Your NBA team fandom & alliances

i root for the heat as a miami boy but i don't live and die with them quite like i do with some other teams (tho the bron years were particularly fraught...) i happen to watch them a lot now because i find the team to be kind of interesting and fun even in their mediocrity, but if they were i.e. the pistons or hornets i don't think i'd watch very many of their games.

the heat as an object of fandom are pretty interesting. when i was a kid in the mid 90s they had still not even been around for 10 years -- with the marlins and panthers being even younger -- so miami was still very very much a football town... if you lived there in the 70s and 80s the dolphins and hurricanes were the only shows in town & that's what i was raised to be invested in. the heat were there -- and were good in the zo/hardaway years when i was still impressionable -- but it wasn't the same. i cared way more about canes basketball (disease) and still do. but the dolphins, canes and marlins have all been in the trash for a good two decades now and in that time the heat have won 3 titles, had wade, had the bron years & generally been by far the most (slash only) competently run team in the city. so the heat really have a lot of equity built up now especially with anyone younger than 30. miami will always get shit for its fair weather fans but the heat are a real NBA success story.

otherwise i just root for storylines, pain, and steph curry

i'm only marginally an NBA fan and grew up in pittsburgh, so i have no allegiances

long ago i hated the spurs because my father lived in san antonio, but that was before duncan (who i fucking loved) and pop

would theoretically root for duke products (not austin rivers) but in the one-and-done era i don't really care. except for zion, now

root against teams from places i've lived (wizards, knicks). except i have nothing against the t-wolves and am barely aware of the nets even though i live in brooklyn now

otherwise i just root for storylines, pain, and steph curry

otm

I've rooted for the Warriors since Run TMC (grew up in Bay Area) but only really started following hoops and stuff when I moved back in '07. I don't really have a side piece, tend to root for individual players more. I guess I've kinda dug Denver ever since the Melo trade, lots of fun bball's been goin on up there.

Memphis stole my favorite team RIP

oh damn sorry i knew i was missing one!

Grew up in North Carolina in the 70s and 80s so it was all about college hoops. No one watched the pro game in NC back then even if we knew about Dr J, Jordan and Magic etc. Gradually became disinterested in college hoops (it became kinda boring once I left NC). First pro team I followed sort of closely was the '10-'14 Spurs when they were battling the Heat. Also, because I was in the Bay Area, I started watching the Warriors on TV at the gym. That was the season (?2011) they traded Monte Ellis. Super frustrating team to watch. Eventually the legend of Steph and the preposterous sounding splash brothers drew me in. Been watching the Dubs closely over past several seasons.

11-12 was the year curry only played like 20 games cos the ankle. also klay's rookie year. and yeah they traded bogut for monta and the new owners got boo'd that day. david lee was really ballin tho. people forget he was the first all star the dubs had had since sprewell, curry didnt get his first one until a couple years later. pretty quick rise to the mountaintop from there.

I like reading this simmons column about the booing with the benefit of hindsight: http://grantland.com/features/how-annoy-fan-base-60-easy-steps/

a classic piece for sure

so I wasn't actually an NBA fan until after the Vancouver Grizz left, but my little sister was a diehard fan, and I ended up going to some terrible games. I recently watched this extremely wholesome documentary about tracking down Big Country that brought back the memories:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMhM-8D-Q1o

my sister was also obsessed with steve nash (and any Canadian player, like the legendary Todd MacCulloch) and I started watching the Vince-Iverson playoff series in 2001 and the Nellieball Mavs. I transferred allegiances to the Suns when Nash was traded and lived and died with those heartbreaking playoff series against the lakers and spurs. I guess I'd still consider myself a suns fan, but it would be nice if they were ever competitive again. I've been lightly rooting for the Warriors because they took the Nellieball/Seven-seconds-or-less style and perfected it, but by this point I'd be happy if someone knocked them off, like most NBA fans.

celtics, saw bird play in the old garden w my dad etc, have p much been a hardcore fan since, watching many games in even the direst of todd day dee brown type seasons

generally like to pick up a side piece that plays good offense tho havent really gotten into any this year kinda like toronto and sacto i guess

obvs am also just an general nba fan tho too i like to watch the guys do the dunks

can't root for the celtics simply because of bill simmons

hes not the celtics fault lol

I don't really have a fav team. I would be a Knicks fan but I hate Dolan so much, plus obv they stink. The Nets aren't interesting to me. I grew up in DC but the "Wizards" name change always annoyed me. Moreover I just feel silly being a "fan" of a team on any deep level as a near-40-yo-man.

