I Love The Basketball Hall Of Fame

Me and Hall of Famer Earl Monroe. Earl looks way more dapper than I ever will. The great Knicks captain, Willis Reed, is behind me.

February 2015 was not a kind month to my Washington Wizards. The team has collapsed over the last month plus, sliding from second place in the Eastern Conference to the brink of sixth place. In the 12 games played in the shortest month of the year, the Wizards managed only three victories, all over teams which are currently well out of the playoff hunt. In games against teams with worse records than us, my team could only manage three wins in eight attempts. In six road games in the month, the Wizards won zero. Hopefully last month's woes are behind us with Saturday's home win over the Detroit Pistons.

Fortunately, reminiscing about this year's All-Star weekend has mercifully kept my blogging attention off the Wizards and I still have a few more to go. Maybe by the time I am done with all this short-term nostalgia the team will have righted itself to some degree. Looking back, the All-Star Game, All-Star Saturday Night and even the Rising Stars Challenge in New York were all fantastic experiences. But those events alone do not tell the story of my one and maybe only All-Star experience. The reason Valentine's Day weekend 2015 was a transcendent basketball experience rather than just really really special was the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

Now if you are one of the half-dozen or so people who regularly reads this blog, you'll recall that I won an auction on ebay sponsored by the Basketball Hall of Fame which allowed me to get to All-Star weekend this year. That auction win got me lower level tickets to the All-Star Game, All-Star Saturday Night and Rising Stars Challenge. It also got me four nights at the Grand Hyatt above Grand Central Station and entry into the 2015 Hall of Fame Finalists press conference, which I figured would be sort of a throwaway event, although VIP access to that event was advertised, whatever that meant.

The lobby of the Sheraton New York Times Square. Keep an eye out.

So it's about November of last year and I thought I'd check up on how this weekend was supposed to work. I swapped emails with my contact at the hoop hall after I first bought this package but really had no contact with him since April-ish. Now that the 2014-2015 NBA season was in full swing, I thought I'd check in. There was a part of me that was nervous about this all being a hoax. I mean it was really too good to be true, right? As of November there was no update. They didn't know where the seats were in the arena (that was what I really wanted to know); sit tight and wait. This went on until about the beginning of January 2015.

Then finally some different news. The hotel might change. The Grand Hyatt was all well and good but they were trying to get us into one of the players' hotels. Cool. I could go with that. And eventually that happened. So instead of staying at the Grand Hyatt, we ended up at the Sheraton New York Times Square on Seventh Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Streets. Seemed like a downgrade from the Grand Hyatt to a Sheraton but the price point was about the same so whatever. 

How wrong was my initial reaction? It was so NOT a downgrade. We figured out over the weekend that the NBA All-Star weekend is essentially like a business convention. Everyone in the industry is there. It's like Summer League on steroids. There are official hotels, guards at the doors of said hotels, free shuttle buses to events, free Subway cards to get you where you needed to go when you were not taking the shuttle buses and signings by current and future players literally all over town. And one of the players' hotels, like the Sheraton we stayed in, is absolutely the place to be.

Our train got in to Penn Station about 3:30 pm on Thursday, February 12 and we hopped in a cab to get the hotel, rolled in the door, past security ("yes, we are checking in") and to the front desk. First opportunity really to get a look around. Who do we see standing around the lobby but Marco Belinelli, last year's Three Point Contest winner and defending his title this year. Over the rest of the weekend, we saw Aaron Gordon, Etan Thomas (former Wizard!), Dikembe Motumbo, Horace Grant, Nerlens Noel, Rony Turiaf (also former Wizard!), Dahntay Jones, well…you get the point by now, right? Awesome substitution by the Hall of Fame. The first of many very positive surprises during the weekend.

The Hall of Fame Finalists press conference.

So it's Friday, February 13 and we are now firmly checked into our hotel, which is paid for already (no longer a hoax) and we finally meet someone from the Hall of Fame and get our tickets. All-Star Game? Check. All-Star Saturday Night? Check. Rising Stars Challenge? Check. Instructions on how to get into the Hall of Fame Finalists press conference? Check. That's it, right? I mean that's all I bought. Nope. Wrong. Tickets to the Celebrity Game on Friday night? Can't go; already set up happy hour with friends and it sort of conflicts with the Rising Stars Challenge. Tickets to the National Basketball Retired Players Association Brunch on Sunday? Wow, didn't know I was getting that. OK, sure. Sounds like fun. So now this is getting really good.

