In modern sports, there’s no shortage of data. Between fantasy sports, betting and the rise of analytics, numbers have moved far beyond the box score and measure almost every facet of the game. Baseball has spin rate and exit velocity; basketball has player efficiency ratings and impact estimates.
And while those statistics have broadened our understanding of sport, they can’t exactly capture one key part of the games: How they make us feel.
That’s where Shea Serrano, who’s written for Grantland and The Ringer, along with multiple books, and his latest effort, enters the picture. His newest work, Expensive Basketball, launched this week and features plenty of stats, but the focus isn’t on numbers. Instead, it catalogs the special players and moments that stand out for more ephemeral reasons.
And that was an intentional choice.
“This would be my second book about basketball, but it’s a thing I care about deeply, and over the course of my life, specifically over the course of the past 15 or so years, I have watched basketball become optimized in a way that is very interesting if you’re interested in that sort of thing, which I am,” he told Newsweek. “But also removes a part of basketball that I feel like is more important, which is the fandom part of it.”
“It’s really, it’s fun and exciting to be hanging out with your friends, and you’re arguing about a basketball and whatever thing. And you can be like, ‘Well, that player’s player efficiency rating is like actually lower than that.’ That’s it’s fine. I get the appeal of being able to do that. Like, the nerdy part of that is very interesting to me. But when you start to, it just felt like I had been tipping a little too far in that direction. And the conversation became about the numbers rather than the other part of it.
“And so when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the new basketball book, it was like, ‘Well, let’s go in that direction.’ If everybody else is numbers, numbers, numbers, let’s talk about the other [side] of it because that’s, that’s to me like the thing that makes you fall in love with the game and let’s celebrate that.”
A Labor of Love
As Serrano mentioned, this isn’t his first basketball-related project. Basketball (and Other Things): A Collection of Questions Asked, Answered, Illustrated came out in 2017, earning a place on The New York Times Best Seller list and a shoutout from former President Barack Obama.
But his connection to basketball goes beyond that.
Reggie Miller, who has a chapter in Expensive Basketball dedicated to his “grace and gloating,” is the first hooper Serrano loved. And, even today, that emotional connection persists.
“That’s the basketball player who made me fall in love with basketball,” Serrano said. “I still get excited when I hear him on a broadcast today or when I see him pop up somewhere on something talking about basketball. I was just watching the Starting 5 documentary on Netflix, and he features [in] a big role in there because they’re talking about Tyrese Haliburton, so you want to have like another s***-talking Pacer shooting guard. Like, ‘Let’s get that with the king’ in here. But he’s even on my desk right now; as we sit here and talk, I have this Reggie Miller basketball card, this [version by Ken Goldammer].”
“Reggie is the guy who just activated sort of a thing inside of me when I was watching him play that,” Serrano said. “It’s like ‘Oh, I didn’t know, I didn’t know you could play basketball this way, I didn’t know you can behave in this manner.’ All of the cool things all at once is what Reggie was doing for me. So, you know, that’s an early nineties Reggie, mid-nineties Reggie. That was my guy.”
Championship Rings, Stats and Betting
Given that Expensive Basketball is about feel—early in the book, Serrano juxtaposes Ray Allen’s jumper (like a first chair violinist) against Joakim Noah’s jumper (like someone who was just handed a basketball covered in bees) as an example of the ineffability but understandable nature of being expensive—you might wonder how numbers fit into the picture. They are, after all, an inescapable part of modern sports.
Serrano isn’t naive. Both approaches are valid. In his mind, it just depends on the context.
“I think it depends on what the purpose of the conversation is. That really will decide the most effective way to talk about the game,” he said. “Because if you are [Philadelphia 76ers President of Basketball Operations] Daryl Morey and you’re trying to figure out how can my team score more points than the other team, you don’t care about how a thing makes you feel. You just care about what’s the most efficient way to do this thing, right? So that’s like a numbers-based conversation.”
“But if you and I are just hanging out at the bar talking about basketball, I think then the conversation becomes or the line becomes ‘Let’s use some numbers here to fortify something, but never to be the end all of something.’ You know what I mean? ‘Here’s how this thing made me feel and here [are] some crazy numbers attached to it, but the numbers are not the end.’ The numbers are just a piece of the thing that’s gonna help me arrive to this other thing I’m talking about, which is like, ‘Man, I felt something there.’”
