New Cap One Signage, Ranked

Over the summer, Capital One Arena underwent a significant transformation. New seats were installed, the entire lower level concourse was renovated and there are a significant amount of new dining options in the building. I posted a quick rundown on this blog of what I saw at the September Wizards open house a couple of months ago.

The coolest of all the renovations, in my opinion, is the installation of new signage at the entrances to the lower level seating sections. Now it's true that the purple and yellow signs were one of the more objectionable design decisions made when MCI Center was built, but it's not just the removal of these monstrosities (i.e. addition by subtraction) that makes this upgrade the coolest part of the renovation. The new signs celebrate the history of the building and the history of the Wizards, Capitals and Mystics that call the building home. All told, there are 22 of these things. Let's rank them shall we? Why not? We rank everything else in life it seems.

Inevitably in any sort of comprehensive ranking like this, there will be some excellent entries and some real stinkers. That's totally true of this list. Some of these signs are awesome while others are not unique in any way to 601 F Street NW, which really sort of sucks. In some cases, the event depicted on the sign didn't even happen in the building at all and I've taken that into account sometimes as I'm counting them down from 22 to 1. I'm including the section where each sign is located in parentheses in case you want to check out your own favorites.

22. Capital Investment (101/102)
I get that Capital One paid for all these new signs but this is ridiculous. This is not an accomplishment in any way. It's just paying money. If I could have ranked this sign lower, I would have.

21. WWE (112/113)

Come on. Really? WWE? You only have 22 of these signs and decide to devote a whole sign to WWE? I guess they pay money to rent the building when they come to town. Money talks at 21 as well as 22.

20. Tim McGraw & Faith Hill (108/109)
There have been many, many, many concerts held at 601 F Street NW over the last 20 or so years. Was Tim McGraw and Faith Hill really one of the best? I have a hard time believing this. I've seen Bob Dylan twice in this building. And while one of those shows was not Bob's best, I'd go with Dylan over McGraw and Hill.

19. Inaugural AFL Game (115/116)
Nobody really cares about the AFL, do they? This four team league (half of which Monumental Sports owns) is barely on life support. At least they didn't make a sign out of the electronic sports league. I'm thankful for that at least.

18. (NCAA) Tournament Host (105/106)
I was truly tempted to put the building hosting NCAA basketball games below Tim McGraw and Faith Hill but ultimately basketball won out over country music here, even though basketball is exactly what the building was designed to host. Neither is really worth making remarkable enough to put on a permanent sign in the building in my opinion but they didn't ask me.

17. Wizards Draft Bradley Beal (113/114)
16. MVP Comes To DC (119/120)
Only time will tell if these two events are really as important as they seem right now. Sure, both players are elite in their own leagues but their time in Washington has been either (a) really short or (b) just not that significant from a team perspective. Yes, Elena Delle Donne has taken the Mystics to the WNBA Finals after forcing a trade to Washington two years ago but what if that's it? Does she really deserve a sign in the building? I'd go out on a limb here and suggest that the Mystics in the Finals is more deserving of a sign, but perhaps that happened too late in the construction process.

Bradley Beal has made an All-Star Game. Once. What if Beal gets traded? What happens to his sign? It has to get replaced, right? And why Beal not Wall? Isn't Wall getting drafted more significant right now than Beal getting drafted? I'd say it is. I'd also say that Monumental Sports was looking for a way to get Beal into the mix somehow and this was their only chance. 

Neither of these things happened in the building, by the way. That in addition to the uncertain significance of these two events puts these two 16th and 17th. In a few years, they could be a lot higher. And I have no idea what's up with the color on these two pictures. It's completely operator error.

15. Beyoncé (118/119)
I struggled with putting Beyoncé higher than Delle Donne and Beal but at least she performed in the building. Not much else to say on this one.

14. Gonchar Hat Trick (110/111)

There have been 140 hat tricks in Washington Capitals history through the beginning of the 2018-2019 season. Sergei Gonchar has one of those, on January 4, 2000. I'm not sure why this particular hat trick was picked for this sign. It wasn't the first hat trick at MCI Center (Peter Bondra had the first four of those). The caption on the sign says it was just the second in franchise history by a defender. Is that really worth it? I'm not sure. Seems like a stretch to me.

