BACK TO EARTH

               On November 24, 1963, with the nation stunned and grieving over the Kennedy assassination of just two days before, the National Football League decided to go ahead with its full, seven-game Sunday schedule. The games were played even though many of the players later said their hearts and minds weren’t in them.

               The argument was made that football was a welcome counterforce to the national pall, but it was widely rejected, even (although much later) by NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, the man who made the go-ahead decision. It was, rather, the league’s assertion of self-importance and the notion that the world of fun and games stood outside and above the “real” world of mundane concerns.

               That idea, which persists in some circles, took a huge hit this week in a quite-different context-- the scary spread of the corona virus. This time just about every active sporting enterprise has been forced,  however reluctantly, to do the right thing. After first responding to the situation with such goofy half-measures as banning news media reps from locker rooms, games of the National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball’s spring training were curtailed for the duration of the emergency.

               The NCAA cancelled its national-championship tournament, but only after 13 of its conferences had cancelled their own season-ending go-arounds. The group’s initial stance would have held the competition in gyms without fans. That wouldn’t have done much to protect players, who would have had a better likelihood of catching the illness from one another in their locker rooms or on the sweaty courts than from any paying customers. Baseball conducts its business out of doors, where contagion is less likely than in enclosed arenas. MLB just said it will delay the March 26 start of its regular season, but its hand was forced by state and local actions such as the California ban on gatherings of 250 or more people.

               The cessations may go beyond the formal games; NBA people have talked about keeping teams together for practice until the disease runs its course, but the fact that its two players who have tested positive for the virus play for the same team (the Utah Jazz) should scotch that. 

               No games mean no live sports on television, a prospect that many in the population will find painful. The TV networks no doubt will rebroadcast past contests, but they can’t get far with that. Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers in movie theaters is another unattractive prospect. Netflix and Amazon Prime will do good business, and the electronic-game and, maybe, the board-game makers will see an upturn. I hope the libraries will, too, but that’s probably too much to expect. Meantime, putting sports in their proper (secondary) place even temporarily can only have a salutary effect.

              

                

GOING EURO

               When people tell me they don’t enjoy watching National Basketball Association games I have to scratch my head. What’s not to like? I think. As a group and individually the players are the world’s best athletes, easily. The stuff they do astounds nightly.

               One of the best things about having a press pass was that I often got to watch NBA games from floor level. What’s impressive on TV is downright marvelous when viewed straight on. A 6-foot-8-inch man causes heads to turn when one passes on the street, but that’s about the average height of the players in the league. Their sheer size makes their speed and agility especially remarkable. Indeed, more than any others their games can be seen as performance art, like ballet, enjoyable no matter what’s on the scoreboard.

               Yeah, I know, all NBA games aren’t thrilling. The 82-game season is too long so the players take occasional vacations, sometimes on the court. In recent years some of the best players have connived to combine on “super teams,” which are fine if your fave is one of them but not so fine otherwise. That’s because the practice creates talent gaps that all but predetermine some outcomes.

Super teams require super players, which are hard to come by. The usual way a team gets one is to be both bad enough and lucky enough to come out on top in the league’s annual draft lottery. The New Orleans Pelicans, laggards over their 16-year history, accomplished this last season and got to draft the otherworldly Zion Williamson, who has performed as hoped once over a preseason injury. If young Zion makes the right kind of friends he could bring a dynasty to the Big Easy. But that’s if a friend elsewhere doesn’t lure him away first.

The teams that suffer most in what has become the NBA oligarchy are those that perennially finish around the middle in the standings, not good enough to contend for titles but too good to land low-number lottery spots.  That’s pretty much been true of the Milwaukee Bucks, Dallas Mavericks and Denver Nuggets. Together they have only two NBA titles to show for a total of 132 seasons in the league—one for the Bucks (in 1971), one for the Mavs (in 2011) and none for the Nuggets. That they now are bidding fair to break out of their boxes attests to their thinking a bit outside the box. Their putative salvation has come from looking east for help-- way east, to Europe.

