Book review: FreeDarko presents The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac

Photo credit: Game Face

By Alexander Nazaryan

Special to amNewYork

When outspoken Detroit Pistons forward Rasheed Wallace called professional basketball “fake” last season, he was only saying what we already knew: Players are overpaid, rivalries are staged and skills take a backseat to showboating.

And yet there are those who love the NBA, not the least among them the FreeDarko collective, rascally authors of the “Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac.” This lushly illustrated compendium — to be released Nov. 11by Bloomsbury (224 pages, $23) — infuses joy into a game that is now far more concerned with corporate branding than picking and rolling.

Writing under pseudonyms such as Dr. Lawyer IndianChief and Big Baby Belafonte, the authors open with a manifesto that has guided the principles of their irreverent blog: “In rejecting the old NBA, we seek not to spite our forbears but to silence those who proclaim the league’s decrepitude.” True to the authors’ word, the “Almanac” is a technicolor yearbook of the best the NBA has to offer.

Player profiles are divided into such categories as Master Builders (Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett), Uncanny Peacocks (Gilbert Arenas, who also penned a foreword to the book, and Leandro Barbosa) and Destiny’s Kids (LeBron James, Chris Paul). The smart commentary is accompanied by hilarious illustrations that are as telling as the textual analysis: Arenas as a carnival performer, Tim Duncan as an ancient statue, Lamar Odom wandering the basketball world like Job.

Each profile also features the player’s favorite moves meticulously diagrammed and sidebars that detail, for example, corresponding “spirit animals” (Amare Stoudemire: piranha; Ron Artest: dingo), which only furthers the book’s pleasantly whimsical quality.

Colorful statistical charts masterfully avoid the drudgery of reducing sports performances to numbers on a page. The stats, such as a point-by-point analysis of Bryant’s 81-point performance, suggest that, behind the humor, FreeDarko knows its stuff. And there are many surprising findings, too: Despite his off-court troubles, Carmelo Anthony is among the most generous sports philanthropists, having donated more than $4 million in 2006, while Rasheed Wallace’s output improves in nearly every category after a technical foul.

Most wonderful are the humorous asides that have little to do with by-the-numbers performance analysis but go a long way in promulgating FreeDarko’s celebration of individual players. A Rorschach blot for Bryant alludes to his troubled public image; erstwhile UNC philosophy major Wallace is compared to major Western thinkers, in what is surely the first attempt to link Arthur Schopenhauer with a motion offense.

“More personality, more trash-talking, more fights, less coaching” is what IndianChief, in a recent interview with amNewYork, said he’d like to see from his beloved league. The officious David Stern and his coterie of arbitration lawyers may disagree, but opening this paean to professional basketball offers hopeful intimations that the clock hasn’t quite run out on the NBA.

On FreeDarko.com:

“The NBA right now just isn’t a game ‘for the people,’ ” says Dr. Lawyer IndianChief, one of the founders of the FreeDarko.com basketball blog. The site’s name refers to Darko Milicic, the overhyped and overpaid Serbian journeyman whose disappointing career is an apt symbol of the league’s misguided priorities. For this quirky and intelligent blog, taking back the league involves features such as a review of every single game of the 2008-09 season, with irreverent projections, such as this one, for Portland at Oklahoma City (Feb. 6): “Desperate for a rivalry, OKC fans load up on coffee and wear flannel.” This site is not for the humorless fan who wants his assist-to-turnover ratios and little else.

(Alexander Nazaryan)

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Delicious
• Digg
• Stumble Upon