13. Snow-vechkin (117/118)
12. Playoff Goals (114/115)
Caps fans are hating me right about now, I'm sure. Actually who's kidding whom? The likelihood of any of the 12 or so people who read this blog being enough of a die-hard Capitals fan to actually hate me is slim at best.  I put these two at 12 and 13 because honestly, there's enough love for Alex Ovechkin later on in this countdown and these are just two of his 20 career hat tricks. Both of these happened to come against the Pittsburgh Penguins, which I am sure is no accident. The 2009 game is ranked higher because it's a playoff game.

11. 2001 NBA All-Star Game (103/104)

I may have short-changed the All-Star game on this list but looking at everything below it (meaning higher ranked), I can't honestly justify moving it higher. I never really valued the All-Star Game until I attended for myself in New York in 2015 and even then I didn't really value it as a contest, just as an all-weekend event. Shown in the photo above? Allen Iverson, David Robinson and Dikembe Mutombo. No Wizards participated in this game even though the starting forwards for the Eastern Conference were Anthony Mason and Antonio Davis. The Wizards were not good in 2001.

10. Prince (104/105)

Non-basketball, non-hockey stuff hasn't done very well on this list but let's face it, the WWE, Beyoncé and Tim McGraw/Faith Hill are NOT Prince. According to my (not very exhaustive) research, it appears Prince only played the building once, on August 14, 2004. If that's really the case, I would have made sure the date was on Prince's sign. Prince playing is every bit as important (actually, way more) as Sergei Gonchar scoring a hat trick.

9. 1978 NBA Champions (120/121)

I struggled with this one more than any other. The Bullets won the NBA Championship in 1978, 19 years before MCI Center opened. It's a distant memory and not associated with this building in any way. It's also the single-most memorable thing the Packers/Zephyrs/Bullets/Wizards franchise has ever done and that's not likely to change any time soon. If this list were just about significant events in Wizards etc. and Capitals history, this would have to be number one or number two. But it's not. It's about celebrating events in MCI Center / Verizon Center / Capital One Arena. At least that's how I see it. Sorry to all the Bullets fans out there who are still pining for the old name.

8. WNBA Comes To Washington (106/107)
I'm sure there are folks out there who think this is way too high on this list, especially since it's higher than the Bullets winning the NBA Championship in 1978. I don't care. The WNBA is the longest running significant women's team sports league in the United States. The Mystics have been around in D.C. for 20 years and just capped off their most recent campaign with an appearance in the WNBA Finals. The success of the WNBA is important. It deserves this spot on this list. 

7. Earl "The Pearl" Monroe Number Retired (111/112)

I never saw Earl Monroe play but I've run into him in New York a couple of times during 2015 All-Star Weekend and I get his place in basketball (and Baltimore Bullets) history. Maybe a little biased pick prioritizing a Bullets / Wizards historical event over some sporting events actually held in the building but hey, it's my list. I was there on December 1, 2017 when the Pearl's number was retired. I still have the mini-banner giveaway they handed out that night.

6. 1000th For Hunter (107/108)

Dale Hunter is one of four Washington Capitals (right now) with his number retired. Hunter spent 19 seasons in the NHL and 12 years in Washington. As of the beginning of the 2018-2019 NHL season, only 87 players had recorded 1,000 points in the NHL. Hunter is the only one of those who also has 3,000 penalty minutes (Hunter is second all time with 3,565). He's likely never to be passed in penalty minutes by a 1,000 point scorer. Hunter's 1,000th point came at MCI Center on January 9, 1998 when he actually recorded his 998th, 999th and 1,000th point in the same game.

5. Game Winner (100/101)
The Wizards have made it to game seven of the second round of the NBA playoffs just once and John Wall's game winner in game six at home in May of 2017 did it. Wall doesn't hit many game winners. This one was the biggest I've ever seen him hit. He was absolutely on top of his game at this point and it's deservedly memorialized in one of these signs. After hitting the shot, Wall jumped up on the scorers' table and declared himself pretty much king of Washington. I missed that. I was too busy hugging my friend Mike and jumping up and down.

