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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

10:06

Minute Basketball: Return

Minute Basketball ·

2022/03/31

Fear isn’t the only mind killer. All emotion is. Get too excited, too nervous, too confident: feel much of anything at all, and you can suffer the consequences. The problem for NBA players coming back from injury is that you feel too much of everything. Not just NBA players -- coming back to anything is an emotional affair.Injury is the ultimate interruption, physically and mentally. You might not trust the injured part of your body coming back (Gordon Hayward), might not trust your teammates

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10:02

Minute Basketball: Timing

Minute Basketball ·

2022/03/03

Cliches are cliches for a reason has become a cliche. And for a good reason! Let me give you an example: timing is everything. Amanda and I were talking about how chill our baby was the other day. At exactly the moment I said this, however, his cries from across our home shattered the still night. Funny guy! Not because of his jokes (he has none) or his banter (still, none) or his words (obviously, of course, none). He’s funny because timing is everything. It’s even a Garrett Hedlund song for crying

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13:07

Minute Basketball: Drive

Minute Basketball ·

2022/02/10

My baby was born on his due date. They say that’s rare. I wasn’t ready. January 12th, a Wednesday. Amanda went in for a routine checkup, and she called later saying they wanted to induce her, were going to do it later that day. She said, I’ll call you when I have a room. I don’t remember my drive to the hospital. Straight shot. I blinked, and I was there.Going home was crooked. I hadn’t slept, and there was so much to pile in the car, including a baby. I missed the machine where I was supposed to

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8:20

Minute Basketball: Resolutions

Minute Basketball ·

2022/01/01

My mother has kept a book of resolutions for the family since before I was born. It tracks a number of life events of the family, such as partners gained and lost for the siblings, their resolutions included for a year, maybe two, then vanished. For me, though, it tracks the evolution of a life. I wanted to buy my family a new car when I was 8, wanted to work for the CBC when I was 25, wanted to publish my book last year. None of those came true, of course.My wife and I will be having a baby in

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13:53

Minute Basketball: Playlist

Minute Basketball ·

2021/12/16

While I was young, I gave my most treasured belongings to Apple. Over the course of a decade or more, I uploaded my CDs to iTunes, eventually transitioning entirely to digital, adding EPs, pirated albums, entire discographies -- Miles Davis, the Beatles, Elliott Smith. In university I worked at a radio station and added full genres of full years of music, from the Arcade Fire to Hannah Georgas to Yukon Blonde, 2010. At one point, my bloated iTunes would have taken over three years to listen to

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33:26

Minute Basketball LIVE: In defense of Pascal Siakam

Minute Basketball ·

2021/11/25

Louis: Last week we did what we called then our most take-y Minute Basketball takes ever when we discussed the State of the Wing. We are getting much, much take-ier this week. This is Minute Basketball LIVE. And we are talking Pascal Siakam.Samson: That's right. And basically the reasons why we are doing this is because Pascal Siakam lives in an extremely polarized, always-on-trial version of life currently. Or basketball life. And the reason for that is there are multitudes, there's a myriad amount

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Minute Basketball: State of the Wing

Minute Basketball ·

2021/11/11

People usually lose the tiny sliver of the present in the infinitesimal gulf of the past, the yawning chasm of the future. How could we see a dot, ever obliterated by what it holds up, what it feeds into? For the NBA, that means we are full of misconceptions of the now. People see a league in such a supercharged state of change and so see yesterday as today. If you try to snap a still frame, you can miss and end up grasping at its wake. That’s true in the micro, why it usually takes a year after

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11:23

Minute Basketball: Tag

Minute Basketball ·

2021/10/28

It didn’t take Squid Game to teach me that childhood is the core of adulthood. That’s literal, of course, in that we physically and emotionally grow from our childhood selves. But childhood is also locked away from adulthood, separate; we can be and become anything when we’re young, and adulthood is just the process of learning that’s not true. Games are meaningless for children, forgotten moments afterward, but they mean too much to us as adults. Squid Game played on that connection, made childhood

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10:40

Minute Basketball: Players as Boats

Minute Basketball ·

2021/10/21

Sport is metaphor. It’s literal, of course, but the joy we take from it is metaphorical. There’s nothing inherent to putting a ball in a rim 10 feet above the ground, or a small compact hunk of rubber flying into mesh, or any other athletic endeavor distilled to its essence. In fact, it’s almost absurd plastering so much significance and money and fame onto sport when taken literally. But the grace, the community, the emotion: it comes from the symbolic meaning of what’s happening on the field of

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10:23

Minute Basketball: Square Peg in a Round Hole

Minute Basketball ·

2021/07/15

Bobby Fischer invented Fischer random chess. He considered the chess world ossified, hardened into its institutional knowledge and fat and happy without new inventions. (Imagine what he would think about what computers have done to the game since the 1990s.) At the time (and even more so today), chess openings were so specific and known that the first dozen or more moves of all master-level games were simply memorization contests. Oh, you made a tiny inaccuracy in your opening? A book told me that