Exhibit A in this group are the Bucks, currently sporting the league’s best won-lost record (51-8) and the likely Eastern Conference top seed in the coming playoffs. For that they can thank whoever did their drafting in 2013. Their first choice that year was an 18-year-old kid from Greece with Nigerian parents and an unpronounceable (and even hard to type) last name.  That would be Giannis Antetokounmpo, whose last name remains unpronounceable but who at age 25 has become either the first- or second-best player in the game, depending on where one ranks LeBron James.

That Giannis was even the 15^th player chosen in the ’13 draft was a cause for pause. He’d taken up basketball late—at age 12 or 13 depending on the account—and the year before had been a reserve on an unexceptional Greek club-league team. At a skinny 6-feet-8 he was undermuscled for the NBA as well as inexperienced. As a rookie Buck he was played sparingly, averaging just under seven points a game.

From there, though, all the lines on his chart have moved straight up. Today he stands 6-11, packs about 240 pounds, has the wingspan of a 747 and can seemingly run the court in a half-dozen bounds.  If he stays healthy and the Bucks can keep him (he could become a free agent after next season) they’ll be a threat in the NBA East for years to come.

The player who might do the same thing for the Mavericks is 21-year-old Luca Doncic, from Slovenia. He was highly touted coming into the NBA, so his success has been no Giannis-like surprise, but three teams (the Phoenix Suns, Sacramento Kings and Atlanta Hawks) managed to bypass him in the 2018 draft before he was acquired by the Mavs. He was the league’s rookie of the year for 2018-19 and was second only to James in voting for this year’s All-Star Game.

Doncic is listed as a shooting guard on the Mav’s roster but at 6-feet-7 and about 225 pounds can play any position at any time; it’s no stretch to call him the present-day Magic Johnson. The Mavs won 24 games the season before Doncic arrived, then 33 last season and 36 already in this one, and is on a pace to approach 50. With Kristaps Porzingis, 24, from Latvia, playing the role of Robin, the team has the sort of dynamic duo that could dominate once it grows up.

The most surprising of the young Euro stars is the Nugget’s Nikola Jokic, a 24-year-old Serbian.  He was a second-round choice in the 2014 draft, the 41^st player chosen. Now as then he looks stocky despite his 7-foot stature, can’t run fast and might have trouble jumping a street curb. As a game goes on his nose takes on a Rudolph-like red. Nonetheless, his moves around the hoop are stellar, he has a killer fade-away jump shot and is a glib passer. Interestingly, his coach in Serbia, Dejan Milojevic, attributes Jokic’s NBA success in part to his limitations.  “Everything that is not typical basketball gives some kind of advantage,” he’s said.

In 2015-16, Jokic’s rookie year, the Nuggets won 33 games. That climbed to 40 the next year, 46 the next and 54 the next. They are 40-18 now and would be the No. 2 seed in the West if the playoffs were to begin today.  Their beating the probable-top-seed L.A. Lakers in the post-season would be an upset, but maybe not a major one. The Lakers hold a 2-1 edge in their head-to-head meetings this season, but one of their wins was in overtime.

It’s no news that Europeans, and foreign players generally, have become an NBA force, accounting for between 20% and 25% of the league’s roster spots in recent seasons, but their roles as difference-makers is indisputably on the rise. One edge they might hold over Americans is that their countries’ youth-sports systems are centered around vertically organized clubs instead of schools. Those clubs enroll athletes from tots to adults and advance players by their ability rather than age; the prodigy Doncic, for instance, was competing against 12-year-olds at 8. Another is that the best European basketball prospects typically turn pro at age 16 or 17 instead of our 19 and have the experience—and lumps—to show for the difference.

Still another could be that promising kid jocks abroad aren’t spoiled the way they are here. That’s just me sayin’, though.