Why rewatching classic games can be so rewarding
The play-by-play felt like an inside joke.
“It's amazing how the whole season can come down to making free throws,” said ESPN’s Mike Breen as San Antonio Spurs guard Manu Ginobili stepped to the free-throw line. Moments later, his teammate, Kawhi Leonard, stood at the free-throw line while the Spurs led by two in the closing minute of Game 6 of the 2013 NBA Finals.
The NBA season was suspended 30 days ago, on March 11. Since then, ESPN and NBA TV have been airing old classics. Almost seven years have passed since Game 6, which aired across NBA platforms on March 19 and on ESPN alongside Game 7 on Wednesday.
Leonard was about to split the pair, giving Miami Heat sharpshooter Ray Allen enough of a sliver to drill the biggest three in a career filled with big threes. The Heat took overtime, Game 7 and clinched the trophy.
Watching the game two days ago, I knew what was going to happen next. But the experience itself felt new.
Leonard is no longer the humble 21-year-old, just happy to be here. He remains quiet, but he’s all-powerful, as efficient with his words as he is with his every move. He barrelled his way out of San Antonio two years ago and took home a Finals MVP with Toronto before dangling the possibility of his arrival over multiple teams in free agency last summer. It’s jarring, in 2020, to see Leonard look so wide-eyed and vulnerable, nervous even, as he stepped to the stripe.
I miss sports.
Everything we miss right now, we miss acutely. For those of us physically distancing at home, the coronavirus has led to a specific exercise in psychological deprivation.
We are all taking stock of the micro-joys we once got from our day-to-day lives, even the parts we presumed to hate — long commutes alone, the sameness in every carpet stain and cracked wall at work — that subconsciously provide us comfort. We’ve replaced them with FaceTime dates, with drinks on Zoom and yelling out on balconies.
But how do we replace sports?
Nobody reads myths about Greek gods anymore. We barely even watch the same movies. We read less. Churchgoing is down, but sports fandom is up. Fans congregate weekly, sometimes daily, engaging in rituals, watching heroes battle villains. Stories play out. Lessons unfold. Whether or not they should be, sports are influential. Watching them makes us want to mirror Herculean feats. Athletes give us energy. Studies even suggest fans on the winning side experience a testosterone boost. Sports can reduce stress and increase feelings of social cohesion and self-worth. Every day, they make us feel just a little stronger, a little more energetic, more vital. Over time, that goes a long way.
Last week, I asked on Twitter if people had been watching old games. For fans, rewatching sports seems beside the point. In normal circumstances, there’s so much live sports programming that the idea of watching reruns doesn’t even register. Sports is a future-forward enterprise: Games beget more games, until they beget trades and free agency and the promise of another season. The machine churns by looking ahead. We already know what happened in the past. No anticipation, no surprise, no potential, no anxiety, no relief, no agony, no ecstasy.
Sure, you go down the YouTube wormhole sometimes. But as a collective, we aren’t very reflective.
As of late, I’ve found myself nestling into old games like a warm blanket. There’s comfort in knowing how things will end, in sharing an experience aside from daily news briefings with other people. (Seven million people tuned in to watch the NBA’s stream on March 19.)
The experience has reminded me that there’s so much more to a game than charting the unknown. Re-broadcasted games don’t get us any closer to the One Big Thing we all crave from sports — a new champion — but they fill the gaps on the little things quite well: the moments that pump blood into your arteries like it's the first time all over again and displays of athleticism that send our calves a signal to jump.
Watching a great game again is not all that different from watching a great movie again. In hindsight, that shouldn’t be surprising. Watching a game is watching a story unfold. And as with any story, new context creates new viewing angles and new experiences.
In 2020, the story of the 2013 NBA Finals is not what it was seven years ago. Miami vs. San Antonio was a saga of built vs. bought, of age against attrition, a step in the odyssey of LeBron James.
We didn’t realize it was the origin story of Kawhi Leonard, a main player in the quest for redemption that led the Spurs to the title in 2014, when he would take home Finals MVP before clawing out of San Antonio, re-emerging from injury and landing on top of the basketball world.
Nor did we know that Miami’s rivalry with the Spurs would create a tactical drawbridge between the past and the future.
The Heat signed Allen, the world’s best shooter at the time, in the summer of 2012. Increment by increment, big man Chris Bosh stepped back to the 3-point line. In the final moments of Game 6, Heat coach Erik Spoelstra took Bosh out of the game for Mike Miller, famously prompting Spurs coach Gregg Popovich to substitute future Hall of Famer Tim Duncan, one of the world’s best rebounders, for Boris Diaw.
The Spurs then allowed two offensive rebounds that led to threes, one of them being Allen’s 3-pointer. The scramble, the back-pedal, the shot — all of that will be etched in history forever. But the tactical fallout will leave a bigger impact.
In the 2014-15 Finals, the Golden State Warriors beat LeBron at his own game, turning 6-foot-6 Andre Iguodala into a center and a defensive lynchpin while winning three straight to clinch the series.
Duncan being on the bench didn’t just lose the Finals. It was a decision-making flashpoint that governed the NBA from then on. In the face of the small-ball onslaught, would teams zig or zag? Would they stay big or adjust? Zoomed out, the moment marked an evolution.
When Diaw, 6-foot-8 and stout, entered the game, former Spurs assistant coach Mike Budenholzer watched from the sideline as the embryo of the modern five-out style he built around Giannis Antetokounmpo emerged. The contours of the present live in the recent past. It’s up to us to find them, to turn the old into the new while we wait for games to continue.
When Game 7 ended and the Heat were declared champions, I could feel the season’s accumulation rolling off their chest, the accomplishment washing over them. I felt lighter. My stomach muscles loosened. The feeling wasn’t as powerful as it was in 2013, but I remembered the act of feeling it, and that alone was good enough — a facsimile of the ecstasy. Right now, a facsimile will do just fine.
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