots more statistically likely to make his fourth? I don’t know, man. I just know Caleb Martin is vibrating out there, tapping into something completely beyond him. I see a player so in tune with the sport that it seems to move through his every instinct, unlocking a kind of trance state in which he can do nothing wrong. There’s a reason why some of the most remarkable athletes in the world describe having the hot hand as a spiritual experience—something that takes them outside themselves and expands their consciousness. Making shots is just a side effect.

You can reduce that to a fluke if you want, and as many Celtics fans have—while shaking their heads at the very mention of Martin’s name. A talented team was undone in the conference finals by something inexplicable. There will always be frustration in that. But at the risk of exposing myself as washed and overly sentimental, I’m just not as moved by explanations as I used to be. All our passions come in seasons, and the first is often the want to understand them as much as possible. I’ve spent so much of my life digging into why this game works the way it does, chasing the satisfying click of matching cause with effect. That still hits, but these days, I would rather be mystified. Let me wrestle with what I could never explain. Let me ride the wave with Martin as he suddenly finds a new version of himself in the sport he’s been playing his whole life. We all know that a dream like that will end. You can take that to mean it was never real, or you can see a more urgent reality in the fact that it was never meant to last.

Jasmyn Wimbish, Writer, CBS Sports

When I was given the invite to write for this annual gathering of some of the industry's best wordsmiths, I kept going over the details that Katie included in her email. "Explain a moment, event, person, play, gesture, fit or something ephemeral that stood out to you most this year in basketball and why." For several days I kept going over what moment in #thisleague evoked the most emotion out of me. There's plenty to choose from, sure, but I always came back to the same conclusion: since I've stepped into this industry my emotions about the league I cover have become more muted. 

If you asked me to write about how excited I was when the University of Kansas football team won its first bowl game since 2008 this year, a game in which I attended, I could easily work up 1,000 words on the sights and sounds of the game, as well as the emotions it brought up in me. The same is true if someone gave me an assignment on the feelings of watching the Kansas men's basketball team win a championship back in 2022, also for the first time since 2008. Spoiler alert: I cried.

But ever since I officially traded in my foam finger for a laptop, recorder and permanent dark circles under my eyes from the lack of sleep I get doing this job, my feelings have been far more detached when covering the NBA. I instead find myself reminiscing about the height of my NBA fandom: the 2011 NBA Finals. 

When I say Dirk Nowitzki is my favorite player the responses I get range from "Oh, nice," as if it's a niche pick – which I fully recognize it kind of is – to "Oh, why?" but dripping with the judgment of "No one outside the state of Texas would ever give that answer." And no, I didn't grow up in Texas.

This year had me reminiscing about the Dallas Mavericks 2011 NBA championship more than usual because of Dirk's enshrinement into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame back in August. I was up in Wisconsin at my girlfriend's parents house on the day the Hall of Fame ceremony happened. We just got back from getting ice cream, and while everyone was outside enjoying the last bits of a warm summer night I was inside, parked at the kitchen counter with my phone in one hand and a dripping butter pecan ice cream cone in the other. 

Dirk's speech was second-to-last and I had timed it perfectly, right as I opened the stream he was walking up the stage. I was immediately transported back to the 2011 championship, to his final home game in 2019 (also cried), to his jersey retirement in 2022. All the feelings of pure enjoyment from watching this 7-foot German guy play basketball for over two decades just came rushing back to me. They were feelings I haven't felt on that level since Dirk retired in 2019, but for the 16 minutes of his speech I was once again an unabashed, diehard fan. And the last line of his speech still sits in the back of my mind: "When you're green, you grow. When you're ripe, you rot."

Jake Oliveira, Photographer

Both as a participant in life and a fan of basketball, I've felt very on the outside looking in this last year, sort of stuck in a place of indecision and uncertainty. Feels like a photo from one side of a fence to the other was a nice and totally subtle way to express that.

Isle McElroy, Author, People Collide, The Atmospherians

After four years looking for a regular game, a friend of a friend invited me to his weekly run in Chinatown. Three weeks later I was playing without him, hovering on the sidelines, waiting to get on the court. Over the four years since I’d consistently played, I’d lived about ten millions lives–I’d gotten divorced, came out as nonbinary, moved between three different cities and had published a couple of novels. 

