What we lose when we lose the NBA

With the NBA season postponed, millions of fans are struggling to cope with its absence which prompts one to consider just why basketball means so much to so many.

On the night of June 19, 2016, I was watching Game 7 of the NBA Finals with two of my oldest and closest friends. We gathered at a house in suburban Akron where we had watched dozens of games before, but this one came with an added weight those other nights hadn’t possessed. Most of the time, when we watched basketball together, there was nothing at stake, nothing like the palpable anxiety we were sharing as LeBron and the Cavs tried to finish their impossible comeback.

None of us were diehard Cavs fans, but it felt to me like the psyche of our city, our region, our state was on the line. During the game’s final minutes, as Andre Iguodala received a pass for what looked like an easy lay-up, as Kyrie Irving pulled up for 3, as Stephen Curry missed a 3 to respond, and as Marreese Speights threw up a desperate shot as time expired, that would have been meaningless even if it had gone in, none of us spoke until the buzzer sounded and we leaped out of our chairs and hugged each other. It did not matter that the Cavaliers won in a vacuum, but at that moment it felt like a ghost had been exorcised.

If you had asked any of us just what that victory meant, none of us could have told you except that it meant a lot. I remember my friend driving me home as everyone honked at one another in jubilation and I returned to the sight of people literally dancing in the streets of my neighborhood. The rubber plants weren’t coming back, the jobs that had been lost would not be regained, and the economic devastation that had affected the entire Rust Belt had not been halted, but for this night, we were victorious and that counted for something even if it was not quantifiable or tangible in any way apart from the bodies gyrating on West Market Street.

It’s easy in times less perilous than these to credulously claim that sports really, truly matter,  that they don’t merely reflect conflicts and changes within our society, but help to shape them in ways that may be more symbolic than concrete, though nevertheless real. But a moment such as this — a pandemic bringing life as we have known to an immediate halt — makes such ideas about the significance of sports seem a bit misguided, while also clarifying just what it is about them that provides such meaning to so many people.

Many of us now feel the desire for a distraction far more than normal. We are stuck at home, knowing that staying in is the responsible thing to do even though that knowledge brings little satisfaction. It’s not that we are bereft of options. There’s plenty of streaming services and tons of options on each of them (I personally can’t recommend the Criterion Channel enough). We all have stacks of unread books somewhere and the new Animal Crossing came out last week, but watching movie after movie or spending hours playing video games is just a distraction. It doesn’t actually help you forget the reason why we suddenly have all this free time, or why live basketball games aren’t available as one of those distractions.

When LeBron James and the Miami Heat lost in the 2011 Finals to the Mavericks, he said after their Game 6 defeat that “all the people who are rooting for me to fail, at the end of the day, they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today, they got the same personal problems they had today.”

It was a petty and ill-advised thing to say, but it’s also essentially true and unintentionally hits upon what makes basketball mean so much to so many. We all have personal problems. Many have a job they don’t love that also fails to pay them enough to live comfortably. Even before the inexorable spread of this pandemic, the world outside has been scary enough, with a government that flirts with fascism regularly and an opposition party that thrives on moral indignation rather than actual, well, you know, functional opposition. Even some privileged folks with the ability to otherwise pretend all is well when it very clearly is not so for many have been forced to face this reality as democracy erodes, inequality increases, and crises abound.

And while it’s true that sports are far from apolitical, when you’re watching Giannis Antetokounmpo get from half-court to the rim in just a handful of strides before dunking on the poor soul who attempted to stop him or seeing Russell Westbrook bound down the court on a fastbreak with the intensity of a just-freed lion, it’s difficult to think about anything besides the mixture of grace, power, and speed on display. When you see Trae Young nutmeg a defender or pull up for an effortless 3 from the logo, it can feel as if the rest of the world momentarily vanishes. Great art does this to us, offering us a trace of beauty that can bring us out of ourselves and our circumstances for a singular moment. While it’s cliche to call sports ‘poetry in motion,’ it can have a similar effect, allowing fans to lose themselves in a spontaneous beauty that is not always as readily accessible as we may hope.

Sports are so ubiquitous that their absence also makes clear just how awry things have gone. The NBA has never canceled a whole bulk of games like this before for reasons other than labor disputes that significantly shortened the 1998-99 and 2011-12 seasons. Never before has the season ended without a definitive champion and not for several decades has the future of the league felt so uncertain. It’s not that the NBA is in a particularly precarious situation relative to other enterprises, but that any predictions about what the world may look like in six months or a year are bound to change from day to day until a fuller picture develops. The NBA was wise to shut down the league as quickly as they did though with the pandemic spreading as quickly and widely as it is, making any predictions about when league play will resume would be foolhardy.

Basketball will return someday and though the world it returns to will be very different from the one it left earlier this month, our desire for it, and the needs it meets are sure to be the same. It is not just a distraction, or a routine presence in our lives that reassure us all is well, or a chance to witness transcendence, but all of these things at once.

Sports cannot provide us the things we need most. The NBA cannot create a vaccine, cannot provide insurance to those who lack it, or fix the structural problems that plague our nation. Easy as this can be to forget while watching the games themselves, the NBA is a business, after all. But I am learning more and more that finding and cherishing small pockets of joy is important and basketball provides one of those night after night for millions of fans around the world. It cannot solve a crisis, but it can ameliorate some of the fear caused by it; it cannot fill the empty space next to you, but it can bring you enough delight that you temporarily forget about it. And while basketball may not matter as much as we may like to believe, joy is something to cherish wherever one can grasp it and without the NBA, for many, finding it has become just a little bit harder.