sad

xxp i know! but that's how it goes

very sad!

xp to goon, i should also add as well that I am a complete nba junky. the warriors were so bad for so long i learned to just love watching nba hoops in any form, still do. i mean, i still watch a lot of suns games...

league pass is such a game changer, i watched so many knicks games in my life, rough lol

during the we believe era warriors i would watch reg season games by using this one random link that i got from some warriors chat room. i would open the link then type into a blank chat box what game i wanted to watch, supposedly went to some dude in germany... then a link would be sent back within a few minutes and i had exactly 60 seconds to copy/paste the url into a very specific version of windows media player and the game would open. couldnt make the window full screen so it was like 1/10 of the monitor space but i didnt care, i needed my fix.

<3

lol nice, i had cable + league pass for a year and basically went into an nba coma waking up on the couch confused in the middle of the night and so forth

no such thing as too much hoop

league pass is such a game changer, i watched so many knicks games in my life, rough lol

― lag∞n, Tuesday, March 19, 2019 12:50 PM (fifty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Knicks Lakers the other night was deeply painful -- turnovers like every three runs! Just bad, embarrassing, pickup team level play. I imagine a lot of the games are like that but I don't watch that many.

yeah especially late in the season

lotta crap teams start shutting down their best players at the end and you get a lot of mediocre rookie showcasing and 10-day g league call-ups. It can get really ugly. but you are often left with questions like: is mudiay good now? is colin sexton gonna be ok in this league? how did elfrid payton get 5 triple doubles in a row? etc

lol i love the late season random stat games tbh

I've come reeeeally close to pulling the trigger on League Pass for like 8 straight years I think but still haven't done it, honestly between NBATV, TNT and ESPN there is pretty much 1-2 games on every night and I'm not terribly picky about who I watch.

Living in NC I am nominally a Hornets fan but this year has been a pain in the ass because I don't have traditional cable and my Playstation Vue doesn't get whatever rando regional sports channel that carries Hornets games. So I've literally watched them less than any other team this year because they're blacked out on the very rare occasion they appear on one of the national sports networks. This is all probably for the best. I saw them twice in person last season and they got smoked both times, once understandably by the Raps but once by the damn Nets.

I think the avidity of my NBA fandom has definitely peaked in the last few years, maybe in part due to the fact that I've dropped baseball as a sport I follow and I only get into college hoops in March. Honestly a big part of it too has been getting into NBA podcasts, especially the Lowe Post but also some of The Ringer's stuff, it just makes following the sport more enjoyable when there's a lot of smart content out there about it (same has been true for me with the NFL).

— Who's your #1 team:

Bulls

— Why is that team your #1:

Cause grew up in Chicago 'burbs. I was 6 when MJ was a rookie, 20 when he retired from Bulls 2nd time, so whole childhood was MJ Bulls.

— Who's your side-piece(s):

Don't have one. Respect the hell out of Pop and Spurs though. If Bulls aren't playing, I just root for good ball/close game/that player who annoys me to lose in comical fashion.

— How, when, why you got into the NBA:

See above re: 6 yr old me and MJ rookie. !st games I remember watching though were when MJ came back from fractured foot; I was so annoyed with his minutes restriction.

HAWKS. moved to atlanta from charlotte when i was eight and right in the middle of the classic nique/doc/spud/moses years. don't fuck with sidepieces and really don't watch much ball unless the hawks are playing. became weirdly invested during the rebuilding years of the early 2000s and haven't backed off since.

my son is two and is already asking me to watch trae highlights. when he shoots on his little basketball goal he yells trae highlights when it leaves his hand. this is how it should be.

aw go lil man

very nice.

my kids are arizona natives so i (kinda) want them to choose their own team, i try not to fill their minds with too much warriors homerism. they have chosen wisely thus far, obv with gentle nudging + praying to steph curry every morning and night.

reddit.com/nbastreams is consistently great if you don't mind watching games on your computer

er... r/nbastrems w/e

STREAMS

rae streamerds

celtics, saw bird play in the old garden w my dad etc, have p much been a hardcore fan since, watching many games in even the direst of todd day dee brown type seasons