Friday night comes. We watch the Rising Stars Challenge in person and then take the bus back to the hotel. Now it's Saturday morning. Time for the Hall of Fame Finalists press conference, where we are supposedly VIPs, again whatever that means. We head over to Madison Square Garden and squash into one of the building lobbies on the south side of the arena and wait for our passes and permission to pass through security. It's a bit of a mess, through no fault of the Hall. Apparently they don't typically hold this event at the arena itself and there are clearly access issues.

I'm sure I'm not going to do a very good job of making a long story short here but this event was awesome. Yes, it was just a press conference but the star power that was there was just amazing. When I was stuck on the wrong side of security, I managed to meet former Knick and Bullet Bernard King and say hi over a handshake. Then we passed former San Antonio Spur George "the Iceman" Gervin on the way to the VIP lounge at the press conference. Gervin and King were joined by other hall of famers on the stage, including Willis Reed, Dominique Wilkins, Oscar Robertson, Rick Barry and more.

But the signature moment of this experience was meeting former New York Knick and Baltimore Bullet Earl "The Pearl" Monroe after the press conference. I was at the ceremony when the Wizards retired Earl's number a few years ago and I happened to be reading his autobiography on the way to New York so meeting the Pearl was a real treat. Earl Monroe is one of the true legends of the game who brought street ball to the NBA game. He was wearing a ring on his hand which I asked if was his 1973 NBA Champions ring he won with the Knicks. It wasn't. It was his NBA 50 Greatest Players ring. He claimed he didn't know where the '73 championship ring was. Awesome one of a kind conversation. In case you are keeping track, that's three things the Hall of Fame delivered that we didn't expect. We turned down one, but we didn't have to.

Wall 1, Curry 0. At least someone on the Wizards won something on All-Star Weekend.

I'd never been behind the scenes at the Garden in my five prior trips there so I thought getting out of there after the press conference might be interesting, although I was pretty confident that I could get thrown out if I just went the wrong way. But since that's not really my style, I thought I would ask for directions. I got them and following the directions happened to take me right onto the upper level concourse right of the main arena right before the All-Star Practice was about to begin. Well, since we are here and in the building (even though we technically needed a ticket) we may as well stick around for a bit, right? This makes me a bad person, I know. But I was right there!

Over the last 15 years as a Wizards season ticket holder, I've been to a number of practices. Some are boring; some are really interesting. The best one I ever attended was narrated by Ed Tapscott, who has held a number of jobs in the NBA throughout his career and is currently the Wizards' Director of Player Development. He explained how all basketball teams essentially run the same plays and that the game all comes down to execution. I went to the same sort of All-Star Practice in 2001 when the event was held at the Verizon Center in D.C. right at the beginning of my season ticket holder tenure and I'm sure at that time I thought watching the practice was awesome.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd pretty much put this year's All-Star Practice at between a 1 and a 2. We only watched the West practice which consisted of Steve Kerr telling the crowd several times that they were (a) not going to really run any plays and (b) were going to play Tim Duncan a lot so he'd be tired when the regular season resumed. After that, I just couldn't stick around for the East practice. But we did get to see the John Wall-Stephen Curry H.O.R.S.E competition which happened about an hour into the event.

The Wall-Curry H.O.R.S.E. competition was a manufactured grudge match staged by Gillette. Yes, the makers of the particular brand of antiperspirant that Steph Curry advertises. The competition, which was really nothing of the sort, was a best of three shots event with a fourth shot if a tiebreaker was required, which it was since both Wall and Curry missed all three of their shots in the actual competition. Wall ended up winning in "overtime" with a three point shot defended by actor and director Michael Rappaport (Curry missed his three). It's always good to see a Wizard win something, so I'll take it.

The National Basketball Retired Players Association Brunch.

