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Minute Basketball

The audio version of the celebrated and world famous, Minute Basketball Newsletter. minutebasketball.substack.com

sports basketball

All Episodes

12:05

Minute Basketball: The Princess Bride

Minute Basketball ·

2021/03/04

We love stories. Drink them like we drink water when we wake up hungover. They’re the reason Tyrion volunteered Bran to be king in Game of Thrones. They’re so much fun that stacking them often makes for the best narratives. Don Quixote is maybe the best and first concept of stacking stories: a man who reads so many knight stories that he thinks himself a knight goes on ridiculous hallucinatory quests, then has that story published (in real life and as a plot point in the actual novel) and believes

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8:13

Minute Basketball: Too Big to Fail

Minute Basketball ·

2021/02/18

Like most everyone else in the world, I was first introduced to the phrase, ‘too big to fail’ in 2008. When people who play self-important video games and huff cocaine for a living robbed the entire world and got away with it. Were thanked. Took their million-dollar bonuses while millions lost their homes.To say the event radicalized me is true and not. Not, in that I’m not a radical. True, in that I’ve never been an optimist again, not about the big stuff. I retain optimism at the personal level

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10:15

Minute Basketball: Regrets

Minute Basketball ·

2021/02/11

If you don’t have any regrets, then you haven’t actually lived. I don’t know where I heard that first, but I do know that I hear it pretty regularly coming from inside my own head. It’s good to be positive! It’s the same in the NBA. You’re supposed to have a short memory, in that if you make a mistake on one end, miss a shot or a blockout, you can’t let it affect your behavior on the other end. There’s no time in a basketball game to pout or remember. There’s no time for regrets. You miss 100

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8:00

Minute Basketball: Outlet

Minute Basketball ·

2021/02/04

The sky was bluer yesterday in Toronto than I remembered it could be. That’s the thing about the winter; you forget things like the sharpness of the sky and the air. This winter, especially. It’s not just the month of February, with crusted black snow in every direction, and daylight only starting to creep back out of its hole. It’s also the pandemic, of course. That makes you forget, too. The pandemic gets into everything like the first frost gets into last summer’s garden. Everyone I know right

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8:18

Minute Basketball: Floating

Minute Basketball ·

2021/01/21

Floating is different from flying. It’s more descriptive. Flying doesn’t connote grace. It’s absolute. That’s why so many people choose flight when describing a superpower they’d most want. Floating exists in the borderlands, in the space in between. You might be on the verge of flying. One more inch, one more fraction of a second, and you’ll take flight. If you describe the difference in the aesthetics of action, flying is Goku hurtling through the air to save the world from Piccolo. Floating is Li

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10:50

Minute Basketball: Path Dependence

Minute Basketball ·

2021/01/14

I spent last week in the woods, hiking through the tramped snowbanks of scattered sections of the Bruce Trail. It could not have been more distinct from Samson’s surroundings, with an iguana living in the waving palm tree outside of his apartment. It’s fresh in the woods, clear. You can sneak up on your thoughts, ones that wouldn’t be home otherwise, from directions you wouldn’t otherwise consider. All the time walking in past footsteps that have beaten the snow into something slick and

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8:17

Minute Basketball: Inertia

Minute Basketball ·

2021/01/07

Inertia could be the most powerful force in human society. We take the path of least resistance for as long as it can lift our loping bodies. It’s not criticism. It’s the way we are. It’s true in sports, politics, romance, you name it. Humans can get used to practically anything. And when we’re used to something, we do nothing to change the way it is. Sometimes even fight to keep it the same. We see it in every level of the NBA. We see NBA teams like the New York Knicks trying desperately to sell

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6:38

Minute Basketball: Delayed Reactions

Minute Basketball ·

2020/12/31

We don’t usually realize truths until long after they become true. That’s a fact, even if you never realized it (see what I did there?). It’s broad, generalizable; the frog in a soon-to-be-boiling pot of water. It’s specific to your own life, too. You can sit beside the same person in class every day for a month before asking their name. When you’re too hungry, you don’t taste the first bite of food. And then you don’t feel full until 20 minutes after your stomach should take no more. That sense of

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7:23

Minute Basketball: Holidays

Minute Basketball ·

2020/12/24

Are holidays a reprieve from other on goings in life? Perhaps not, as a lot of people work through them. A chance to see family? Under normal circumstances, probably, but I’m not sure how viable that is this year. Holidays are both universal, and not. Most everyone in the world has gone through some form of holiday, but it often looks different. For me? Family, and NBA basketball. For you? Who knows, it might not even come at this time of year. They’re a vessel important things are packaged into, or

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9:40

Minute Basketball: Beginnings

Minute Basketball ·

2020/12/17

Here in Toronto, daylight is about to return to our lives. Dusk now comes at five o’clock, give or take. But in a few weeks, days will lengthen. We will start to feel less dreary, less achy. More focused. It’s only fitting that against this backdrop, NBA basketball is returning. We’ve become accustomed to summer offseasons, but winter makes more inherent sense. And as the holidays come to a close, and the New Year rolls around, the season will begin again.Beginnings are times of promise. Not in the

