There is a graph that tells more than anyone what basketball has become, especially in the NBA: it shows the starting points of shots towards the basket, and between the start of the free throw line and the area under the backboard there is a void. Nothing, no one tries anymore in that middle ground. While at the same time, outside the three-point line it is the triumph of the shooting. So what: is it still basketball?
For goodness sake: sport must now be entertainment, but perhaps it is exaggerating a little. We are as excited about triples as we are about dunks, but if someone tries to hit the basket from half distance, the public is almost disappointed. As if to say: “Just that stuff there?”. So here one of the greatest heroes of the modern era has become Stephen Curry, the star of the Golden State Warriors who in all of these has sublimated the show of the three-point shot. In any way, from any point, he has always tried, “from his home” they always said, with lightning-fast actions and hitting the target in the most imaginative ways possible. Rather than schemes, it is the triumph of run and shoot.
Fans of the “most beautiful game in the world” (the NBA has always decided this) will excuse us: they will probably find these words out of place. But we who grew up with Meneghin, Morse, Riva, Sacchetti and Bariviera – people like that, in practice – and with the wonderful clever tricks of D’Antoni or with the defense of Vittorio Gallinari whose teammates, at the end of his career, served the ball so that at least once he made a basket from behind the magic arc (spoiler: he did), we don’t resign ourselves to seeing the exceptional become normal. If shooting threes is a habit, then you know I yawn.
So we weren’t even excited about Curry’s return this week after an injury: Steph, even before the prematch warm-up against Minnesota, popped his head out of the locker room tunnel, looked at the basket on the other side of the building for a while, then threw the ball as if it were a catapult, tufting to the millimeter inside the retina. Thirty meters of shot, which would once have been the measurement of a basketball Martian. The problem is that today, however, many people do it. And maybe it’s not even so much basketball anymore.
Worth a look
