Hardwood Paroxysm Presents: The best pickup basketball teams in all the land

Earlier this week, The Basketball Tournament awarded $1 million to Overseas Elite, the pickup squad that won its second annual tournament. “TBT” is an open application, single-elimination, 5-on-5 tournament whose games are broadcast online. The third tournament won’t happen until next year, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get excited right now. Below, the Hardwood Paroxysm crew attempts to build the ultimate pickup team.  

Ian Levy’s (@HickoryHigh) ultimate pickup team consists of…

Jason Williams, Doug Christie, Peja Stojakovic, Chris Webber and Vlade Divac.

I know I’m playing fast and loose with the rules of this exercise since those players constituted an actual team at one point. But for me, and for playground basketball, there is no other answer.

Remember this scene from He Got Game?

Jesus Shuttlesworth (Ray Allen) and his high school teammates (played by Hill Harper, Travis Best, Walter McCarty and John Wallace) show up at the playground and proceed to decimate all comers. They are incognito (as much as possible on a court they likely appear at ` regularly) until Harper pulls a newspaper clipping out of his sock about their state championship and begins his hype-man routine.

I picture these Go-Go Kings operating in much the same way. They are aesthetically bland as they walk up to the court. The locals take one look at Divac and Stojakovic and, despite their size, laugh them off as oafs who belong at the other end of the park with the frisbee golfers. Williams and Christie clearly belong in this world, but the way they remove their bulky sweats, dripping with overconfidence, makes them all the less threatening. Webber is quiet and moves slowly.

The locals take the ball out and Christie quickly picks off the lazy inbound pass, dunking it on top of the inbounder as he helplessly tries to rectify his mistake. The next steal comes from Williams. Picking the opposing point guard’s pocket at the top of the arc, he puts the ball behind his back three times in a syncopated rhythm, turning the defender around and allowing Webber to fly ahead. A seeing-eyes bounce pass snakes the ball to Webber, who, without looking, whips it to a wide open Peja on the wing. Bottom of the net (assuming this court has nets and not those terrible metal chains). The ball goes inside and out. The locals put up a doughnut. As my squad scores their 11th point — a Webber dunk, off a no-look wrap around pass from Divac, off a no-look, off-handed pocket pass from Williams — Williams reaches into his sock, pulls out a printed copy of this article, and turns his volume to 11.

“What, you didn’t know!! We’re the Sacramento Kings and we birthed a post-modern revolution!!”

David Vertsberger’s (@_Verts) ultimate pickup team consists of…

Zach LaVine, Jamal Crawford, LeBron James, Reggie Evans, Hassan Whiteside.

Quite the cast, I know. let me explain, step-by-step.

When I began this list with the point guard spot, I figured as a pick-up team I’d just like to see the most enjoyable basketball possible. High-flying, fancy-dribbling, speedy, end-to-end fun basketball. LaVine very much falls into the high-flying territory. I could have gone with a Jason Williams or Steve Nash-type that could swivel through creases in the offense and throw the most ridiculous passes around, but I sided with pure, unadulterated airtime. LaVine’s a freak. Since there’s little defense in pickup, he’s going to have one or two between-the-legs dunks a game. Can’t say no to that.

Sticking with the fun basketball theme, I chose Jamal Crawford as my two guard. I mean, have you seen him at his Seattle Pro-Am? He brings streetball dribble moves to the NBA hardwood almost nightly – picture him in a pickup setting. Yikes. You’d need an industrial mop to get all those broken ankles off the court. He can also bomb threes from other ZIP codes like it’s nothing and unlike a Nick Young or Kobe Bryant, would be more prone to passing (albeit in highlight fashion) in a game like this.

Is picking LeBron a cop out? I don’t care, I picked LeBron. He’d just catch lobs and perform chasedown blocks all day. And if the time comes where this pickup team seriously wants to win and is in danger (somehow) of losing, well, LeBron. He rarely appears in summer streetball leagues or pro-ams, but when he does it’s magical. LeBron without the pressure to win is as much a highlight factory as anybody.

