Basketball Under Capitalist Absolutism

Tracing the effects of neoliberal capitalism in the transformation in the style of professional basketball

The kind of capitalism we are living through can be described in a number of ways, but capitalist absolutism perhaps best describes the effects of neoliberalism. Once politics was completely subjected to market logic, which is what the bourgeois political project of neoliberalism is all about, market logic seeped into all aspects of social interaction, cultural production, education, and even sports. 

We can see the cultural effects of capitalist absolutism clearly reflected in professional basketball. Not only is the NBA by far the most relevant and popular sport, it might be the most popular and dynamic cultural entity period, other than gaming and Marvel movies. It's the only twelve month a year sport at this point—we can usually go for long stretches in the NFL offseason without a big story popping up, other than something about Tom Brady being weird. Ratings get bigger every season for the NBA, while the NFL fluctuates, and baseball and hockey have been in nosedives for years. Attendance is down at all the sports except for the NBA, which keeps setting records. (Well, before Covid World at least).

More people know more NBA players than any other sport—LeBron has more name recognition than every baseball, hockey, and football star combined, and he's not even the biggest NBA star anymore (that would probably be Giannis or Luka). It’s the only sport that continues having Hollywood movies made that tie into it—Kyrie Irving made a movie a few years ago, LeBron made another Space Jam movie. When was the last time a football or baseball movie was made? Kevin Costner made a couple of like 15 years ago, that’s about it.

Everyone likes the NBA, not just one group of people. Baseball fans, hockey fans, and football fans are all of a certain type, more or less, but the NBA really is for everyone, all ages, all races, smarts, dumbs, you name it. 

Since basketball reflects our cultural moment most completely, it is also most subject to the effects of capitalist absolutism. I've noticed a change in the way the NBA is covered in the last few years. Sports journalism has been completely given over to the control of the wonk. It started in baseball with sabermetrics, and eventually seeped into basketball coverage. Everything is about efficiency, player ratings, and so on. The highest compliment that you hear an NBA player get from media these days is that he's "efficient." This is a new development. We used to hear about players being winners, being good teammates, having high basketball IQs, being tough, and so on. Now it's all just about efficiency ratings. 

Even more than data journalism infiltrating sports, ownership logic has become the de facto way that it is covered. All you hear about the NBA anymore is whether this or that player deserves a max contract, if he's overpaid, should he be traded, how much cap space would moving him clear out, how much room a team has to sign big free agents in the offseason, and so on. Not only during sports talk shows, but during the games themselves, announcers talk more about potential trades, contract situations, and the vagaries of the basketball market, instead of commenting on the game. It is now routine for amazing basketball plays to happen while the announcers ignore it to blather about cap space instead. 

The game itself matters less than catering to the ownership fantasy, the managerial fantasy, the data nerd fantasy, of assembling the perfect, most efficient unit. Here we see the apotheosis of working conditions under capitalist absolutism, as described by Franco Berardi in his book Futurability: "Capital no longer recruits people, but buys packets of time, separated from their interchangeable and occasional bearers....He or she is only an interchangeable producer of micro-fragments of recombinant semiosis..." The players themselves do not matter, only their impact on the team's balance sheet, and their contribution to the team's overall efficient output. Their situation has become a perfect expression of the flexible worker under capitalist absolutism.

Even the style of play itself has been completely given over to efficiency. So-called "long two point shots" have become virtually forbidden in the current NBA. Instead, all players are coached to shoot three point shots or layups, since threes are worth more, and layups have a higher chance of going in. It's all about efficiency, you see. Any kind of mid-range two point shot is frowned upon. If you watch a basketball game now, you see almost nothing but a constant flurry of three pointers, and occasional layups, very little in the way of a mid-range game. For the last few years, more three point shooting records have been set than ever before. 

This may well be more efficient, but it has a flattening, homogenizing effect on the game. Three point shots require very little individual style, same with layups. The personality and style of a player comes alive in their mid-range game, where they have space, time, and freedom to create signature moves. Hakeem Olajuwon, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, to name just a few—they had signature moves that weren't layups or threes, and they required time, space, and freedom to create and experiment with them. 

This allowed more individuality in playing style, more variety and creativity, and also created more exciting matchups—you would get to see Karl Malone try to defend Hakeem Olajuwon's post moves. Now there is little in the way of matchups. Players just whip the ball around until it lands on someone who has an open three, or they slash and kick to the basket.

