A New Orleans N.B.A. All-Star Weekend Diary: Dunks and Skills

In the N.B.A. AllStar Weekends dunk contest Aaron Gordon despite—or perhaps because of—help from an Intel drone failed...
In the N.B.A. All-Star Weekend’s dunk contest, Aaron Gordon, despite—or perhaps because of—help from an Intel drone, failed to make it past the first round.PHOTOGRAPH BY RONALD MARTINEZ / POOL VIA AP

The Superdome was lit purple, a giant spaceship beneath the night sky. Blue police lights strobed near and far. There were police on motorcycles, in police cruisers, in unmarked cars, on foot with parked cars next to them, all of them with lights madly blinking. It was like the entire Superdome had been turned into a Mardi Gras float. A helicopter circled above, lower and lower. White stretch Bentleys, including two with the monogram “TMT”—the boxer Floyd Mayweather’s life-style brand, The Money Team—were backed up at a police checkpoint where a black, bomb-sniffing dog circled the vehicles. I had parked my Vespa on the other side of the overpass and was on foot. It felt like a stroll through the fall of Saigon, but it was just the back entrance to the Smoothie King Arena, where all the TV trucks were stationed under bright white lights, their radar pointed skyward.

The sold-out event contained a skills challenge, a three-point contest, and the dunk contest, but the most thrilling moment may have been when the N.B.A. announced a shooting drill to honor the television commentator Craig Sager, who did sideline interviews in garish jackets for decades, and recently died of cancer after leaving for chemotherapy, returning to work, and leaving again. A rack of balls was brought out beyond the three-point line, and Ernie Johnson, of TNT, announced that, for every basket made in the course of a minute, they would donate ten thousand dollars to the Sager Strong Foundation’s fight against leukemia. Who would shoot? The three-point-contest finalists were already on the court, but others were summoned. James Harden, a leading candidate for this season’s M.V.P., strolled onto the court. Then Reggie Miller stood up in the stands, taking off his jacket. He was wearing a dress shirt but could not be restrained. Some celebrities were summoned, and others. And on and on. It was like a revival. The drill commenced. The balls rained down. Some went in, many did not. Over a hundred grand was raised. Sager’s wife, blond and in a bright-red dress, was shown beaming, somewhat awkwardly, I thought, but movingly, nevertheless, on the Jumbotron.

But wait! said Johnson, there was more. What if, for five hundred thousand dollars . . . and the next thing you know, Stephen Curry is standing at half-court getting ready to shoot the ultimate, half-million-dollar money ball. He asked for three tries to make one shot.

Was there a circus drumroll to accompany the attempts? I think so. But if there wasn’t one could be forgiven for having imagined it, as the moment had the same feeling as when a man is about to be shot out of a cannon or a woman is about to jump onto a galloping horse. Ringling Brothers has just closed down. Here was the N.B.A. fill in the gap.

Curry shot. He missed. One, two, three. All misses. He was given, in effect, a do-over. More shots. More misses. I enjoyed it.

The N.B.A. All-Star Weekend makes manifest the reality that all thirty teams and all the players, and the refs, and the owners, and the trainers, and the ball boys, are all part of an extended family with a shared interest. We all know this. It’s the nature of modern sports. It’s also the nature of adulthood—the stuff that happens in a circus is supposed to happen, it’s been rehearsed, planned—but you try and forget it and enjoy the show. And then there is the mood of professional wrestling, where it’s all a show.

Curry never made the half-court shot. But then Shaq came out, lifted Sager’s young son to the rim. The boy made a close shot to applause. A giant check for half a million was brought to center court.

The night’s first competitive event was the skills challenge, a combination of dribbling, passing, and shooting. Kristaps Porzingis won. I was in the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, on the night that he was drafted by the New York Knicks. He was the fourth pick. The immediate reaction by the fans and commentators was negative. Boos rained down. A very young boy with thick glasses was shown to be sobbing as he emphatically made a thumbs-down sign. That clip was shown over and over on television, which I found strange, because though it indicated that one Knicks fan was indisputably very disappointed in the choice of a seven-foot-three Latvian, it also looked a lot like an emotionally fragile kid who was looking for an excuse to sob hysterically.

