Outside The NBA

I knew I would like this book. I first heard about it on TrueHoop, where Henry Abbott made it sound very interesting. I can’t get enough of the types of insights Abbott posted there, so I knew there was a chance I would love this book, maybe even put it on the level of FreeDarko’s Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac. At that point, though, I still didn’t exactly know what I was getting into. After reading Chris Ballard’s The Art Of a Beautiful Game, I can’t say I’ve ever enjoyed a basketball book more than this one.

Chuck Klosterman has said that all reviews are autobiographical – they tell you more about the person doing the reviewing than the actual content being discussed. When I’m telling you that this is one of my favourite books ever, I’m telling you about myself. And it’s possible that I am the last person on earth who should be reviewing this book, as I am predisposed to loving it. With pro basketball, I’m a glass-half-full guy. For the podcast we recorded on Tuesday, my Outside co-conspirators wanted to have a segment on “players we hate”, but I wasn’t really up for it. Julian declared that I had a case of “like-itis”, as I could excitedly rattle off a list of players I like at a moment’s notice, but didn’t want to come up with a list of the guys that bother me. I will readily admit that I’d rather focus on positives than negatives when it comes to basketball. In my defense, though, I’ll say that there’s plenty to love. These guys work tirelessly to master their craft and we are lucky to be able to see the end result of their years and years of labour. So, knowing that this is how I feel about the game, you have to know that I’m going to be totally down with a book that is all about getting inside the heads of those who are masters at certain aspects of it. There’s no snark to be found, no cynicism in Ballard’s endeavour, just a genuine appreciation for how the game is played at the highest level. He talks to Ben Wallace about rebounding, Steve Kerr about entering a game cold and shooting three-pointers, Shane Battier about the finer details of defense, and Steve Nash about the relationship between his personality in everyday life and how he runs a basketball team. If this stuff doesn’t interest you, I’m afraid we don’t have any common ground. Stay away from this book.

If you’re like me, though, then you’ll find this book making you more excited about basketball. It’ll make you want to go play some pick-up ball, work on individual parts of your own game, or, if you don’t play, it’ll get you fired up about watching these guys from night-to-night, maybe even changing the way you look at the game a little bit. You know those “ohhhhh” moments when Hubie Brown perfectly breaks down a replay, showing you a subtle move or fake you missed the first time? You’ll have those, reading this book. The difference: much of the time, the insights will come directly from today’s players. Can you imagine asking Kobe Bryant about a specific move and then immediately witnessing the man perform the move on you? What if, after schooling you, he demanded that you try it out on him? This is the kind of stuff that happened to the author of this book. Kobe is an extreme example of this, but if you’re extremely skilled at something you have to be a bit of a geek about it, and Ballard is fantastic at drawing this out for the enjoyment of geeks like us.

Ben Golliver has already posted an excellent, thoughtful review of the book on BlazersEdge – read it if you haven’t. I disagree with one of his conclusions, though – he says that if you’re the type of person that has League Pass and reads blogs like this, you might be disappointed in the book because it tells us some things we already know. Okay, fine, you might be disappointed. I wasn’t, though. Not even close. Yes, I know that Kobe Bryant is a ruthless competitor who is absolutely obsessed with basketball and has arrived where he is now by outworking everybody else. I know that Shane Battier loves being the underdog, pays particular attention to offensive players’ tendencies, and is fanatical about efficiency. None of this knowledge in any way detracted from my enjoyment of the chapters about these players, though. If anything, it added to it – I already feel like I “know” these guys and appreciate what makes them great, and reading anecdotes that bring their personalities to the forefront reinforces the respect and admiration that was already there. I didn’t read this book for educational purposes (although I certainly did learn a lot); I read it because the subject matter was inherently interesting to me. Again, it might just be me, but I will always enjoy hearing about how this personal stuff manifests itself. If you have stories of Battier and Chuck Hayes arguing about how to defend LeBron James, I want to hear them. And I always will.

If you get nothing else from The Art Of A Beautiful Game, you should have an appreciation for the best of the best. In Ball Don’t Lie chats, I’ve seen numerous people ask KD who he thinks is the league’s most underrated player. His answer: Chris Paul, LeBron James, or Dwyane Wade. And he’s right. We can get spoiled by these guys; we watch them all the time and we sometimes forget how truly amazing they are. To reach their level, it takes an incredible work ethic and an extremely rare drive to keep improving after already achieving great success. So much of what they do comes from not just the coaches they’ve had throughout their basketball lives, but the time they put in at the gym and on the court during the off-season, the way they study their own games, and their dedication to maximizing what they can get out of their bodies. Take this quote from Idan Ravin, a lawyer-turned trainer who has worked with guys like Carmelo Anthony, Gilbert Arenas, and Chris Paul (p. 160): “The average player may talk about girls, or cars. You can give me the great players, and money’s never part of the discussion. The great ones want to win a ring, want to make an All-Star team. They’re motivated by each other. CP is wondering what Kobe is doing right now. Gilbert is thinking about LeBron.” This is the undercurrent of much of the book, especially those chapters involving James, Bryant, Paul, and the most missed man on the planet, Yao Ming. Once you reach a certain level of fame and wealth, the challenge is no longer just to make it. The challenge is to master tons of little things within the game, in an effort to give yourself every advantage possible.

In TAOABG, Chris Ballard is trying to give back to basketball what the game has given to him. When he’s expounding on, for example, the brilliance of Dennis Rodman’s rebounding, he’s not trying to convince you of anything. Rather, he’s sharing some of the wisdom that he’s come across in his travels as a journalist covering the NBA. He’s trying to give you a greater understanding and appreciation of the art of basketball, a game he has come to love. In this, he succeeds wildly. I don’t know how to put it any plainer than this: get this book. Now.

Here is an excerpt, on Hoops Addict.