Same same same, but sub “grandpa” for “dad” and “jeered at” for “saw”

no flex zone

https://i.imgur.com/hP2KjK6.png

dont be rude to larry bird please thank you

— Who's your #1 team: Dubs
— Why is that team your #1: Moved to the east bay in the '90s and slowly warmed to them.
— Who's your side-piece(s): I considered myself a Pistons fan in the Bad Boys era and also liked the Knicks, but mostly watched the Lakers since they were on TV regularly. Pretended to not enjoy the Lakers due to anti-LA bias. These days: My fantasy teams/players.
— Why they are your side-piece(s): $
— How, when, why you got into the NBA: Pretty much got into NBA/MLB/NFL as soon as I noticed they existed. Went to a few San Diego Clippers games as a tyke.

"celtics, saw bird play in the old garden w my dad etc" is p much as good a tagline as it gets for sports fandom

yeah theres some great stuff in this thread.

really liked jordans miami sports breakdown, had never thought of or heard any of that.

didnt know aimless was around for the golden years of the nba! its kinda weird to me that the nba hasnt uploaded a full archive of all games played or something. would love to watch some games from the 60s-70s.

yeah even before YouTube was a thing I thought NBA should put up all its old games online. but there are a LOT on YouTube. I watched a '71 Bucks Finals game not that long ago.

i watched a celtics-lakers russell-wilt finals game over the summer and...... it was so bad, no offense to the legends and what not but russell looked like he had never held a basketball before

sadly i'm a bit too young to have gotten to see larry bird, i did go to some games in the old garden with my dad but it was during like the dee brown era

there was a couple years in there where the celtics were playing smallball just cause their roster was bad and tommy called them "the mighty mights" lol really trying to be optimistic

mighty mites i guess makes more sense actually lol

Celtics are one of my earliest sports memories. Watched the Celtics/Rockets finals in a bar (!) with my dad.

lmao memories

https://media.tenor.com/images/12b3ddf25ec2c58830d84984caa9cbb1/tenor.gif

The antoine walker thing was a great little blip in time

lol, I have a lot of fondness for the players who became stars in the post-Jordan Bulls, pre-LeBron years.

i read a lot of Slam magazine in that time period, they hyped a lot of those guys

I never read Slam, but I can definitely picture those covers in my mind. Also there was about a year in there where I played PS2 NBA Street every day.

— Who's your #1 team: 76ers
— Why is that team your #1: i started watching basketball in like 2015, and the process was interesting, and then joel embiid ended up being a really fun guy and then they did good and i didn't have to live through years of badness, i just get to show up for the fun part haha sorry phidelphians
— Who's your side-piece(s): blazers, raptors
— Why they are your side-piece(s): cool-ass jerseys (blazers), i liked portland when i visited (blazers), i am from canada (raptors), but not toronto (anyone but raptors), lillard and kawhi
— How, when, why you got into the NBA: 2015 because it was the only major sport i wasn't watching at all and some new friends of mine were v into it so i jumped in and i was like "wtf this is good" and i stopped watching hockey and football p much immediately because basketball is very very very good. still have <3 in my heart for baseball tho, the ambient sport.

THAT SAID i dunno if i am gonna click sixers in the poll or click "w/e team is fun" because honestly i... watch who i can? with the weird nba pass blacking out every game. and there's so many good players at basketball. i like deaaron fox!!

ahh ill clikc 76ers to make it more interesting

— Who's your #1 team:
the nuggets

— Why is that team your #1:
I grew up in upstate NY and had filial and geographical connections to syracuse college sports. I was 13 or so when the carmelo-led team won the NCAA title and ended up just following him to the nuggets as I didn’t really have an NBA team. I was really into those teams from melo’s early years but only really became an every-game-watching fanatic after he was traded and fell in love with the deep, fun team they put together (especially the 2013 nuggets, my favorite team ever)
— Who's your side-piece(s):
whichever team chris paul is playing on, mid-2010s spurs for aesthetic and manu reasons, and generally any team that is good and plays fast

— How, when, why you got into the NBA:
I was only a casual fan for most of my early life, watched the late jordan bulls and the shaq lakers, but probably started the league more closely once I started following the nuggets

#1 team: Milwaukee Bucks
Lived in Wisconsin since I was 7.

Side-pieces...none, really. I liked the Mavs because of Dirk and the Spurs are always a cool team to watch. I like LeBron and a few other individual players like Chris Paul and Boban.