On the night that Porzingis was drafted, he wore a burgundy tuxedo jacket, and I remember walking behind him in the bowels of the Barclays Center, marvelling at his height. It was like he was on stilts. He spoke with humility about how he hoped to show the fans at Madison Square Garden that Phil Jackson had made the right choice. I asked if there were any Latvian players he had looked up to as a kid, and he cited Andris Biedrins, who played on the Golden State Warriors, with Stephen Jackson and Baron Davis, in 2006, when they upset the Mavericks in the first round.

Porzingis turned out to be a good choice. He is a rare spot of sunshine in the gloomy dungeon of Knicksland. At the All-Star Weekend, I followed him through the bowels of the Smoothie King Arena, marvelling once again at his height. I walked past Andrei Kirilenko, who is tall, and Kevin Garnett, who is very tall. Porzingis is a different kind of tall. Saying that he is seven feet three doesn’t really convey the effect. He answered questions from a throng of media, including one from me about whether he ever talks to Andris Biedrins. “I have met him a couple of times,” he said. “But I haven’t talked to him in a long time. I should probably give him a call.” Then he took a question from a reporter in Spanish and answered it, at length, in Spanish.

I don’t mean to implicitly shame any other N.B.A. players for their demeanor by calling out how well behaved Porzingis is, but rather to highlight how dismal the Knicks are at the moment in almost every respect.

The night was all a bit underwhelming. Perhaps the most potent moment came when one of the league’s premier dunkers, Aaron Gordon, emerged in the company of a drone built by Intel. The company is eager to move into the drone market, and had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in a drone that could hold a basketball up in the air and then release it at a precise moment. Gordon and Intel had collaborated and rehearsed this for months. The claw that held the basketball had been custom-built in Germany. And yet it all went wrong. Gordon missed his first attempts, made one, then missed some more. The combination of man and machine didn’t work out. Gordon didn’t make it out of the first round. The finals were between two unknown players. The winner was Glenn Robinson III, part of the burgeoning population of N.B.A. players with fathers who were N.B.A. players.

Gordon, meanwhile, left the arena right away, in a state of distress. He had been a sensational runner-up last year, and was the favorite to win it this year. Part of it was the work that he put into it. But maybe part of it is that his mother used to work for Intel? Gordon released a statement, via the Sports Illustrated journalist Ben Golliver, saying that he would be skipping the dunk contest in 2018, offering the quote, “This event takes a lot out of you when you approach it as seriously as I do.”

Golliver produces a steady stream of astute analysis, profiles, player quotes, video, and so forth, in his articles, tweets, Facebook posts, podcasts, and live streams, all of which now constitute the ever burgeoning salad of media activity that comprises sports journalism. I stood next to him when the text message from Gordon, or from Gordon’s people, came in. He copied it on his phone into a tweet. He had been reporting the story for months, following the progress of the specially built clamp from Germany, the partnership between Gordon and the Intel team. He seemed almost as disappointed as Gordon.

I tried to cheer him up.

“This is great news,” I said, of the failed drone-marketing mission. “Months spent on a failure is interesting. And then there is the human angle—his mother worked at Intel!”

“But this was going to be my own big redemption,” said Golliver, looking up from his phone. He explained that his father, who had misgivings about his son’s career as a sportswriter, was himself an engineer at Intel.

Golliver had been part of a panel that I had organized at Tulane, the previous day, titled “NBA Journalism: The Daring Young Men on the Flying Trapeze.” The other panelists were Howard Beck, a longtime basketball writer for the Times, now at Bleacher Report, and Jonathan Abrams, previously of Grantland, now also at Bleacher Report. Abrams is the author of an interesting book, “Boys Among Men,” which charts the story of high-school-age players in the N.B.A., building on David Halberstam’s classic, “The Breaks of the Game.”

The Daring Young Men on the Flying Trapeze” is the first book by William Saroyan, published in 1933. It’s a dreamy series of short stories that today read as first-person essays, which turned the struggling Saroyan into an overnight celebrity, a literary All-Star. My allusion to the title was mostly to the N.B.A.’s high-flying players but also to the writers, who have to make it up as they go, both on the page and in such a volatile media landscape.

I hadn’t met any of the panelists before, but I had once published, in my literary magazine, “Open City,” a long, dreamy first-person account by Ben Golliver about attending the Las Vegas Summer League. It was literary, personal, and weird, while also being all about N.B.A. basketball. Why didn’t he show that side of his writing more often now that he was at Sports Illustrated? Why didn’t the other sportswriters embrace that style, either? They all had similar answers, though Golliver put it most memorably. “The N.B.A. is a bubble,” he said. “The bubble will always get you.”