BASKETBALL FEELINGS – Détails, épisodes et analyse

New Yorker staff writer, Louisa Thomas, in conversation for her Nuggets 'Exits' selection in the annual Basketball Feelings series.

"I like interrogating the thought process. The thought process is more interesting to me than anything else."

NBA Writer for the Action Network and industry mainstay, Matt Moore, on the era of the fanalyst, recognizing your own biases, how fun it is to follow historic threads through basketball, fighting with editors, trying to get better at not replying to negative comments, not imposter syndrome but comparative syndrome, the Nuggets, the Grizzlies, and the biggest evolutions in Matt’s career.

"Could it be a close friend, a casual acquaintance, the NBA’s all-time assist leader, George Gervin, waiting in the breakfast buffet line? Oscar Robertson, standing in front of an elevator door?"

Andrew Schlecht, Taylor Sharp, Jerome Cheng, Kyle Mann, Michael Pina, and Seerat Sohi share their favourite and still sleep deprived parts of NBA All-Star Weekend. Back to regularly scheduled (and regular length) episodes from here on out.

For the 23rd episode of the podcast, former guests and BASKETBALL FEELINGS contributors give their "Michael Jordan baseball feeling", a.k.a. the feeling they thought they were done and over with, only to eventually come back to it in life.

Featuring Josh Gondelman, Seerat Sohi, William Lou, Jordan Ligons, Roundball Rock (Joey Devine and Sean Keane), and Rob Mahoney.

You need forces that big, and ideas that big, and images that striking and powerful to explain the kind of drama you get from basketball.

I cold emailed Sam Anderson in the first summer of the pandemic. He’d just written a feature for the New York Times Magazine on the NBA Bubble — which was anxious and strange and sad and beautiful — that I’d read while I was alone in the woods north of Toronto. It made me feel a lot of things at once that I hadn’t realized the pandemic muted, which was kind of exactly what I needed at the time. He didn’t reply for a long time but now, knowing Sam a bit better, it wasn’t personal. Because when he did it was incredibly kind and funny, and I knew I’d get him into Basketball Feelings some way, some how.

We talked about the origins of his own basketball feelings, involving patient, now deeply ingrained shooting drills and basic components of the game, plus homemade collages with cut-outs of NBA stars from magazines. I asked him to make sense of the Nets based on the profile he wrote about Kevin Durant last year, and why our analogies for the game always involve cosmology, including the gravitational pull between Durant and Russell Westbrook.

We also talked about the Bubble and how weird it was, the tragic history of the Portland Trail Blazers through Sam’s own fandom (he was wearing the same hat when we talked that he is in that photo with one of the world's last two surviving northern white rhinos), interviews, more about Russ, the secret simplicity of watching game warm-ups, and what makes basketball so mythic.

My basement was being dug out when we recorded and the occasional guttural vibrations felt then and sound now like the universe talking back.

To eliminate narrative is to me like whenever there are those ads that are from a really duplicitous looking dude, in a strangely expensive suit, who’s like, “LISTEN TO THIS BOOK IN 38 SECONDS, AND YOU’LL BECOME A MILLIONAIRE”.

I knew Isle McElroy first as a Raptors fan and an editor at the literary magazine, Gulf Coast. I remember their joy when the Raptors won the 2018-2019 Championship and after that, remember them disentangling from the team a little as they got ready for their own title run. Isle wrote the novel The Atmospherians, which came out in spring 2021 to rave reviews and the kind of humming disquiet that comes when a book or piece of art has really hit on and crystallized something.

We talked about that disentanglement, the amorphousness of fandom and how we grow in and away from it, and fandom’s aesthetics. We also gave book recommendations for players, talked about the perception that narrative is harmful, or the generalized fear of it in sports. That we are biased as writers to it as a tool in telling stories but also when you pay attention, it’s everywhere. Even in the arguments against it. Even in stats.

Isle’s novel, which is now out in paperback, can be picked up wherever you like to buy books.

I’m in my Basketball Feelings right now, in a bad way.

I’m realizing at the end of all these recordings, because we are chatting on Zoom with cameras on, that they just feel like getting off a really good, long, rambly phone call where you walk around your place from room to room, pick things up, put them away, fiddle with stuff, smile out the window, lie down, get up, and laugh a lot. I’d told Ashtyn the rundown was Flagrant, Russ and a Portland temperature check, but that the podcast was “mostly talking around things”, and boy, did we deliver.

Ashtyn Butuso (I should introduce her first) is a cofounder of the wildly smart, beautiful, very cool and desperately needed Flagrant Magazine, she’s also instantly disarming, generous and very kind, and one of the funniest and best dressed people in the expanding vortex that is NBA Twitter. One thing about learning people through a vacuum like NBA Twitter is you see their fandom first, before you know them, and it pre-informs you a little, sometimes to its detriment. So I wanted to know why and where — if she could pin it — her Blazers support started.

We also got into the origin story of Flagrant, like way back to when and how everyone met (this is a success story across state lines), why Russell Westbrook makes so many people so mad, delved into Damian Lillard hopefully chilling, the population of Canada (I’m very wrong, Ashtyn is closer), fans as martyrs, the wonder of modern mail, Jerry Krause, grocery store cakes, and wanting to live in Wyoming.

I know I said the first episode of the BASKETBALL FEELINGS podcast was going to be for paid subscribers, but then I thought well, it would be nice for everyone to hear the story of how the basketballfeelings.com domain came to find me via Jodie Layne.

Jodie lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and had her own plans for her own Basketball Feelings (some of it had to do with the skincare regimes of NBA players — Serge Ibaka we know you’re doing hydrafacials, anyway we talk about it on the pod!), but her life went in several different directions and rather than letting the domain expire she tracked yours truly down.

We talk about her finding me, trying very hard not to sound like a scammer via cold email, her 76ers fandom, Bobi and Tobi, and Ben Simmons — but I made sure to ask if she even wanted to go there first.

This inaugural ep also has to be free so that if you so choose to become a paid subscriber to this newsletter, I can prompt you to do that now:

If you’re already a subscriber and would like to opt into a paid subscription, you can click that button and do so for the price of $7/month or $70/year. Full disclosure, I went with 7 because of Kyle Lowry but I’m not going to make a taking charges joke about your money.

The podcast will be exclusive for paid subscribers going forward, and will feature some of your media, player and basketball people favs, and there will be bonus content, like player interviews I have, or things like the BASKETBALL FEELINGS FEELINGS DRAFT going forward.

If you do decide to become a paid subscriber — Thank you! And if you decide to stay on as a unpaid subscriber for the weekly newsletter, which stays free — Thank you, too!