Yeah, Reggie Evans. The guy I’m very glad is out of the NBA. The guy who would make me choose another favorite team if he was on mine. At this point I made a distinction. This doesn’t have to be fun basketball. This has to be fun-to-watch basketball. And seriously, I can’t imagine anything more fun than Reggie Evans going all-out on the boards in a pickup game and playing twice as hard as everybody else throughout the contest. This team would go undefeated in a pickup circuit out of annoying the other team to the brink of quitting alone.

Hassan Whiteside’s a center that can block almost any shot, catch almost any lob and has shown a nice touch on his jumper. He’s perfect to me.

Daniel Leroux’s (@DannyLeroux) ultimate pickup team consists of…

Stephen Curry, Ricky Rubio, Danny Green, DeMarcus Cousins and Rudy Gobert

I chose to use the following rules: Only active players, maximum of one person who had played in multiple All-Star Games and maximum of one who had played in just one.

The star spot boiled down to LeBron and Curry, two players who would be incredibly fun to play with and devastating in a pickup setting. I ended up going with Curry because he can play on or off the ball and generates so much attention on defense.

From there, my next thought was to add someone who would just be a pain to play against and there may be no one who fits that bill quite like Boogie. A physical specimen who is also a great rebounder, Cousins’ back to the basket game and status as a one-time All Star made him a clear choice. Other 1x All-Stars considered were Jimmy Butler, Klay Thompson and Brook Lopez.

The three players who round out the squad would all be incredibly fun to play with in this setting.

Rudy Gobert is the other archetype of a perfect pickup big man because he protects the paint and rebounds without wanting the ball much on offense. He is basically a cheat code against any conceivable opponent, especially with Boogie getting the interior touches.

Ricky Rubio makes the short list of best passers in the league today and would be an absolute terror in open court situations. Plus, he can defend and allow Curry to expend less energy on defense while playing on and off the ball on offense.

Danny Green makes the list because I considered Kawhi cheating. Of players with more than 100 catch and shoot points last season, Green finished sixth (sixth!) in catch and shoot eFG%. His role on this team would be defending the other team’s best swingman scorer, running in transition and drilling open looks. In the words of Troy McClure, it is the part he was born to play, baby.

Jared Dubin’s (@JADubin5) ultimate pickup team consists of…

John Wall, Stephen Curry, Kyle Korver, Kawhi Leonard and Dwight Howard.

The most important things you can have in a pickup game are athleticism and shooting. I don’t care about size. If you want to try to post my guys up, go right ahead. Waste your time. I’ll be busy running the floor, gunning for transition threes and layups at all costs.

That’s why I’m basing my squad around John Wall, arguably the best open court point guard in the league, and Steph Curry, the best shooter in the history of the world. Flank Wall with shooters in transition and you are bound to find open threes. He is a step ahead of the defense in terms of finding angles pretty much at all times. With Steph and Korver, my squad has the two best shooters on the planet.

Even if Wall’s not the guy pushing the ball up the floor, I have Steph. He can pull threes out of crevices nobody else knew existed. Let Korver sprint to the arc while Wall and Kawhi fill lanes and try stopping me.

If we don’t get an immediate three or layup, we’re resorting to a pick and roll where Dwight sets a drag screen for whichever of Wall and Curry brought the ball up the floor. Peak Dwight is still the best dive man in the league, and he’s never played with a point guard that can pass like Wall or shoot like Curry (Dwight barely got to play with Steve Nash during his sole season in LA). When Wall’s running the high screen, he has the two best shooters in the league plus freaking Kawhi Leonard to choose from. If Curry’s the man with the ball, the fact that Wall’s defender might cheat off him a little bit on the perimeter honestly doesn’t even matter because Steph doesn’t actually need any space to get off a shot.

On defense, I’m telling Wall to pick up full court, sticking Kawhi on your best wing scorer and having Dwight patrol the paint. Good luck.

Kaveh Jam’s (@KavehsRoom) ultimate pickup team consists of…

Kemba Walker, Russell Westbrook, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Blake Griffin, and Andre Drummond.