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16:21

Minute Basketball: Prescience

Minute Basketball ·

2021/07/01

Let me tell you what will happen in the future. Come closer. Lean in. That’s better. Listen closely. Money is going to slink back into sportswriting. It will come in the guise of a friend, recreating jobs that aren’t exclusively at the Athletic. It will reinvigorate a field that has had a titanic leech named Google sucking its blood for decades. Plummeting local ad revenue and table scraps from search engines aren’t enough to sustain an industry. But don’t worry -- gambling money is on its

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11:06

Minute Basketball: Glorious Purpose

Minute Basketball ·

2021/06/17

Kyrie Irving. Kawhi Leonard. Chris Paul. Mike Conley. Not to mention, those already vanquished -- Anthony Davis, Jamal Murray, Jaylen Brown. Or some playing through it -- Joel Embiid, Trae Young, Donovan Mitchell, James Harden. All injured or absent for other reasons. It’s easier at this point to count the surviving stars. Devin Booker. Kevin Durant. Giannis Antetokounmpo. Paul George. Antetokounmpo is missing Donte DiVincenzo, but his team is relatively healthy. Durant’s legacy is already set in

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11:19

Minute Basketball: France

Minute Basketball ·

2021/06/10

The Maginot Line was a marvel of engineering. The French cannibalized their existential sense of selves after losing the Franco-Prussian War, and then a second time after the magnified horror of the First World War. So Joseph Joffre and André Maginot had an idea to prevent such a disaster a third time. They built a line of fortresses between France and Germany so modern, so fierce, that France could never be invaded. The Maginot Line comprised defenses stretching hundreds of kilometres across the

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12:23

Minute Basketball: Pockets

Minute Basketball ·

2021/05/27

Pockets! More elusive in womens clothing than in mens. Citation - a woman showing off her dress and excitedly saying: “And look! It has pockets!”. A thing to hold something in. Is it conveyance? Is it protection? Is it the little pocket inside the pocket that’s supposed to house change??? The back left pocket that I’ve never used? The Herculean work of George Costanza’s back pocket - yes, the one that held onto his gargantuan wallet. In Louis’ case with Luka: it’s protection. Maybe Luka is the

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8:20

Minute Basketball: Legacy

Minute Basketball ·

2021/05/20

How many times have you had to prove something that was already proven beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt? It’s one of the most common reasons good employees hate bad employers, why confident lovers become frustrated with partners who lack the same certainty. Being forced to prove a fact that’s well known is what turned Wild West outlaws into mass murderers, as runaway youths challenged famous Kids like Billy or Sundance to prove their speed with a pistol, again and again.That same force

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16:44

Minute Basketball: Short Kings

Minute Basketball ·

2021/05/13

Homogeneity lends itself to utopia and dystopia both. The idea that humanity would eventually produce enough to fulfill everyone’s needs led to Star Trek and to Francis Fukuyama, to HG Wells and Karl Marx. But the idea that everyone’s needs can be fulfilled comes inherent with the degradation of culture and purpose: think Brave New World, Harrison Bergeron, The Giver. The modern NBA is balancing on the same blade. On April 16, Nick Nurse was discussing positionless basketball and said that he won’t

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11:10

Minute Basketball: Sleep

Minute Basketball ·

2021/04/22

addition to being a sports writer, I’m also an LSAT tutor. (What a condemnation of the industry that this author of a free Substack newsletter needs a second job!) As a tutor, I teach the difference between sufficient and necessary conditions. To illustrate the difference, occasionally I’ll use sleep.You need sleep to have energy. It is necessary, a requirement, like food or sunshine. But it’s not always enough; it’s not, on its own, sufficient. These dark gray quarantine days mean energy is as easy

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22:05

Minute Basketball LIVE: Fandom

Minute Basketball ·

2021/04/15

Louis: Welcome to Minute Basketball Live! The first Minute Basketball Live! I'm looking at Samson and his gorgeous place. He looks wonderful. I just am happy to see him. It's fun to talk together. How are you doing buddy?Samson: I'm doing alright. Hanging out. I just got a DM from Blake that says “Lourdes!”, so I'm guessing Gurriel hit a home run or something, and we were talking about how much we appreciated him for his vibes. That's something I'm looking forward to catching up on once this is

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13:04

Minute Basketball: Pivots

Minute Basketball ·

2021/04/01

It’s a subtle secret that most of basketball happens from the waist down. Your legs offer power for your jumpshot, of course, but it goes much deeper than that. It seems counter-intuitive to say, but dribbling doesn’t actually take you anywhere. Your hands and the ball are just catalysts to movement; they help you get where you’re going, either by craft or guile, but they aren’t part of the equation. Your feet actually control movement. They’re the pivots on which the lever of basketball rests. Not

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14:18

Minute Basketball: The Post

Minute Basketball ·

2021/03/18

The post-up is the most intimate event on a basketball court. At no other moment are players closer together for a longer period of time. The offensive player has the defender on his back, likely with several points of contact. Arm or shoulder on back, hips, feet: there are more bonds of connection than usually happens in the NBA.And the post-up is not constituted by an explosion of violence, at least not right away. Other intimate moments, like the in-air collision above the rim, or the

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42 results

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