4. Southeast Division Champions (109/110)

I feel bad having this event so far up this countdown. As I've already pointed out in my September blog post, the Wizards didn't actually clinch the Southeast Division at home. But since it's the only thing this team has won in the 18 plus seasons I've had season tickets, I'm throwing myself a bone here.

3. Ovechkin's Debut (102/103)

It is quite frankly difficult to put anything that has happened at MCI Center / Verizon Center / Capital One Arena ahead of all that Alex Ovechkin has accomplished in his time in Washington. Certainly for the purposes of this post, I find it difficult to put anything Wizards-related ahead of the Great Eight (although I did). And yes, Ovi did make his debut at MCI Center (not on the road) on October 5, 2005 and yes, he scored in his first game. Twice, actually.

2. "I Called Game" (116/117)

It seems odd to me that I'm placing one shot in one playoff game by a guy who ended up being a rent-a-star for a single year above all other Wizards moments but I am. I know Ted is deliberately exiling Gilbert Arenas by not including anything Agent Zero did in Washington but for all the great game winners Gil hit, this one was better and more important. Too bad the one in game six didn't count.

1. Champions (100/121)
I mean is there really any competition for this? The only championship won by a non-AFL resident of the building and it was clinched in the building. No contest. This is number one.

There you have it. That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it. At least until Elena Delle Donne makes the Mystics into champions or Bradley Beal wins the NBA Most Valuable Player award. Go ahead and tell me I'm wrong. This is clearly a list heavily sponsored by Ted Leonsis. The complete absence of Wizards prior to John Wall's arrival is testament to that. I still think Gilbert Arenas at his best was better than any other Wizard at his best.

And yes, I'm still having doubts about that nine spot.

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.

The Hoop Hall

The Washington Wizards 2104 postseason starts today at 7 pm. So before my attention gets totally swayed in the direction of our first playoff run since 2008, I thought I should wrap up my thoughts on my recent trip to New England. I've talked about watching hoops in Springfield and finding what I hoped to find in the D-League in Maine in past posts. I've also covered an important side trip in Portland on my mini-brewery tour up there. But one of the most important reasons I visited New England this year was to make a pilgrimage to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame while I was in Springfield. After becoming a true certifiable hoops junkie, I figured it was time to go.

This was not my first trip to the Basketball Hall of Fame. I'd visited once before when my dad and I were both Knicks fans and my folks lived about 35 miles from the Hall in Connecticut. But it feels like a long basketball journey for me since that visit. I've now been a Wizards season ticket holder for 14 years and schedule my life around the NBA season, something I couldn't say the last time I was in Springfield, Massachusetts. I've become engrossed in the history of my own team and basketball in general with a focus on the pro game through reading books and watching movies in the last dozen plus years so I figured this time around I'd get a lot more out of a visit to the Hall.

After flying to Boston Friday morning, driving straight down to Springfield and making a cautionary, but as it turned out unnecessary, couple of hours long stop in the Mercy Hospital emergency room, I arrived at the museum that celebrates the birth and history of the greatest game ever invented. To be clear, the museum is not the NBA Hall of Fame (there's no such thing…yet) but instead covers basketball in all its incarnations both foreign and domestic and focuses as much on the amateur and collegiate game (yes, I'm deliberately separating those two) as it does on pro ball.

My first impression of the place was that I didn't remember the Hall of Fame this way from my previous visit. The museum is buried in a strip mall with a Subway, Cold Stone Creamery, a couple of bars and some retail stores I'd never heard of. I totally didn't recall all this. And for good reason based on some Googling when I got home. As it turns out, this is the third iteration of the Hoop Hall which opened in 2002 and in fact, I had never been here before. The Hall of Fame I visited with my dad is about a football field's length north of the current location, now converted into an L.A. Fitness gym. I was shocked to learn that the current facility was designed by respected architects Gwathmey Siegel. To me, it looked like a commodity strip mall and until I actually got all the way into the museum, I remained unimpressed.

