10 BIG3 matchups we can’t wait to see
By Miles Wray
The BIG3 3-on-3 basketball league is going to keep your summer loaded with high-level hoops. Here are 10 matchups we’re most looking forward too.
The BIG3 basketball league, triumphantly debuting tomorrow at the Barclays Center, is going to be absolutely off the hook. Most of your favorite irresponsible ball-handlers from the early- to mid-aughts are spending their summer traveling this great nation playing halfcourt 3-on-3. It’s a crazy daydream brought gloriously to life, down to the ridiculous 4-point circles from way downtown. Big ups to Ice Cube and Roger Mason, Jr., the unlikely duo leading this league to its inevitable place in all our hearts.
In late April, the league’s eight team captains — from Allen Iverson to Brian Scalabrine — held the inaugural BIG3 draft, a team-building debacle that no doubt made you proud of your GM no matter which NBA team you follow. Now that each six-man roster is set, the eight teams will all be traveling to eight regular season rounds, putting on a full-league quadruple-header at each stop. After a playoff round — to be staged, fantastically, in Seattle — the championship game will be held in Las Vegas on Aug. 26.
BIG3 is so loaded with huge personalities that every last game will start getting you nostalgic, sending you running to YouTube for handfuls of grainy, pre-HD highlight reels. But here are the ten individual match-ups — the game within this trash-talk-heavy game — that I’ll be looking out for.
10. Hakim Warrick (3 Headed Monsters) v. James “Flight” White (Trilogy)
The modern NBA has, unfortunately, phased out players like Warrick and White: wings who dunk as their main/only method of scoring. Their presence in BIG3 — where one imagines that rims will rarely be protected by big, hulking centers — is most definitely welcome.
The bigger question, really, is whether Warrick and White — both 34-years-old — still have the hops necessary to pop rims, or if Father Time has taken their wings away. The good news is that Warrick was still flushing over people with regularity last year in Australia. (Recent footage of White, who last played in Iran, is a bit harder to find.)
For some reason I can’t figure out, Warrick is named the reserve on his team, while Eddie Basden — who played all of 19 games for the Bulls in 2005-06 — is not. Head coach Gary Payton better keep an eye on those rotations.