Aesthet-Knicks: How do we define “good” basketball?

The Knicks have been winning a lot more this season, but they’ve often won “ugly.” But does winning itself make basketball enjoyable? Is it possible to play an aesthetically-pleasing brand of losing basketball?

If you’re one of those people who feels like “ball is life,” who caught the basketball bug at some point and never let it go, I bet you’ve found yourself trying to explain your obsession to someone else by saying, “Basketball is art.” I’m positive this makes sense to every single person reading The Strickland right now, because to get here, you already need to be in that deep. What happens in this space isn’t ESPN’s First Take, although sometimes I think Shwin’s energy can approach Stephen A. Smith if you get him onto just the right topic. 

I got to thinking recently, what makes for “good” basketball, the kind of basketball you just enjoy in the moment without concern for winning and losing. On the flip, what makes for “bad” basketball in the same way? It seems important to me because winning basketball always feels good in its own way, but the satisfaction of looking at the standings and seeing something you’re excited about isn’t the same as sitting around watching a game, invested in the mid-second quarter, just because you love what it feels like to be deeply engaged in the sport. It’s also easier to entertain this idea when the Knicks are hovering around .500 at mid-season instead of 20 games out. I’m feeling greedy right now, thinking about what I’d prefer to be experiencing, instead of watching 20 hours a week of prospect videos, crying into my pillow at night. We’re getting winning basketball now, and when we’re not, we’re still mostly getting competitive basketball. 

To help you conjure up this frame of mind, consider the recent win vs. Minnesota. Consider what it felt like to be up by 21 points in that game — and then what it felt like to eek out an ugly crash landing when everyone walked away, but not without need of some immediate therapy. How much was the 21-point lead built on beautiful basketball vs. some ugly incompetence from the Timberwolves? For my part, the Knicks have had 5-point leads during this season that felt a million times better than that 21-point difference. They’ve lost a few games this season that were far more enjoyable to experience as a fan. Part of that feeling comes from not knowing the outcome when you’re in the moment. That’s what I’m talking about here. What kind of basketball feels best when everything else is set aside?

Now, I’m going to spend one paragraph getting a little PhD on you. I’m really writing about the subject of aesthetics here. It’s philosophical and phenomenological. It runs deep. The great 20th century American philosopher John Dewey wrote a lot about art and experience — in fact, he wrote a book literally called “Art and Experience” in 1934. To Dewey, art had been rendered impotent by our fascination with artifacts. We mistakenly take the object of creation as art, hang it on the wall, and consider it worthy of appreciation if it looks pretty. Art, to Dewey, is the experience of creation and the appreciation of all our sensory engagements is the level at which we understand aesthetics. Our imagination is the source of aesthetic appreciation as we use all of our faculties to call something into existence. 

Now, if I take that basic explanation of aesthetics and apply it to hoops, you might imagine that playing basketball is where the action’s at. Players know what feels good and right. You know when you’re in the zone and how good that feels. You know how good ball movement feels when you make the pass that leads to the pass that leads to the open shot or layup. Our favorite pros demonstrate that joy when they celebrate each other’s success, whooping it up and chest bumping their teammates when the opposing coach calls a time out. In part, those of us in the audience appreciate the spectacle of basketball from the arena, bleachers, or on television because it’s likely that we’ve experienced the act of creation ourselves at whichever level we’ve played the game. Even vicariously, we recall some feeling from deep inside our memory that satisfies the soul. We know “good” basketball when we see it, in part, because we have a storehouse of memories, we and memories of sensations, born in our own playing days.

Mostly, I’m interested in the phenomenon of “audiencing” here. I just made that word up. Don’t hate the player, hate the game. Verbing shit is fun. When we’re participants in the spectacle of basketball, primarily on television, we’re co-creating the game as it unfolds. We know what we want to see, in part, from that internal map we’ve created of what “good” basketball feels like. Of course, the total experience of any basketball game can’t be divorced from the score or the season record. We also bring every storyline, pet peeve, and personal grievance to the games we watch. Yes, we watch them in the moment, but every moment is embedded in some broader context. That said, the Knicks are playing mostly winning basketball — I feel happy, I remember the last 20 years and all the mayhem, anger, and humiliation, but I still know what I like to feel when I’m experiencing the unfolding of a game. 

Good passing is aesthetically pleasing. The experience of following the ball as it flies around the perimeter and back, eventually finding the hand of an open shooter or cutter, is beautiful. It’s the high art of the sport. Watching someone get dunked on is aesthetically pleasing because it taps into the innate desire to physically, emotionally, and spiritually dominate one’s rival. A beautiful jumper is aesthetically pleasing because it’s the most attainable-seeming aspect of this game of giants and Olympians. Everyone knows the super unathletic dude who shows up at the playground, gets picked last, and then rules the court because no one can stop him from bombing away. There are so many aspects of the game that tap into that deep sense of aesthetic pleasure.

Thinking about these things, it occurred to me that the overall success of any team can train the observer in a new set of aesthetics. The ‘90s Knickerbockers are the perfect example of this phenomenon. Sometimes it’s fun to play hard-nosed, physical basketball, banging away on your friends and neighbors to exert some aggression and experience a mild sort of battle high. Mostly, that style of play isn’t as televisually friendly as the current idiom of the sport, where players fly around, running off screens, burying threes and using the space to get all the way to the basket uncontested. The speed and skill of the current game is loads more attractive than the ‘90s grind-it-out style. 

“But I liked the way the Knicks played the game back in the day,” you say? Yeah, so did I. It was a tough game. It spoke to the way New Yorkers think of themselves. I get it. But, I would argue that we learned to appreciate the nuances of that rough and tumble version of basketball because over time it got us closer to a championship than we’d been since the early 1970s. We liked looking at the standings and seeing 50-plus win seasons. We liked being feared in our own building. We liked giving Michael and Scottie a shot in the chops and making them pick each other up off the floor. Anyway, if we couldn’t beat them, we could sleep at night knowing that we made them feel every second of it. 

In some way, that learned appreciation is a bit like learning to like beer. I’m sure someone out there reading this will say, “I liked beer from the first time I ever tried it. Beer is just good.” The same thing can be said about coffee, two staples of adulting. (There’s that verbing game again. I’m not sorry.) Mostly, when a grown up gives you beer or coffee to try, the correct response is, “What the f*&k is wrong with you old people?” Over time, you learn to appreciate the nuances of beer and coffee, and the different types of beer and coffee, not to mention 1000 other weird things you probably shouldn’t like. We refine our senses to appreciate more of the map that life presents us. Thank goodness for that. It’s where growth comes from, and it’s what keeps our senses from becoming atrophied for lack of experience and adventure. Learning to enjoy ‘90s Knicks basketball is just like that. There’s every reason to have enjoyed that version of the sport, but is it your ideal? That’s where I’m at with this piece.

Be greedy for a second. What style of basketball would you most prefer to experience while watching your Knicks win basketball games? Which style would make for the most enjoyable, aesthetically-pleasing experience night in and night out, win or lose? Those people old enough to have experienced it firsthand will tell you the most beautiful basketball they’ve ever experienced was the championship Knicks teams of the ‘70s. Some will point to “Showtime” Lakers. I’ve always been partial to the Pete Carril-inspired Sacramento Kings teams of the early 2000s. I leave it up to you to decide your answer to this. I don’t have an answer that will objectively pin down what “good” basketball is like. I suspect there are some commonalities, if we start to converse about this subject. But, in the end, we are co-creators of the experience of basketball when we sit in front of our screens and tune in. So much of it is subjective. Let the conversation that’s born from this little piece deliberate something objective about basketball aesthetics, as they’re defined in our community.