The All-Star Practice became item number four that the Hall of Fame got me that I didn't expect, even though I sort of got that on my own. The final item was tickets to the National Basketball Retired Players Association Brunch on Sunday morning. This event was held at the Jacob Javits Convention Center and I honestly imagined a room a little bigger than the makeshift green room that adjoined the Hall of Fame Finalist press conference with about the same 1:3 or 4 former player to not-ever-a-player ratio that event enjoyed.

To say I underestimated the size of the event would be a great understatement. The room was huge and featured way more not-ever-a-player people than it did retired players. Don't get me wrong, there were former players there, including Hakeem Olajuwon, Moses Malone, Bernard King (he was everywhere that weekend) and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, complete with official and unofficial entourages mostly made up of kids with basketballs and Sharpies. The brunch looked awesome and our nibbling at some of the dishes proved my eyes correct (we already had brunch plans so unfortunately couldn't load up).

For me this was a short event, but we did end up sitting with Andy Walker and his wife and talking hoops for a bit over some eggs. Andy played  for the New Orleans Jazz during the 1976-1977 NBA season after being selected in the seventh (!!!) round of the 1976 NBA Draft by the Jazz. As a player, Andy's career in pro basketball was extremely short but it was obvious how deeply basketball has touched his life and the lives of all his family members, including his children and grandchildren. Having Moses Malone walk by and say hi to him got my attention if nothing else.

So that's the backstory of the unexpected part of my All-Star 2015 Weekend. I couldn't have imagined all that when I placed my bid on ebay and headed for whatever Wizards game I had to go watch on bid day. I owe a huge thank you for everyone at the Hall of Fame for hosting us for parts of the entire weekend and all the generosity and hospitality they extended to us. It was definitely the best way I could have seen an All-Star Weekend. One day I need to make it to Enshrinement Weekend up in Springfield. I promised them I would if they ever found it in their hearts to put Vlade Divac or Antawn Jamison in there. Not holding my breath on Jamison; I see Vlade as a real possibility.

I Totally Had Better Seats Than Steve Kerr

Get ready for what is likely the pettiest post I have ever written. I'm not generally in favor of pointing out stuff like this and I'm not trying to cause any controversy but I just found this amusing.

So it's All-Star Saturday Night at Barclays Center in Brooklyn on February 14, 2015. The Shooting Stars portion of the night is complete and we are waiting for the Skills Competition to begin. I am sitting in Section 104 in the corner of the building. Right below me is the tunnel which connects the concourse to the arena in the middle of the section I am sitting in. I'm in the first row right above the tunnel so there's nobody in front of me. A speaker obstructs the court at the left side of the court where the Slam Dunk competition will occur (although I don't know that yet) but I can see the hoop itself perfectly.

To kill time between the first and second events of the night, we are trying to people spot. Eventually, we will find Rihanna, Nicky Minaj, John McEnroe, Floyd Mayweather, Spike Lee, Julianne Moore and a whole host of other characters. It's at this point that we spy Steve Kerr, head coach of the Golden State Warriors, and one of his assistant coaches, Luke Walton, walking in front of us and looking up into our section with the help of one of the staff from the arena. The Warriors have the best record in the Western Conference so Kerr, with the help of Walton and the rest of his coaches, are in charge of things for the West in the All-Star Game the next night. He's kind of a big deal.

From our point of view, Kerr is not happy being told he's sitting in Section 104 and he's totally trying to get out of it. He pulls the dude showing him to his seat aside and talks with him for a while. Kerr is standing under the blue arrow in the picture above; the guy he's talking to is under the green arrow (Walton is under the orange arrow headed to his seat). It didn't seem to work. Kerr relents and heads up to his seat in Row 7, which is exactly one row behind me. The kid next to us asks for a selfie with Kerr, which he allows, and then we turn our attention back to the court since the Skills Competition is about ready to start. 

I already felt good enough about this weekend but now I have better seats for the Three Point Contest and Slam Dunk competition than the head coach of the Western Conference All-Stars? I feel bad for Steve Kerr but whatever.