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9:39

Minute Basketball: Endings

Minute Basketball ·

2020/10/08

Before the British Expeditionary Force fought its initial battle in World War One at Mons, Belgium, the soldiers thought they’d be home within a matter of months. Half a year, at most. Instead, those few who survived the initial contact at Mons ended up living, on and off, for the next four years in almost total isolation from the rest of the world. On a small scale, that’s sort of what this NBA season was like. The NBA season began an eternity ago, as the Toronto Raptors beat the New Orleans

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11:39

Minute Basketball: The Unsung Heroes

Minute Basketball ·

2020/10/01

Unsung Heroes instill in us the belief that ordinary people can be agents of change. They provide us with reference points and road maps to accomplishments that are larger in scope than we might have imagined. We're all spectacular in that way. The heroes of our own story, and unsung in the stories of others. This week in Minute Basketball, we're showing love to the Finals participants who didn't get enough love on the way up.ZatzmanThe rest of the LakersWhat’s a song to the most storied franchise

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10:09

Minute Basketball: Jamal Murray

Minute Basketball ·

2020/09/24

Have you seen Stars Wars Episode Four? Remember the part where all the heroes are trapped in a trash compactor, with the walls closing in, and some strange creature lurking in the depths? That’s supposed to be what the NBA playoffs feel like.The playoffs are supposed to be a crucible wherein the fraudulent are burned away and only the hardened emerge. Only obvious superstars like LeBron James (2020), Kawhi Leonard (2019) or Kevin Durant (2018) are supposed to dominate with ease. Yet there’s another

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11:23

Minute Basketball: Jimmy Butler

Minute Basketball ·

2020/09/24

Have you seen Stars Wars episode four? Remember the part where all the heroes are trapped in a trash compactor, with the walls closing in, and some strange creature lurking in the depths? That’s supposed to be what the NBA playoffs feel like.The playoffs are supposed to be a crucible wherein the fraudulent are burned away and only the hardened emerge. Only obvious superstars like LeBron James (2020), Kawhi Leonard (2019) or Kevin Durant (2018) are supposed to dominate with ease. Yet there’s another

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16:48

Minute Basketball: The State of the Big

Minute Basketball ·

2020/09/17

Reports of the death of the NBA big man have been greatly exaggerated. Look, for example, at the current NBA playoffs. Four teams remain, and four centers will see the bulk of the important minutes. But each of those players is vastly different from the next. That’s rare in basketball context; many NBA champions have followed a similar blueprint. But as Detroit Pistons Head Coach Dwane Casey is fond of saying, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Change ‘cat’ to ‘NBA big men’ and ‘skin’ to

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14:29

Minute Basketball: The Houston Rockets

Minute Basketball ·

2020/09/10

Innovation often breeds contempt. For Galileo Galilei’s claim that the Earth revolved around the sun (correctly, as it turned out), the Catholic Church wanted to burn him at the stake. instead he was imprisoned indefinitely. For just generally being annoying and asking lots of questions, Socrates was forced to drink hemlock, which was his death. Partly for his belief in natural virtue, and partly because Roman emperor Nero was a crazy person, politician and philosopher Seneca the Younger was forced

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12:28

Minute Basketball: Conversion

Minute Basketball ·

2020/09/03

There are lots of different kinds of magic, but alchemy has to be right at the top of the least comprehensible forms of wizardry. It’s magic to be able to convert one thing into another. A substance into another, a feeling, a memory. It’s always been magic. To turn thought into action. Last week showed how incredible this collective group of NBA players is. On the heels of the murder of George Floyd, the players came to Orlando, aceded to the bubble on the premise that it would help inspire change,

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12:17

Minute Basketball: Hips

Minute Basketball ·

2020/08/20

As people, we lie a lot. Multiple times per day. Slip lies into conversation for small social gains, sometimes for no reason. The difference between a truth and a lie is thin. Often fictitious. Think George Costanza: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” Or the fact that human beings are extremely poor at telling when another is lying, even professionals whose job it is to recognize a lie. We come up with strategies to tell when someone is lying. Eyes darting, furtive. Sweating. Looking through their

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12:07

Minute Basketball: Astronomy

Minute Basketball ·

2020/08/13

Physics is incomprehensible in big spaces. Nothing, really, makes sense when you zoom out far enough. But that’s especially true in outer space. There are forces like gravity that push and pull with more horsepower than there are horses on Earth. There are all sorts of bizarre objects: asteroids, and comets, which are really just icy asteroids, but so cold that you’d freeze just to touch one, if you didn’t burn up from the force of impact. There is space weather, like solar flares, which are so hot

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11:01

Minute Basketball: Your own worst enemy

Minute Basketball ·

2020/08/06

There’s depth to the idea that we are our own worst enemies. It’s inherently appealing, in the sense that we are in control of our own destinies, the protagonists of our own realities. Nothing can stop us but us, context be damned. It’s akin to the Protestant ethic, of course, that tangible manifestations of our success reflect our internal compasses. But it goes deeper in the religious context; the Devil’s greatest weapon is deception. In other words, the Devil doesn’t wreck you unless you fail to

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