The NBA's Culture Wars, Part 2

While watching the NBA playoffs, I have been intrigued by the number of cultural issues that are being played out on the basketball court. I'm not generally given to over-the-top theorizing, but I feel the need to gradually record some of the observations I've made while watching this year's match-ups. The first part can be found here.

With the recent conclusion of the Suns-Spurs series, the Western Conference continues to evoke the cultural battles of basketball's yesteryear, albeit with a more modern and, in some ways, more subtle twist.

The differences here are less about race (which was so prevalent in the Warriors-Jazz series) than they are about differing opinions on the way basketball is "meant" to be played. And that's a cultural minefield all its own.

Phoenix
At the beginning of the series, I thought that the Suns were the closest thing that we've seen to the "Showtime" Lakers of the 1980s in the 21st century, perhaps with the exception of the Shaq/Kobe Lakers themselves. After seeing Steve Nash cut underneath the basket approximately five hundred times in Games 5 and 6, his passes begging to be picked off more than Eli Manning's, I'm not so sure about that assessment. The fact remains that, most of the time, the Suns were a multi-dimensional team with the most talented starting five in the NBA--athletic, graceful, and poetic.

Like the Warriors, the Suns play a more playground-style game. But Phoenix is truly distinct because of its roster. The Suns are truly the NBA's first "cosmopolitan" team. In fact, it's hard to imagine that this group of players isn't playing in either LA or New York. They've got a French power forward (Boris Diaw), a Brazilian sixth man (Leandro Barbosa), an old-fashioned grinder (Raja Bell, a former Sixer), and a member of the "skipping college" generation (Amare Stoudamire), when you could still do that in the NBA.

And then there's the aforementioned Nash, a Canadian and a two-time NBA MVP. It's impossible to think of the Suns without thinking of Nash nowadays, as he is not only the face of the team but also the de facto face of the entire league--which is revealing in terms of the NBA's business plan, as Nash is the highest-profile white player in the game. Yet Nash's game places his playmaking style and panache front and center, as opposed to the methodical, textbook style of play of his former running mate, Dirk Nowitzki. He's practically the anti-Bird.

All this makes the Suns something very unusual in the basketball world: a bona-fide subversive team in a cultural sense, a roundball rainbow coalition that is the champion of hipster b-ball fans across the world.

San Antonio
Approximately 980 miles from the epicenter of the NBA trendiness is a team that never seems to change: the San Antonio Spurs. This is most certainly your father's NBA team. With the exception of actual Spurs fans, they play a style of basketball celebrated by virtually nobody. Compared to some of the more transition-oriented teams, they are plodding, methodical, and seemingly joyless. Yet this approach is not without successful results. The Spurs are the picture of consistency to a maddening degree--they've only missed the playoffs four times in their 30-year NBA history. Tim Duncan is as much a staple of May sweeps as "super-sized" NBC sitcoms.

The presence of Duncan also has a lot to do with the way the Spurs are defined culturally. Duncan is one of the least expressive players in the league today. He's so quiet and workmanlike, you forget that he's won two MVP awards and could easily have a couple more. But it's hard to expect excitement from somebody nicknamed "The Big Fundamental."

Surprisingly, Duncan's supporting cast also resembles the cultural cornucopia that surrounds Nash in Phoenix, including an Argentinean (Manu Ginobli), a Frenchman (Tony Parker), and arguably the former "highest profile white player" in Brent Barry. They've also got plenty of other recognizable stars and semi-stars that have achieved varying degrees of success: Michael Finley, Robert Horry, and the like. So why doesn't America love the Spurs too?

The simple answer is that San Antonio is a little bit too familiar: bland, safe, and stale. It's gotten to the point where a recent ESPN front page story claimed that LeBron James was the only "superstar" left in this year's playoffs, presumably considering Duncan the antithesis of NBA cool. And, to a point, that's true. It's no secret that NBA Commissioner David Stern is making overtures to capture a more "mainstream" (read: conservative) audience--remember the dress code?

Well, the Spurs are the poster team for this transformation. Everything about them indicates this, from Manu cutting his hair and developing a mid-scalp bald spot like a middle-aged stockbroker to a system that squanders Parker's incredible speed (he could be the best point guard in the league; we just haven't been able to see it).

The Series
Not since Breaking Away had there been a clearer example of "the townies versus the gownies" like the first few games of Suns-Spurs. The Suns ran the floor, the Spurs pounded it inside, and all was right with the world.

Then, in Game 4, a series of events occurred that irrevocably changed the momentum of the entire playoffs twice in the span of two minutes. Trailing two games to one on the road, the Suns produced an incredible 14-2 run in the last 120 seconds of the fourth quarter to even up the series. Phoenix played remarkable basketball in that final quarter--so remarkable, in fact, that it might just be the apex of the Nash Era. This is because in the waning seconds, with the Spurs intentionally making those clock-stopping fouls that turn so many games into a free throw-shooting contest, Horry literally body-checked Nash into the scorer's table.

This incident shifted the momentum of the series back the Spurs all on its own, as the NBA's current rules punish not only the perpetrators of flagrant fouls but also players who "leave the bench area" to protect their teammates in any potential scuffle. The subsequent suspension of two Suns who meandered a couple steps onto the court, Stoudamire and Diaw, affected Phoenix much more than the loss of the relatively expendable Horry affected the Spurs. As such, this has led many to question the fairness of the "bench rule" when a coach could potentially sacrifice a lesser player in the hopes of getting the other team's stars to react negatively.

The Nash-Horry imbroglio revealed even more about the NBA's culture wars. The Spurs played much of the series in the vein of the "Bad Boy" Pistons of the 1980s, a calculated mayhem designed to send the Suns over the edge. Yet, somehow, San Antonio's conservative image suffered little: a great hypocrisy considering the Spurs' outright thuggery and the Warriors' crimes of passion, which produced a series of commentators who admitted their "uneasiness" cheering for underdogs who also appeared to be "thuggish."

Lost in the shuffle is the justified (and some not-so-justified, but understandable) antipathy towards the Spurs. Basketball fans have been both robbed of the potential for more highly entertaining play and bamboozled into believing that this outcome was fair--that the Spurs are doing things the "right" way with boring and unsportsmanlike basketball, and that Daniel Stern's desire to broaden the NBA's fanbase to people like my mom (whose entitled opinion is that "all the writing on some players arms" is not something she wants to see) had nothing to do with our current Jazz-Spurs conference finals reality.

In the interest of full disclosure (as if it's not obvious by this point), I desperately wanted the Suns to win this series, if only because I'm sick of the Spurs and I have these delusions of grandeur about being a hipster. The Western Conference is dead to me now.