As 2015 begins and I enter my 37th year of life on this planet, it will also mark the 10th anniversary of the first post on FreeDarko.com. Except as with most things having to do with FD’s early days, it was anything but straightforward. This opening salvo was actually the second post, back-dated to create an origin myth. Really, the blog kicked off with three sentences and a typo, the nerdy NBA fan’s attempt at “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge.” From there, we were off, even if it took us months — even years — to figure out exactly what we were trying to do.

I think we ended up doing a lot of things, some of them well, some of them incompetently. There’s a lot I wrote on that site that I hope no one ever reads again. But I’m pretty confident that, over those five plus years that FreeDarko was open for business, we managed to put a stake in the ground and stand for something. I don’t even mean that we inspired other writers or changed the way some people viewed sports; if that’s true, it’s flattering, but that’s not really what we set out to do. A steady diet of grad-level theory and modernist manifestos had us believing that anything — even basketball — could be discussed in these terms. So that’s what we did. We theorized basketball and along the way, we threw some basketball back at theory.

I wasn’t always the most lucid writer. Part of that was by design, either out of literary aspirations or sheer perversity. But it was also because the Big Ideas we came up with were constantly evolving in response to the way the NBA was unfolding. That’s lead to some confusion — including on the part of the FD cabal itself — over exactly what concepts like the Positional Revolution, Liberated Fandom, and the lesser-known League of Stars/League of Psychology meant. Ask Silverbird5000 about the entire summer we spent trying to codify these ideas and the relationship between them. It didn’t end well. However, with hindsight, I’ve got a pretty good handle on where this stuff netted out. And as I get all sentimental about FD and the run we had, I wanted to use the opportunity to set a few things straight.

(Diagram by Tom Ziller)

Warning: This will be unspeakably boring if you never read FreeDarko. In fact, it might come across as self-righteous or self-aggrandizing. Maybe that alone is reason enough to keep reading.

The Positional Revolution: At some point, it began to dawn on us that traditional positional roles seemed less and less important. Players like Kevin Garnett and Chris Webber had skill sets that expanded what, in their case, the power forward position was capable of. There was a thriving backcourt in DC of Gilbert Arenas and Larry Hughes, both of whom were combo guards. The Phoenix Suns were anchored by Shawn Marion, a player who could defend guards and forwards. And LeBron James, already clearly the future of the league, was looking like he could turn into a Jordan/MJ hybrid. Little did we know, he’d also throw some Karl Malone in there before he was done. Versatility was nothing new (duh, Magic), but there was something about the way these players were dissolving traditional roles and becoming something functionally new. They weren’t just transforming themselves, they were transforming the teams around them.

Here’s where I feel like the Positional Revolution has been misinterpreted. It was never meant to be as simple as positions becoming fluid or indistinct. Running out five multi-talented swingmen in itself proves absolutely nothing. What intrigued us was that players were being allowed to play their own game and have that dictate their roles, rather than have roles imposed on them by a traditional (or non-traditional) system. In turn, players being themselves created new systems, one where a team consisted of making the best out of the ingredients on the roster. No two teams were supposed to be alike and potentially, the functionality of a team could vary from possession to possession. It wasn’t that players were being granted absolute freedom but that they were being given the opportunity to define themselves from play to play and by extension, to define roles and systems. I’ve often trotted out Derrida, Heidegger, and Ornette Coleman as high-falutin’ references here but the simple truth of it is that finding power in players being themselves was, in a way, revolutionary. It’s also lined up nicely with the whole drive toward player self-determination in a broader sense. Guys are still coached but any coach who refuses to take this collaborative stance will 1) be extremely unpopular and 2) lose games, since the NBA has progressed beyond that way of thinking.

Liberated Fandom: This one is a little more difficult to defend, since at bottom, it was about the right to root for whatever (or whomever) you felt like. But it was never intended to be fickle or mercenary. It was certainly never bandwagon-jumping. The thought was that, as a fan, you could form multiple attachments and that this loyalty only had to last as long as they held up their end of the bargain. If a team made drastic alterations or a player turned knucklehead, you were under no obligation to stick around. Maybe this sounds like sports polyamory but whatever, traditional fandom is like an arranged marriage between two sadists. It was always more about trying to find ways to enjoy the league more, not dilute the experience of fandom. Liking players and teams is called investment, and investment means more active incentive to watch games and check out more obscure parts of the NBA (back when such a thing existed).

I guess in a way, we’re all Liberated Fans now, at least those of us who suckle at the teat of League Pass. But remember, League Pass wasn’t always a given, and the networks didn’t always go out of their way to showcase teams outside of major markets. You almost had to force yourself to go out there and experience the full breadth of the NBA. Liberated Fandom was like convenient theology: You had to put a lot in to get anything out, but learning to invest yourself was, in a lot of ways, its own reward. Caring about the NBA in the abstract never seemed to make as much sense to me as saying that’s my dude, that team is my shit right now, I’m all about this particular random Wednesday night game. Maybe this reads now as bygone snobbery but at the time it was more like a motivational (or survival) strategy. Dispassionate knowledge only gets you so far in sports, at least if you’re invested in the emotional or psychological truth of the thing. We weren’t trying to override the idea of giving a fuck, we were trying to use it as a means to care even more. We weren’t liberated from fandom, we were trying to save it from itself.

League of Stars/League Of Psychology: A footnote for most readers, this one was actually a big deal for us internally. Mostly because we were always trying to reconcile our interest in lesser-known players with our obvious affinity for larger-than-life All-Stars. There was also that gulf between the fundamental unknowability of pro athletes (especially before we had anything resembling access) and the desire to understand what makes them tick. What I’ve realized is that, hokey as this sounds, we wanted to elevate every player of note to the same mythic, symbolic level as Kobe Bryant or Tim Duncan. A player could become a star not through on-court performance, but because we learned to recognize in him qualities — usually stylistic or personality-based — that made him as compelling, and as well-defined, as the brand name phenoms.

That brings us right back to League of Psychology, i.e. our desire to speculate as to what players were thinking or what they were “really” like underneath the post-game interview veneer. Actions in games speak volumes, as do off-the-cuff remarks. Third-hand anecdotes helped a little. But there seemed to be a pretty clear imperative to do armchair analysis for, say, Lamar Odom or Tracy McGrady. They weren’t just athletes, they were characters — partly of our own creation, but also in the same way that any public figure can’t help but present some version of a fully-formed complex human. Even if they are trying as hard as possible to keep things one-dimensional or hidden. League of Psychology simply asserted that we would strike an uneasy balance between using players — no matter how big or small — as ways to talk about broader human issues and trying to figure them out. Because at the end of the day, these approaches were both diametrically opposed and totally complementary. Understanding people as basketball players isn’t so different from trying to understand basketball players as people.

Anyway, this concludes my crotchety and possibly unwarranted screed about the use and misuse of FD’s legacy. Hate me if you will but please, remember the good times.