I also chose to play with the “active player” only rule. I’m starting off with the guy who grew up on pickup basketball – the NY legend himself Kemba Walker. I feel like pickup has a certain ragged, unorganized element to it, perfect for Kemba. I follow College Basketball almost as closely as I do the pro’s and if anyone else does then you remember these highlights of him from the Maui Invitational:

My star spot goes to Russell Westbrook. Every pickup squad needs a guy with no conscious and outlandish athletic ability that will unequivocally take over a game. A Kemba-Westbrook backcourt will not be neutralized – if you collapse on Russ, Kemba will free himself from outside. If you don’t, Russ will beeline to the front of the rim.

From here I opted to mesh together a front line that has several elements: flexibility, ball handling/slashing, rebounding, and brute force at the rim.

For this reason I’m going with the Greek Freak – as long as he is, he can slash with the best of them and overwhelm you with his athleticism. Between him and Russ, they’re the only defensive pieces on my team (no one plays defense on pickup anyway so not the biggest sacrifice).

Blake is your prototypical pogo stick; the guy that shows up to your local YMCA and inexplicably can jump out of the building. Kemba can sling shot the ball to Blake or let him do his predictable post move where he hauls in the pass, faces up, jab steps left only to take two maneuvering strides right and flush it.

Drummond was a no brainer for me. I don’t need a traditional post up center with the other guys here. I need an athletic big that can clean up around the basket and rebound Westbrook’s 25-foot pull-ups.

Kris Fenrich’s (@dancingwithnoah) ultimate pickup team consists of…

Steve Nash, Steph Curry, Larry Bird, Boris Diaw, Rasheed Wallace

Pickup basketball is some kind of pure version of the game that exists within the realm of the rules, but without all the pomp and circumstance that accompanies an “official” game with refs, cameras, and money at stake. Some hyperbolists say the greatest game ever played was the famous USA practice scrimmage (slightly more formal pickup game) that acted as the arena in which Michael Jordan could once and for all assert himself as the NBA’s undisputed king in the post-Magic/Bird era. It’s no coincidence that when freed of the constraints of a corporate/network packaged product, the game can truly flourish.

With that in mind, my ultimate pickup team is a crew of artists, improvisational men known for thinking and feeling their way out of tight jams and into positive basketball outcomes. Each of these five players is highly skilled with 360-degree passing vision. Three are legendary shooters, a fourth has a logo that’s a silhouette of him shooting a jumper and the fifth is Boris Diaw. I’ve been in too many pickup games where the less athletic, older, physically underwhelming team somehow runs the court because they have a couple shooters, guys who make the pass, and, for want of a less-annoying term, “play the right way.” This mix of old and new players is a collection of kindred basketball spirits that will be competitive in every game and even the ones they lose, they’ll make enough mutually stimulating plays that it’ll feel like they’re stumbling into some new realm of basketball existence.

Onto the team: where some might see redundancy with Nash playing alongside Steph, I see a pair of unselfish guards wholly comfortable and natural either play making or spotting up, getting their looks or getting others involved. Nothing says pickup ball like heat checks and there aren’t many humans in Naismith’s history that are as justified in heat checking as Curry. Nash can shoot OK too.

The front court is like a mini-Mensa Society for post players. For all of Sheed’s well-documented volatility, his post play is that of a skilled craftsman. Surrounded by shooters of this caliber, Sheed’s establishing leverage and position with those long legs, catching in the post and either toasting your pickup big (who likely doesn’t want to be playing defense anyway) or waiting for the double so he can hit Larry Legend for the three. Also, in a call-your-own-foul setting, is there another human that’s going to out-argue/bombast Sheed? Points for the low-key skills.

Culturally, Diaw and Bird couldn’t be much different — but that could be said for most NBA players and Larry Bird. Anyways, the Frenchman and Hick from French Lick are overlooked athletes with world class reflexes. Both big men can rebound and push, with always-darting eyes looking for Steve and Steph leaking out for transition threes or layups. And if no one’s open, screw it; they can each create their own mini-masterpiece.