The same principle can apply to the “Ring Debate,” which has become an unavoidable part of modern sports discourse. Is a championship ring—something you factually have or do not—a requirement to be considered a great player? Or do other accomplishments, not to mention more intangible things, fill the void?
“I always get a little nervous that fixation point will be to the detriment of a player who didn’t win a championship,” Serrano said. “But I think I think that has to be part of the conversation if you’re talking about the greatest basketball players of all time. You can’t be one of the greatest basketball players of all time without having at least one ring on your finger. That does have to be a part of the equation. But there are there are certain players, there’s like a class of basketball players; it doesn’t matter if we could magically add or subtract a ring to their legacy.
“There are a class of players who…the championships don’t matter. Allen Iverson is one of those players. He will always be important for a very specific reason. And it wasn’t because he won or didn’t win a championship, it was for this whole other thing. And that’s important too. That’s like a thing that can’t get lost.”
Fantasy sports and gambling are another piece of the numerical puzzle; they make more stats relevant to more people, transcending the connection for a favorite team. Suddenly, you’re invested in players and squads around the country. For Serrano, betting creates another opportunity to lose sight of the forest through the trees.
“I think it makes it for a less enjoyable viewing experience,” he said. “I was watching the games [Monday night] and at one point I had to, without being prompted to select a thing, the screen just shifted and there was bets on the other side and I had to opt to exit to full screen while I’m watching the game. And I don’t need to see that.
“I’ve never been, like a gambler, a gambling guy. So, it’s not something that appeals to me. I feel like it should be it used to be in the back rooms in the shadows with their cigar smoke and guys in hats. And that’s how you do your sports gambling. I don’t want Jayson Tatum selling me FanDuel picks or whatever, you know what I mean? I want a guy with a nickname in a trench coat trying to get me to gamble on a game.”
Some of Today’s Pricy Players
When it comes to expensive players, things are usually pretty intuitive. Everyone knows about LeBron James, Steph Curry and those top-level superstars.
But who else is worth your time?
While Serrano had plenty of praise for San Antonio Spurs superstar Victor Wembanyama—he called Wemby “expensive in a way that no Spurs player has ever been expensive before” and noted that the big man hasn’t been pigeonholed as the next version of any one athlete—the author did have a selection for a more under-the-radar name.
“The League Pass guy that you should watch is LaMelo [Ball, of the Charlotte Hornets]. He’s so incredibly fun. He also does just infuriating things still, because he’s a young guy and wants the moment, but he does them,” Serrano said.
“How do you classify this? I was watching the game where I believe they’re playing Philadelphia. The game’s tied like 119 to 119 in the final seconds. LaMelo’s got the ball and he just chucks up a very horrible, ‘What are you doing?’ sort of shot, not even close to making it. Like a 35-footer, fading away for no real reason at all. I’m sure the argument was, ‘I wanted a two for one type of situation,’ but whatever, it leads to a three on the other end of the court, a wide-open three for Philly, and they end up winning the game,” Serrano explained.
“But I watching that and it felt like he shot that shot not in a way that Jordan Poole shoots a bad shot, where he shoots a shot and it’s just the bad shot. He shot that in a way that felt to me like he was after a moment. And I think that that’s the difference.”
And, in the author’s mind, that drew a parallel to a modern NBA legend.
“I’m going overstep here. I’m going to be slightly sacrilegious,” Serrano said. “But I got the same feeling when I watched Kobe [Bryant] airball. Remember when he airballed those four threes against Utah in the playoffs? And it felt like it didn’t feel like a Jordan Poole bad shot. It felt like a LaMelo bad shot where he was after a moment.
“And the fact that he was after that moment is, I think…was like an indicator of that he was going to become the player that he became, because then he was like, that meant he wasn’t afraid is effectively what it boils down to. And I felt like LaMelo is never going to miss a shot because he’s afraid. He’s going to miss a shot cause it’s a bad shot. He’s gonna miss shot cause you miss shots, but it won’t ever be because he’s afraid, and those sorts of players are, are very interesting to me. So go watch, go watch some LaMelo and let’s keep our fingers crossed. And hope that he snaps the pieces together and becomes the guy whom he can maybe become.”
