When I started writing “seriously” about basketball eight years ago (before that, I wrote NBA fan fiction for David Roth’s irreverent and sadly defunct sports site, The Classical, and did some light basketball blogging at the also defunct Vice Sports) I was trying to emulate other sports journalists—they were my entry point. I was citing stats, describing technical highlights, nodding to games the night before. Early on, my blogs and articles were, in their lightly coded ways, small handshakes with the audience I imagined was reading them, and beyond them, some larger gatekeeper. I wanted to write about the game to fill all the gaps I saw in sportswriting—who were the athletes, really? What were the larger metronomic forces at work? How far did the cultural reverberations go?—but I still succumbed to its codex.