When you’re getting together with random dudes, communication via unspoken languages and body signals bridges gaps and creates success. Running a pick-and-roll with a stranger and without ever discussing who’s going to do what, your temporary teammate and new best friend makes the perfect read which results in a beautiful pass and textbook finish is isolated joy — something spontaneous and symbiotic. Imagine sharing a single brain on a basketball court and you’re imagining the team I’ve crafted here, a team that fires on all intellectual and improvisational basketball cylinders while delivering the kind of palpable connection between human beings most commonly found on stages and in studios when elite musicians join forces for a jam session and while we’re all distracted by the bright lights of the big stage with its arena hype men and well-dressed rich-voiced narrators, the pickup court with its sweaty rewards, camaraderie and eye-contact-communication is where real life disciples pay their tributes and none would do the basketball gods justice the same way as Larry, Steph, Nash, Sheed and Boris.

Dan Lewis’s (@minutemandan) ultimate pickup team consists of…

Gary Payton, Maya Moore, Tracy McGrady, Kevin Durant, Bill Walton

I wanted to pick a team with one active player from the NBA, WNBA, and then fill out the lineup with retired players. Since this is pickup basketball, and everyone is healthy, I wanted to add guys like T-Mac and Bill Walton.

Do you know how many point guards have won Defensive Player of the Year? One – Gary Payton. He wanted you to know that you were going to lose the game, you weren’t going to play very well, and it was because he was going to make things miserable for you. GP was a 20-5-5 threat every game, and you’d be lucky to reach double digits on him. With his gift of gab, he’d be in your head five minutes after the game started, and there’s real value knowing that one guy has pissed off every single player on the other team. Payton was one of my favorite players in the league during his career, and was an obvious Hall of Fame choice.

Maya Moore is the greatest player in the WNBA, with in-the-gym range, the ability to shoot well off the dribble, and the athleticism to get to the rim and score. This is a pickup game, and Maya deserves to play against the boys. If the opponent feels like cheating off her, she’ll kill you with her outside touch and moves to create space. It’d be fun to watch her teammates find her for open shots, and just letting her splash jumpers from all over the court. Moore would have a size disadvantage on defense, but I’m betting that she’d surprise everyone with how well she would do.

Tracy McGrady in his prime played some of the greatest basketball I’ve ever seen. Like most of the players on this team, he can score, pass, rebound, and shoot at an elite level. McGrady also had some of the most impressive hops in the league, participating in the legendary dunk contest with cousin and Raptors teammate Vince Carter in 2000. Letting McGrady slash to the rim for alley-oops with this roster of playmakers is sure to elicit some highlight reel plays.

Kevin Durant is one of the greatest players in the NBA, with elite shooting ability, athleticism, and is a steady leader. Durant as a playmaking stretch four is the stuff of nightmares for coaching staffs, and good luck stopping him when he gets the ball on the wing. He’s too fast for traditional power forwards, too strong for modern small forwards, and too long for a guard to check him. He’s improved as a rebounder and his court vision is an underrated part of his game. I mean, look at what he did to Marcin Gortat. Sign me up for some more of that, please and thank you.

The anchor of the defense and the straw that stirs the drink on offense is the legendary Bill Walton. The MVP of the champion Trail Blazers team, Walton helped his team win without having to fill up the stat sheet. Walton earned first team All-Defense honors, led the league in defensive rebounding percentage four times, and shot above 50 percent from the floor nearly every year of his career. Walton was never much of a threat from the perimeter, but hey, you can’t dunk it from 23 feet away from the rim. I envision a beautiful, flowing offense, with Walton watching the music flow from the high post, finding his teammates cutting to the rim or kicking out for open shooters. Pure jazz, man, and it’s beautiful.

This team has defense, shooting, athleticism, passing, and personality. What more could you want?

Matt Femrite’s (@FattMemrite) ultimate pickup team consists of…

Chris Paul, Jerry Stackhouse, Paul Pierce, Rasheed Wallace, Andrea Bargnani

This team is a tribute to memories from afternoon pickup in college.