After entering the museum property, we grabbed some tickets and then looked for the entrance to the Hall, something that required the assistance of a guide after asking for directions; the sequence of arrival is that confusing. Our visit started with an elevator ride, which is never a good way to start the journey through a building to me. It works in the Guggenheim Museum in New York; this is not the Guggenheim. The elevator let us out in the Honors Ring, which occupies the giant silver ball component of the building in the photograph above.

The Honors Ring contains photographs and career details of all the Hall's inductees and while to me this should be at the end of the museum sequence, it at least provides an instant immersion into the history of the game. Eventually, most visitors are going to recognize someone in this room unless they just started watching basketball in the last few years and have managed to remain blissfully ignorant of any and all of the game's pioneers.

For me, the Honors Ring meant seeking out Bullets and Wizards legends from the past. There are a total of 11 former Bullets and Wizards players currently inducted into the Hall of Fame, with a 12th (Mitch Richmond) on the way this fall. Only one of those 11 (Michael Jordan) played for the Wizards and most of the soon to be 12 played their best ball somewhere else. In the interest of time, I concentrated on finding the four who have had their number retired by the franchise, meaning Gus Johnson (class of 2010), Earl Monroe (class of 1990), Elvin Hayes (also class of 1990) and Wes Unseld (class of 1988).

Gus Johnson was selected by the Chicago Zephyrs (soon to be the Baltimore Bullets) in the 1963 draft and played nine years with the Zephyrs and Bullets before being traded to the Phoenix Suns in 1972. Johnson was released by the Suns but went on to win an ABA championship with the Indiana Pacers in 1973. Earl Monroe was drafted by the Bullets in 1967 and spent four years with the team before being traded to the New York Knicks in 1971 and helping the Knicks to their 1973 NBA Championship. Monroe, to me, is more a Knick than a Bullet, although he arguably had a greater impact on the game in Baltimore.

Elvin Hayes and Wes Unseld both played on the Washington Bullets' 1978 championship team. Hayes spent the first four years of his career with the San Diego and Houston Rockets before being traded to the Bullets and helping the team to its three NBA Championship appearances in the 1970s. In 1981, he was traded back to the Rockets where he ended his career. Unseld is undoubtedly the franchise's greatest player, spending his entire career with the team from the time he was drafted in 1968 until his retirement in 1981. He won both Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player honors following the 1967-1968 season and presided over the franchise's most successful run ever in the 14 seasons he suited up for Baltimore and Washington. The franchise hasn't been the same since.

After the Honors Ring, we were directed into the History of the Game Gallery, a room whose entrance is presided over by a bronze statue of Dr. James Naismith, the inventor of basketball. Among major American team sports, basketball is unique in that its origin can be traced back to a single inventor on a specific date and time before which the game absolutely, unquestionably didn't exist.

The game was invented by Dr. Naismith in December 1891 while he was a physical education instructor at the International YMCA Training School (now Springfield College) in Springfield as a way to keep his students occupied during the New England winters when they were frustrated about having to exercise indoors. Naismith wrote the original 13 rules of the game down and pinned them to the gymnasium's wall before the first game was ever played. He originally requested two boxes for goals from the YMCA's staff but finding no boxes, elected to use peach baskets instead. I'm glad in a way. Although I never would have known it, I think I would have had a harder time being a boxball fan.

The original game was way different from the way it is played today. The first game was played with a soccer ball and dribbling was not permitted. The game also featured two teams of nine, because there happened to be 18 student's in Naismith's physical education class. I imagine the original game would be barely recognizable to fans of the current NBA game. The invention of the game is described in a video behind the bronze statue of Naismith in front of the History of the Game Gallery.

The History of the Game Gallery itself traces the game's spread and development from its beginnings in the YMCA system and then through the American Athletic Union (AAU) when the game outgrew the ability of the YMCA to manage the game's growth. It deals with the early professional leagues and the transfer of the game to the college level and its rise internationally. It also traces the development of the game's equipment, from the balls used to the design and manufacture of uniforms. The early woolen uniforms and smoking jacket like warmups (complete with pockets) on display in the center of the room are crazy. I can't imagine today's players competing or warming up in these things. 