The only other time I’d played over that stretch came on a whim. I stopped at a court midway through a run where strangers were playing four-on-four. That day, I rediscovered the sudden, silent intimacy I rarely found elsewhere in my life. Chemistry is the word sportscasters and fans like to use, a word that sanitizes what’s actually happening by turning the feeling into a science exam. But it’s intimacy. That afternoon, I felt it immediately with a dude on my team, a thin, quick wing who cut with a sense of gravity, summoning passes I didn’t think I could throw until the ball was precise in his hands and lifting high to the hoop. We ended the game when I went up for a three. At the top of my release, I flung the ball to the block, where the dude waited, as open as an ocean, and easily slipped in a layup. I put in my headphones. I ran home. I don’t even know if I gave them my name.

A year later, in Chinatown, I ended up on a team where I couldn’t muster a sliver of intimacy with any of the other players. They never cut when I wanted them to; I bricked the jumpers they fed me. But I felt something for the dude I was guarding. He had a few inches on me, and a lot more strength, and even though he seemed uneager to run on that day–either protecting himself or simply done with running–there had likely been a time where he’d gotten wherever he wanted. On the rare occasions I forced a miss in the post, he easily gobbled his misses and scored. His jumpers were clean. He directed everyone on his team with the kind of nonchalance that would have upset me if I didn’t admire it. 

Midway through our third game, I was guarding him on the three point line. I stretched my arm out, palm flat in front of his eyes. He surveyed the court, patient, then looked at my hand. My effort amused him. He tapped his forehead against my fingers and laughed. He drained a three over my arm. When the game ended, my body felt thickened by overwork, but I was excited to return the following week. I wanted to play with this dude. I wanted to slide onto his team, to slip to the basket after a pick, knowing he’d hit me square in the hands on a roll. He’d make things easy for me. It would be fun, and simple, and intimate. 

The following week, on a bike ride to the social security office, where I would legally change my name, I hit a curb and landed hard on my shoulder. My collarbone shattered on impact. I haven’t shot a basketball since. 

Sean Yoo, Senior Creative, Wave Sports and Entertainment

If 2023 was anything for the world of basketball, it was undoubtedly the year of the NBA player podcast. The podcast space for a short period of time had a handful of players finding success, but in a matter of seconds, the market hit its boom and bust all within the same year. It genuinely felt like a new podcast was popping up every other week and it encompassed the entire spectrum of hoopers from All-Stars to role players, and everyone in between. I will personally take some credit for this boom and bust, since we as a company launched two podcasts just this year (Podcast P with Paul George/7pm In Brooklyn). And while I’d be more than happy to shamelessly plug and celebrate the shows I’ve worked on, that’s not why I’m here today. I’m here because I wanted to give flowers to the one player who objectively surprised the masses with his arrival into the world of podcasts — 2023 was the year of Jeff Teague. 

Although his podcast entered the space in 2022, I think Jeff Teague really blossomed and found his voice as a host this year. I’ll be honest, I don't think anyone knew Jeff Teague was this funny or had so many ridiculous stories to tell. The thing about his Club 520 Podcast is, the pod itself might not be the highest quality or the most well produced, but at its core it has arguably one of the funniest hosts in the space. Teague has a special way of telling stories that makes you feel like you were there experiencing the events in real time with him. Whether it’s the retelling of the infamous Jimmy Butler practice, a story about shoving LeBron James, or what a fan said to him after pushing Ricky Rubio, it’s a guarantee Jeff Teague will make you laugh your ass off. Now, you can question the merit and truth of these stories all you want, I don’t care, and it doesn’t matter because I will never scroll past a Jeff Teague tiktok. While other podcasts might have climbed the charts or featured some iconic guests, Jeff Teague takes the crown for consistently being the funniest dude on mic, and in 2023 he made everyone feel joy.

Tom Ziller, Writer, Good Morning It’s Basketball

A downside to rooting for a bad team, or rooting for no team at all, is the lack of a personal touch in experiencing the greats of the league. I have watched Stephen Curry as close as possible through his thrilling NBA tenure. But because the Kings had so little at stake in any games against the Warriors for the first 13 years of his career, and because I abandoned my fandom for a stretch of time, I never truly felt Steph’s greatness like a dagger in my chest. Until Game 7 of Kings vs. Warriors last spring. 