Despite the talent here, the goal for them is to win as ugly, annoyingly, and be as dysfunctional as possible. There’s some well-rounded bickering here, giving them a chance to win every single argument on the court. They will be fouled on every one of their shots, there’s just no way they touched the ball last before it rolled out of bounds, and if the opposition is fed up after the game they can discuss it with Jerry Stackhouse. If you’re going to win, it’s going to take at least an hour.

Chris Paul’s the point guard with an edge that you need when coming across a point guard like, say, Gary Payton. Obviously there are no free throws in pickup, but for somebody who gets 75 percent of his on non-shooting fouls, Paul will call the same exact ticky-tacky fouls he commits on the other end of the floor. He will also bicker with his own players to the point that they ponder tanking, but then they realize it’s as much of a pain to play against him as it is with him.

Despite the highlights of the scrums Stackhouse was part of, choosing him had as much to do with his shooting. Stackhouse was a fine player, averaging 30 points per game one season, but he had some horrific shooting nights. I want that player at the gym who you know has the skill and athleticism and would be a better player if he passed a little more, but he just can’t help himself, and I want the game where Stackhouse misses 10 consecutive contested, off-balance shots and then, when it’s game point and the defense is begging him to shoot, he makes finally makes one. Gerald Green is so much more the ideal player here, but Stackhouse’s presence is just a bit more intimidating, a good guy who everybody knows not to mess with.

Pierce is the oldest guy at the gym who has enough left in the tank to make us wonder how good he was when he was our age. Well, despite being a force during his 20s, those days are long gone and the Pierce of pickup ball talks more trash than his performance can back up. Watching him sink the dagger is just as, if not more trolling than the super high-usage shooting guard making it. Then, several hours after pickup ball has concluded and when nobody really cares anymore, the Pierce of pickup hoops lets you know on social media that his team won that day, but in the process shows a clear struggle to grasp how social media really works.

Chris Paul is the talker who cuts deep, but Rasheed Wallace will argue with such fire and passion that even if there’s no way his argument his true, you hand him the ball so he shuts up. If this doesn’t happen a few times per game, where Sheed’s team gets the ball over an argument they had no chance in hell of winning, he failed. It’s possible Sheed gets so heated after a play that he walks off the court and never comes back, but he’s so good that he’s a risk worth taking.

We need a scapegoat, which unfortunately for him is Andrea Bargnani, who everybody yells at when they screw up and who everybody blames when their team loses. They can’t get away with anything while everybody else gets away with everything. One reason is because he has no idea how to math, inexplicably taking a 3 when his team has 20 points.

Greg Mason’s (@VotaryofHoops) ultimate pickup team consists  of…

I’m going to go with the “We can’t dunk on you but we’ll still kick your ass squad”: John Stockton, Joe Dumars, Paul Pierce, Sam Perkins and Arvydas Sabonis. This team would open a can of Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson all over everyone.

There is nothing more enjoyable than watching a team full of crafty, unassuming old men run game on everyone at the Y. This team would do just that.

6-1 John Stockton and 6-3 Joe Dumars could walk down a crowded street unnoticed but they will chew you up and spit you back out between the lines. Michael Jordan called Dumars the best defensive player that he ever played against and Baron Davis told Bill Simmons that Stockton was his toughest matchup due to his absolute relentlessness.

Paul Pierce could get you buckets in his sleep, he’s competitive as hell and we’re most certainly going to see a Cuttino Mobley-esque video of a grey haired Pierce absolutely destroying dudes half his age in about 15 years.

Sam Perkins aka “Big Smooth” aka “Sleepy Sam” looked like he played the game in slow motion but he was known for quietly doing all of the little things that help teams win games. For this reason and his ability to step out and hit the three, he gets a spot on my all-unassuming pick-up squad.

Last but not least, I’m rounding out my team with Lithuanian hero, Arvydas Sabonis. I’m not talking about the athletic stud whom coaches from far-and-wide crossed the Iron Curtain to pursue, I’m talking about the lumbering, wrist band wearing Sabonis who graced us with his presence in the late nineties. His virtuoso passing and crafty old man moves fit perfectly on this crew of underestimated stars.

This group might not wow you with their athleticism but their collective IQ, craftiness and grit would blow you off the court.

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