The next thing we know, Kerr's gone. I don't know what happened here because I was honestly trying to pay attention to the event rather than the customer behind me but whatever he said to the dude escorting him to his seat seems to have worked. He didn't want to sit where they showed him and so clearly he wasn't going to. Instead of occupying seat 12 or whatever it was in Row 7, they parked him on foot in the area behind the handicapped accessible seating area just to the right in front of us. He mostly stayed out of sight from our seats, leaning against the wall right in front of us, while the arena staff kept checking on him. He can be seen standing up below the blue arrow in the picture above, for a moment not hidden from our view.

Eventually, he gets a seat. He says hello to the guy in the wheelchair in the accessible seating area and then plonks himself down on a folding chair in that section away from me and the kid who asked for a selfie. His final seat can be seen in the photo below. Kerr is once again below the blue arrow.

Now I'm not saying Kerr doesn't deserve to sit where he sat. I just think it's funny that he didn't want to sit where his ticket said and that he has enough pull this past weekend to get re-assigned. If I had any sort of pull, I'd move my seat too, although I kind of liked it even though it was smack dab in the middle of the row. The funniest thing, though, is that he didn't get Luke Walton moved. Walton spent the rest of the night at the end of Row 7 in Section 104. I'm sure Luke's seat was just fine. As would Kerr's have been if he'd stayed put.

Hello Brooklyn!

The NBA All-Star Game is the marquee attraction of the NBA's All-Star weekend, but it's not the only event that generates some buzz during the mid-season break. Before the main attraction on Sunday night, there are two more nights of excitement in the Rising Stars Challenge (Friday night) and the All-Star Saturday Night. I suppose I could have headed to New York last weekend and just taken in Sunday night's game but what's the point of that? All-Star Weekend for me had to include all three nights. Plus I sort of had little option. More on that later.

On a typical All-Star Weekend, the Rising Stars Challenge, All-Star Saturday Night and All-Star Game all take place on successive nights in the same arena. After all, most cities only have the luxury of having one NBA team. But New York not only has two teams (as does Los Angeles) but the two teams play in totally different arenas. So instead of having one team host all three nights, the NBA elected to put the All-Star Game at the New York Knicks' Madison Square Garden and have the Brooklyn Nets' Barclays Center host the Friday and Saturday night affairs. That not only got me three nights of basketball, it also got me a look at the almost brand new Nets arena.

Barclays Center from the west.

The main lobby of Barclays Center.

Of all the arenas opened in the last ten years or so, Brooklyn's Barclays Center has to be the most expensive and most deluxe so I was excited about getting an up close and personal look at the place on both Friday and Saturday nights. There's an iconic image of the place with a giant hole in the roof with video displays within the hole which alone seemed worth experiencing. I really couldn't wait to get to Brooklyn to see it for myself.

 

After a couple of nights there, it's a nice place. I mean it's clearly newer than Verizon Center and the block (as with most arenas in the NBA) is not as restricting as the city grid at 601 F Street in D.C. so the concourses are nice and wide. The food choices are amazing and completely New York with a strong emphasis on Brooklyn. We ate pizza with a black and white cookie before the All-Star Saturday Night got started which I'd probably eat again, although Saturday I elected to wash all that down with a Budweiser instead of another $9.75 12 oz can of Brooklyn Lager like I had the previous night. I love Brooklyn Lager, but one per weekend at that price point is enough for me.

 

The hole in the roof disappointed me. I guess I hadn't looked closely enough at the pictures of the arena before visiting but the hole is in what is basically a canopy over the main front entrance. It looks like so much more than that in the pictures I guess. I can argue with the logic of having a canopy with a large hole in it but I guess I won't here. I'm probably being a little harsh about the outside appearance of the place considering I was only there at night and didn't feel inclined in the far-less-than-freezing temperatures to spend some time looking around the outside of the building.

 

If there's an impressive part of the building, it's the front lobby, which serves as a monumental arrival space and also allows crowds to filter onto the main concourse before the game and back out of the building after the final whistle without causing a horrendous backup at the exits. The space itself is more modern both in the way space is defined and the way it is lit than any other arena I have visited. I was truly happy to see the entry space. I hope the security tent we passed through on the way to the main lobby on Friday and Saturday nights was an All-Star only fixture. Otherwise, it significantly negatively affects the entrance sequence.

