Of rivalries and evolution – The Hindu

Sporting rivalries are at their best when the protagonists offer a sharp contrast in their winning ways. The Jackie MacMullan-edited book When the Game Was Ours is an ode to the sharpest rivalry in professional basketball, between Larry Bird and Earvin Johnson, whose teams, the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers shared seven National Basketball Association championships between 1980 and 1987 (the Lakers won four).

Bird and Johnson are co-authors of the book; they recollect how each of them drove the other to competitive heights during their careers beginning from their college rivalry to their respective stints in the NBA. By the end of their competitive careers, they had become close friends, underlining how much respect they had for each other. The garrulous Johnson, known as Magic, was a speedy, effervescent and restless passing savant who was unusually effective as a point guard despite being 6-feet-and-9-inches tall. Bird offered a sharp contrast he was introverted, was somewhat slow in his lateral movements, but he was highly effective as a shooter and offered clutch scoring, rebounding and passing skills as a 6-feet-10-inches forward.

There was the other thing that differentiated them race. Magic was an African American born to an urban worker in the industrial State of Michigan. Bird was born in a poor rural family in French Lick, Indiana. Their rivalry excited a generation of Americans to take to basketball as a vocation and expanded its scope as a spectator sport. The NBA took off as a profitable venture in the 1980s during the Bird-Magic era.

Soon, basketball in the NBA became a globalised sport, with scores of foreign players plying their trade in the league and millions of viewers glued in to watch the best of the games on TV the world over. Much of it is due to the influence of one show-stopping athlete, Michael Jordan, whose spectacular brand of basketball as a shooting guard gave the NBA the fillip to garner worldwide viewership. The best analysis of his career was provided by David Halberstam in his book, Playing for Keeps .

Today, the NBA has reached its epitome of professionalism It is no longer just a spectator sport that thrives solely on athleticism and superstardom. It has undergone an analytics revolution with the influx of studious statistical-minded talent to aid teams to optimise hiring of talent and in strategising. Basketball on Paper , by Dean Oliver, one of the pioneers in basketball analytics, is a good place to begin to understand the moneyball-isation of basketball.

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Of rivalries and evolution - The Hindu