How, when, why you got into the NBA: Like a lot of 90s kids I pretty much grew up on Jordan's Bulls, not really caring about my own hometown team which was mostly awful. Nobody I knew really liked basketball so I kinda forgot about it, by the time I made some basketball friends and started watching again it was 2002, the year after the Bucks' last run with Ray Allen. They have not won a playoff series since. Still, it wasn't all bad - not having a good team meant no pressure and cheap tickets. Plus, we've been kind of spoiled by the Packers, so I figured rooting for a team that downright sucked sometimes was probably good, on balance. I thought the 2010 Bogut/Jennings team had a chance to make some noise...didn't happen. Of course Giannis has changed everything in Milwaukee.

aw go mke

how's the local vibe for the bucks now? are people into it?

i have only passing familiarity with milwaukee but don't see any reason why it shouldn't be a good basketball town.

a friend of mine who moved back to WI said it was a legit vibe, sld out games after years of like not getting sold out

yeah Milwaukee's a good basketball town, even better baseball town. how could it not be, drinking + cold weather + sports really do go together. there is a lot of excitement around the Bucks right now; most of the games I've been at this year were sold out and incredibly loud. Like when they go on one of those 2-minute 12-2 runs the place just goes absolutely mental. Plus we don't have a lot of big money/celebrities here so the front rows are nearly always big fans. I also think the Packers missing the playoffs twice in a row and generally looking like garbage has something to do with it as well. the idea that Wisconsin would have 2 MVPs and neither would be Aaron Rodgers would have sounded completely bonkers 5 years ago.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

— Why is that team your #1:
I grew up in upstate NY and had filial and geographical connections to syracuse college sports. I was 13 or so when the carmelo-led team won the NCAA title and ended up just following him to the nuggets as I didn’t really have an NBA team. I was really into those teams from melo’s early years but only really became an every-game-watching fanatic after he was traded and fell in love with the deep, fun team they put together (especially the 2013 nuggets, my favorite team ever)

― k3vin k., Wednesday, April 10, 2019 2:44 PM (six days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you should feel blessed every day that you didnt choose the knicks

for sure lol

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

dang, 46 votes? show yourselves you cowards

46 votes!?!? xp!!

ILH has got some lurkers

i voted so:

— Who's your #1 team: Bulls
— Why is that team your #1: grew up in northern IN, which is closer to Chicago than Indy. MJ was dominant.
— Who's your side-piece(s): I loved the Hornets when younger. I like to watch the celtics these days.
— Why they are your side-piece(s): hornets: for their gear and later on for the 'My Brother and Me' ties. celtics: IN ties. grew up watching all of the epic Larry Bird VHS docs with my dad. I like Brad. I also like to know what Bill Simmons is complaining about on his podcast.
— How, when, why you got into the NBA: Larry Bird VHS docs. pistol pete instructional videos.

ilh lurkers fear the yellow card imo

my yellow cards are literally carrying this message board franchise right now, have you read the politics threads???

this thread gives me heavy nostalgia for '90s NBA, there were so many gods walking the court at that time

the yellow card is a badge of honor

indeed a yellow card rules i'm just saying the lurkers are a-scared of em

i dont believe you????

idk im making it up. i was a-scared of it until i realized they are in fact a tasty treat! and now i post

Who's your #1 team: Spurs
— Why is that team your #1: went to college in SA in the 90s
— Who's your side-piece(s): Bulls, Hawks
— Why they are your side-piece(s): lived in those places, lived in the Bay Area too but I never really got that the warriors were local because I am dumb
— How, when, why you got into the NBA: 85 I think, started watching baseball daily and nba games would sometimes be on instead (bulls & knicks mostly) I hate all things ny except the knicks because I loved watching Patrick Ewing play

you went to trinity right?

Yes!

I saw a bunch of games while there, even a playoff game one year

yeah Milwaukee's a good basketball town, even better baseball town. how could it not be, drinking + cold weather + sports really do go together.

I'd + relatively few transplants/many WI lifers

this thread gives me heavy nostalgia for '90s NBA, there were so many gods walking the court at that time

― omar little, Friday, April 19, 2019 3:53 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this era might be even better: lebron, durant, steph, chris paul, harden, giannis, AD are all going to be top 25 all time dudes

not sure AD and cp3 belong in that conversation but im open to be persuaded

cp3 is already there and I’ve made the case a million times, you can just look at his stats and all-NBA teams and such, AD obv well on his way