And even this so-called efficiency is deceptive and contradictory. I can't count how many times I see players pass up wide-open layups to kick the ball out to a teammate for an open three, that he then missed. Common sense has been trampled by analytics and efficiency fetishists telling us that threes are always better than layups. If you have a layup, just shoot the layup! This is ideology laid bare.

Efficiency is a major social logic of capitalist absolutism. Neoliberalism loves efficiency more than anything, but individualism is also a core value of neoliberalism. We are all encouraged to be lone sharks, just looking out for ourselves, competing rather than cooperating. Never before in the modern history of the NBA has there been a greater display of individual scoring than what James Harden of the Houston Rockets accomplished in the 2018-2019 season. He averaged 36 points per game, the most in many years. 

But the most fascinating thing about Harden's scoring barrage is how rarely he scores off assists from his teammates. He creates virtually all of his points completely by himself, rather than from his teammates setting him up to score. At one point in the 2018-2019 season, he scored 263 consecutive points without any help from his teammates. There's never been anything like this before. It is almost the complete breakdown of basketball as a team sport. 

Longtime L.A. Clippers announcer, and former player, Don MacClean (not the American Pie guy) said as much during a game against Harden's Rockets. His criticism was mostly dismissed by the media as just an old man yelling at a cloud, but his comments should not be so easily dismissed, I don't think. What MacClean said was, "I just feel like...this style, what Harden does, is manipulating the game somehow. Almost like cheating it. I don't really have a thought beyond that other than I'm watching something that isn't basketball. To me, basketball is player movement, ball movement, designed plays. Not just a guy walking it up and isolating every time...It's not like within the system he's getting all these numbers. The system is built for him."

Basketball isn't basketball anymore. It’s more efficient than ever, but it’s no longer what it really is. The game exhibits more characteristics of capital than the essence of what it is. Walking the ball up, isolating every time, never having his teammates help him score—this is capitalist absolutism made visible. And "the system is built for him," there is a separate, special system enabling him to get all these numbers, he isn't getting them within a normal system. Sounds a lot like our hyper-financialized economy under neoliberalism. 

The hyper-individualism of capitalist absolutism effects the mental health of the players as well, not just the playing style. There are serious effects from this, as NBA commissioner Adam Silver pointed out : “If you’re around a team in this day and age, there are always headphones on…[The players] are isolated, and they have their heads down...to the point where it’s almost pathology...I don’t think it’s unique to these players. I don’t think it’s something that’s just going around superstar athletes. I think it’s a generational issue."

Perhaps the team that is most devoted to efficiency and analytics, from the front office to their professorial coach Brad Stevens, is the Boston Celtics. It is perhaps no surprise that they have had some of the worst chemistry of any team in the league over the last few years. One of their veteran players, Marcus Morris, caused a stir when he made these comments: 

"For me, it's not really about the loss, it's about the attitude that we're playing with," Morris said. "Guys are hanging their heads, it's not fun. We're not playing at a high level, even when we're winning it's still not fun. 

"I watch all these other guys around the league; guys are jumping on the bench, jumping on the court, their doing other stuff and it looks like they're enjoying their teammates' success, they're enjoying everything, they're playing together and they're playing to win. When I look at us, I just see a bunch of individuals."

Even when they win, it's still not fun. He sees a bunch of individuals on his team. The peak of basketball efficiency and analytics-driven performance does not produce chemistry, cooperation, or happiness, even when it is successful. It just produces isolated individuals.  

Efficiency and individualism over all else, lack of style, lack of personality, lack of cooperation—what else would we expect from the most prominent cultural entity during the period of capitalist absolutism? And now the NBA is trying to play the season during the pandemic, players are unhappy with the increasingly totalitarian safety measures being imposed. A new system of midcourt security is being instituted, barring players from shaking hands or hugging. One player, George Hill, said that he would not be confined to his room 24 hours a day the way the league wants, and that if there’s that much danger, then they shouldn’t be playing this season at all. But the games must go on, because of financial reasons more than anything else.

Despite being more popular than ever, I feel like the sport has never been less fun to watch. I still have games on all the time, but I find myself zoning out a lot. Why even bother watching? It’s just going to be the same thing every time: guys jacking up crazy threes, slashing and kicking, layups and threes, no moves, no style. Here we see a final contradiction of capitalist absolutism—by achieving ultimate victory over our political, social, and cultural realms, capital maximizes its own freedom and absolute power, but it changes everything it touches into a hollow, alien shell of what it once was.