Friday night's Rising Stars Challenge.

First up at the Barclays Center: the Rising Stars Challenge. This was not my first time at this event. During the 2001 All-Star Weekend in D.C., which also happened to be my first as a Wizards season ticket holder, I managed to get a seat to this event on Saturday afternoon at Verizon Center. I paid $10 to sit in the last row of Section 119 in the lower bowl to see both this event and the All-Star Team practice. This year those two events were split, with the cost of each event far exceeding the ten spot I paid 14 years ago. I see that as a measure of how much the revenue stream for the NBA has changed in the last decade and a half. My seats this year were $55 each and they were not as good as my seats in '01. Assuming the cost of practice tickets were similar, that's at least a ten-fold increase in price over 14 years.

 

When I took in this event at Verizon Center, it was a contest between ten rookies and ten second year players, a true rooks vs. sophomores event. Since 2001, the game's format has undergone two changes: first to two teams drafted by two celebrity / former player coaches and then this year to a USA vs. the world format. Call me a traditionalist, but I loved the old old format. For me, the idea of taking a class of guys and pitting them against the draft that followed them is far more appealing. There seems to be a common rallying point for each group to show that their draft class is superior. I don't see it in the new formats. I am also not convinced there's enough talent in the world group to equal the American group. Sure the world won this year's inaugural battle in this format, but I think you will generally end up with something lower in quality by doing it this way than by taking 20 first and second year players regardless of national origin.

 

If I were buying these events a la carte (I was not), I'd likely skip this event. Maybe it was the players involved or that I've seen way more hoops than I had in '01 but I didn't find this game particularly spirited. I don't remember much from the game I saw in Verizon Center all those years ago, but I do remember the Chicago Bulls' Khalid El-Amin playing defense hard enough to draw blood and get some folks on the sophomore squad upset. Maybe he set my bar too high. On the other hand, maybe the complete lack of Wizards players in the game affected my enjoyment. Whatever the case, I was less enthusiastic about this game than I was the last time I attended.

Trey Burke and Brandon Knight ready to start their first round heat of the Skills Competition.

At the end of the Rising Stars Challenge, I was honestly worried that All-Star Weekend's hype and expectations would exceed the actual action on court. But any chance of that disappointment dissipated as soon as All-Star Saturday Night started. In fact, I'd go so far as to say this was the best event of the weekend. Even better than the All-Star Game. And it probably wasn't even close.

 

I had a couple of concerns about All-Star Saturday Night. First, the lack of Wizards players' involvement. John Wall was initially announced as a contestant in the Skills Challenge but then withdrew to get a little more (or just a little maybe) rest than he would have without participating that night. Second, I was concerned the event would end quickly and that it wouldn't be particularly exciting. No chance of that as I soon found out.

I think what makes All-Star Saturday Night so entertaining is that it's a real competition. Yes, I know they keep score in the All-Star Game but it's not really competitive. The margin of victory in no way reflects the amount of desire to win that is put out there on the court. But the events held on Saturday night are different. Guys are really looking to show that they are the best in the league at shooting three pointers or dunking or running rings around their counterparts in the dribbling/passing/shooting competition that is the Skills Competition. And believe it or not, the challenge that these guys put up for each other translates into the crowd. Team affiliation aside (although let's face it, I was rooting as hard as possible against Kyrie Irving), it was really easy to get absorbed into what was happening on the court.

 

This was pure entertainment all the way. And Barclays was probably the right place to host this event. I wrote earlier that I thought Barclays was a nice place. For this event, with its lighting and projection capabilities, it was incredible. The arena looked like it was hosting a rock concert, especially during the Slam Dunk contest, which was the last event of the night. If I were picking just one event in All-Star Weekend to attend, it would definitely be the Saturday night event. This, not the All-Star Game, is absolutely the best part of the three day weekend.

 

And it wasn't short either. It easily went three hours and while it's difficult to claim anything costing $500 was money well spent, it was worth every penny to do it once. I'm now one arena closer to visiting every building in the NBA. Now I need to get back to Barclays to watch the Wizards play sometime.

The light show before Zach LaVine's final dunk of the Slam Dunk competition.