The joy of watching meaningless NBA basketball

As the NBA plays a number of exhibition games in the coming days, they may not matter in the standing, but they are still a treat to watch.

After a four-month absence, basketball has returned. This week has a bevy of exhibition games as a prelude to the official restart of the season on July 30 and though it’s odd to be watching these games without fans, or the game operations that we are used to seeing, viewers are not likely to complain at this point. Most are going to be eager to watch NBA games regardless of the specifics right now, but there’s something compelling and joyous about being able to watch games that are purely meaningless. The stakes are low as they can possibly be, which gives teams an excuse to try out things they would not feel comfortable doing for the first time in a regular-season match-up.

On Wednesday, the Denver Nuggets rolled out a starting lineup of Jerami Grant, Bol Bol, Mason Plumlee, Paul Millsap, and Nikola Jokic as the team’s nominal point guard. Of those five players, the shortest is Paul Millsap at a mere 6-foot-7. While it is not indicative of any greater trend or even likely to be a strategy the Nuggets repeat at any point once the games start counting, it was a giant repudiation of the league’s move towards small ball and was therefore a revelation of sorts. Insignificant as it actually may have been, it was a delight to watch Jokic initiating the offense from the perimeter rather than the high post, bringing the ball up the court like a super-sized John Stockton.

It also provided a chance for Bol Bol to shine in his first game as a professional, scoring 16 points while also garnering 10 rebounds and 6 blocks. Early in the game, there was a glorious sequence where he blocked a shot, corralled the rebound, then brought the ball up the court and nailed a pull-up three. It ruled.

If you were scrolling through Twitter yesterday as the Nuggets game was going on, you would have thought Bol had scored three times as many points as he did in light of how rapturously and euphorically his performance was being spoken about. Part of this is surely due to there not having been any NBA action for so long, but another is the joy of seeing a 7-foot-4 player do things that a player of his size does not normally do, even in the era of the stretch big. It’d be foolhardy to treat the performance as anything more than it was — especially since it came in a random exhibition game after a four-month lay-off — and make any big predictions about Bol’s future or how he may be able to help the Nuggets in their postseason run, but in the moment, it was delightful and sometimes that’s enough.

What NBA craziness could we see next?

While no other team in the first day’s slate of games went quite as wild as Mike Malone and the Nuggets, hopefully, some will follow their lead in the coming week, leaning into the inherent absurdity of the whole situation through weird lineups, offbeat strategies, and by giving minutes to players who don’t often make it onto the floor otherwise. Let’s see the Rockets go all in on small ball and play Russell Westbrook at center. Let’s have Nick Nurse utilize a box and one on some hapless player as if they are Stephen Curry in last summer’s Finals. Why not play Jimmy Butler with the Heat’s worst players and see if he can will them to victory somehow? Ben Simmons could play a game where he refuses to shoot from within the paint and Ja Morant could spend an entire half where he does nothing but try to dunk on as many people as possible. And if he’s feeling truly audacious, Frank Vogel could let Dion Waiters and J.R. Smith run the offense together, which would almost certainly allow everyone watching to transcend to another plane of existence.

When watching and analyzing the NBA, so much energy goes towards evaluating who won and why, the specifics of the strategies being used and how they can be best optimized moving forward. Tape is broken down in the hopes of seeing potential areas of growth for each individual player and debates are had about what moves each team should make, if they should scrap it all and rebuild or just retool a bit in the hopes of making the playoffs or contending for a title. A large portion of this work is valuable and worthwhile, but it often takes us away from what makes the game so wondrous in the first place. These exhibitions, inherently pointless as they are, allow us to just exult in the fact that basketball exists in the first place and that we’re lucky enough to watch some of the most transcendent athletes in the world on a regular basis. If there is a benefit to the league’s extended, unplanned absence, it may be that fans are more likely to welcome its mere presence in a new way.

The seeding games start soon, and after a few weeks of that, we get the games that really matter when the playoffs begin. But I do hope that in the midst of those matchups, sure to be played with extreme intensity and passion, that the excitement felt this week remains moving forward. Of course, I also hope that some weird personnel and strategic decisions by coaches remain as well, though unfortunately, that seems less likely.