Early gear in the History of the Game Gallery. Love the wool Celtics jersey.

The next room in the museum to the right of the History of the Game Gallery for me did a great job of crystallizing the start of the current NBA. Early on in basketball's development as a professional spectator sport, there were a number of regional leagues formed, mostly in the northeast and midwest, between the two world wars. At this time, before the development of jet travel, it was difficult to get anywhere outside of your immediate geography so most teams were clustered within few states. It's odd to think of Oshkosh and Sheboygan, Wisconsin being able to support teams but that's just where some of the early teams were located.

Eventually, two leagues, the National Basketball League (NBL) in the northeast and the Basketball Association of America (BAA) in the midwest became the dominant professional leagues. The NBL was important in standardizing the rules of professional basketball which had been in almost constant evolution since the game's invention. In 1948, the two leagues merged, creating a league which would eventually be renamed the National Basketball Association in 1949 and would continue under that name to the present day.

The same room that chronicles the development of professional ball also describes the NBA game's early days and the introduction of the most important development in the game's history: the introduction of the shot clock. The proverbial straw that broke the camel's back to need to speed up the game and stimulate more scoring came in 1950, when the Fort Wayne Pistons and the Minneapolis Lakers played to a final score of 19-18. I know a lot of people who criticize today's NBA game for too much scoring, claiming all you need to do is watch the last five minutes of the game to understand what happened. I can't imagine watching a game in which both teams scored fewer than 20 points. It would be worse than watching playoff hockey!

From this point, the Hall got a lot less interesting for me. We spent some time looking through the Players Gallery, Media Gallery and Coaches and Teams Gallery but the substance contained in the History of the Game Gallery were just not there. There are only so many uniforms and autographed balls and shoes I can look at in one day. The Media Gallery admittedly suffered from some of the interactive displays being inoperable, but ultimately I was there to learn about the history of the pro game and not the guys who covered it.

The last stop on my Hoop Hall tour was the Center Court on the ground level of the museum, a full size basketball court with a museum display on one side chronicling the development and history of the hoop itself, starting with Dr. Naismith's peach baskets and ending with today's NBA hoop and backboard. Since the place was relatively quiet the Friday I was there, I thought this would be a great opportunity to show off my shot on everything from the original peach basket to dropping in some Js from three point land on the main court.

When I lived in upstate New York, my primary source of exercise came from playing basketball down at the Cooperstown Elementary School (next to the addition I designed) and up at the Richfield Springs Central School near where I worked. While there were obvious deficiencies in my game (like my utter lack of ability to play defense), I always had a pretty good shot if I got going on any given day. It's been a few years since I've been on a court but I figured I could get right back into the groove like riding a bike or something. 

Not so much. The years away have not been kind to my game. My performance was quite honestly embarrassing. It took about four or five progressively closer shots for me to drop one in the peach basket and I never hit a shot from beyond the arc. I left humbled and felt the whole exercise in futility the next couple of days in my shoulder. I'm not as young as I once was clearly. At least I could still dribble properly. All in all a pretty humorous end to my trip. We moved on from here to a local bar, far more up my alley at this point in my life.

I know I'll come back here one day. I've promised myself I'll come take in Hall of Fame Enshrinement Weekend one day but I'm sort of waiting for a Wizards-related induction. Mitch Richmond this year doesn't count, despite him being in a Wizards uniform for a few seasons. Given the Wizards' fortunes of late, know I'll likely have to wait a while, unless somehow Antawn Jamison revives his career and squeaks by in a down year, so I may have to revise my philosophy. I'm not sure I can wait 20 years, assuming there's even someone who would qualify on our current roster. Until that time, I know I got something out of this year's visit and I'm glad I went. And I'll keep learning. I still have five or ten books on my shelves about basketball history I still haven't read.

Strip mall: Not the look I want for the Basketball Hall of Fame.