After getting sucked back into Kings fandom by De’Aaron Fox, Domantas Sabonis and the gang, this game was obviously a deeply distressing experience. But there was a thread of wonder laced throughout the performance that I’ve come to appreciate more every day. This is compounded by the fact that Curry and Klay Thompson have ripped my heart out of my chest multiple times already in the 2023-24 season, even in an exhibition game. 

An outsider’s healthy respect for Curry’s legendary career has turned into something personal as a fan of a team he destroyed. I didn’t really know Steph Curry until he broke my heart, until he defused The Beam, until he put the Kings’ miracle season to sleep.

My Basketball Feeling of the Year is a pain I can smile at given appropriate distance. Thank you, Steph Curry, for helping me prove to myself I can still care about that damn team.

Colin McGowan, Writer, Real GM

I grew up not on a street or an avenue so much as a loop, a delicate strand of a dozen lots arcing through the woods behind the local country club, near a tee box from which retired teachers my father knew duffed and cursed and tried not to pack their spikes with goose shit. It's called Kathleen Drive; it intersects with streets bearing Irish names corresponding to no specific person: Margaret Street and O'Brien Glenway. It somehow acutely describes my parents' sensibilities that as I entered school-going age they moved us to Oswego, a place older than America by a good half-century, but more precisely into this sanitary Reagan era node at the southern edge of town. Our house was new and ugly. By the time I turned thirteen, I knew I needed to escape.

Giannis Antentokoumpo comes from no fixed address. He was undocumented, moving irregularly among small Sepolia apartments, approaching at a young age an adult understanding of his own precarity, delaying meals, peddling tchotchkes and cheap sunglasses alongside his parents in Athenian plazas and stands by beaches where people with money congregated. Finding the fun that kids create for themselves, chasing his brothers through the street. At age thirteen, he was plucked mid-stride and set down in a basketball gym. Over five years learning the game, he became a marginal NBA prospect and was drafted fifteenth by the Bucks. Greece was the only place he had ever lived. The nation made him a citizen just before he left for Milwaukee.

I recently bought a home, a second-floor apartment in a building that, I noted briefly as I rushed through dense inches of closing documents, was built in 1891, on a street that I'm slightly disappointed doesn't extend, as many Chicago streets do, through the city and off on some perfectly vertical axis that perhaps cleaves the entire midwest. But Glenwood Avenue does intersect with important, near-infinite streets—Foster, Devon, Morse—and my own memory. A friend lived by one of those intersections. I smoked a hundred cigarettes on a balcony within earshot of the trains clattering north and south. We drank Old Grand Dad and confided in each other; we killed time and transcended. There were parties that linger only as faces and daubs of feeling. The cost of sublimity often expressed itself on the walk home. Around or exactly at Glenwood and Morse, where the concrete walls of the L tracks rose from the pavement bright against sodium lamps, I met a pleasant and ravaging loneliness. The city pummelled and consoled me.

Giannis committed to Milwaukee this past October, signing an extension through 2028. This was not a perfectly shrewd decision, and the league's best players are rarely less than perfectly shrewd. At his post-signing presser, he explained his reasoning. Strategic justifications were offered, but he spoke most strikingly about his city: "My kids were born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That's what their passport says. My mom is here enjoying her life. My dad spent a couple years here before he passed away. My brothers went to school here—private school that before I came here I was not able to afford… I'm extremely happy. I know the ins and outs of the city. The city shows me a lot of love and also whenever I go out there and have time with my family, they also give me space… They respect who I am as a person and what I've done for the city of Milwaukee. And for that, I can't turn my back. Not now, not in the future, not never."

I made up my mind several years ago that I wasn't leaving Chicago. At the time, I was out of work, wandering desultorily in the middle of days out to gray Lake Michigan, returning to my apartment to drink and write and complain to the cat. Whether I would ever own a piece of the city would depend on luck—as it turned out, the death of a mentally ill and childless aunt, the down payment money she bequeathed—but I was prepared to live itinerantly, if I had to. This was a solemn determination. Nowhere else contains what meaning my life has generated.

You are born a nullity, defined by circumstance. Beloved or otherwise, into a social climate, into money or not. Perhaps your state recognizes you. There is a family of some shape, a sky with stars beaming from certain coordinates. You grow into yourself unwittingly. Then there is a point of recognition, often painful, where you think, Is this what I am, and where I belong? Most people ask this question from adolescence until death. To resolve the second part of it—excepting restless moments, the updrafts of terror and annoyance that discompose each day—is a profound comfort. And to give it away would be foolish.