The Casuals Won't Be Addressed

On Damian Lillard, Ball Don't Stop, and the existential war between casuals and hoopers

Last week, Damian Lillard was finally traded by the Portland Trailblazers. In keeping with Lillard’s disposition, his farewell to the city of Portland was equal parts earnest and embarrassing; it, of course, included him rapping. The trade mercifully ended what had become the most tedious story of a tedious NBA offseason—by its end, everybody, including Lillard, seemed to be going through the motions. And yet Lillard’s goodbye to the city of Portland was not without a vitriol that has become something of a mainstay among basketball’s elite class. Before embarking on his saccharine, if sincere, farewell tour, Lillard first felt the need to address the NBA’s newest boogeyman: “The casuals,” Dame tweeted, “won’t be addressed.”

Over the last two or so years, the NBA media landscape has come to be haunted by a certain spectre: the spectre of the casual. Casuals, an increasing number of the league’s commentariat and superstardom might tell you, pose an existential threat to the entire endeavor of professional basketball. Depending on who you ask, casuals are committed to denigrating the beautiful game of basketball, to ruining promising careers in service of received, media-generated narratives, to prioritizing the categorizable over the profound, unknowable hooper. To a certain, extremist vanguard of hoopers, the casual is a species to be exterminated.

The idea that casuals are sabotaging basketball with their lazy wisdoms, perverted preferences, and hegemonic power would feel easy to dismiss out of hand but for the fact that it is incredibly difficult to actually define a casual. At first blush, the term casual appears almost too obvious to dwell on: the name suggests that a casual is someone who halfheartedly follows the NBA, the casual as the direct opposite of the die-hard. One imagines this conception of the casual when, for instance, Christian Wood calls NBA Hall of Fame Shaquille O’Neal a casual on national television for admitting that he was “unfamiliar with [Woods’] game.” But this sort of casual, the casual whose greatest sin is that of not paying attention, would have neither the motivation nor the capacity to remake basketball in its disinterested image.

To attempt to understand the concept of the casual that has come to be the scapegoat of everything wrong with modern basketball, one must step into the mind and Twitter page of the man most concerned with the rise of the casual: Ball Don’t Stop’s Ekam Nagra. Nagra, a Canadian podcaster and Pro-Am organizer who so fully embodies the persona of his multimedia basketball analysis empire that he might be better understood simply as Ball Don’t Stop, runs a Twitter account more singularly critical of casual culture than a blue check’s is critical of gender-affirming surgery. Ball Don’t Stop’s casual is defined not in opposition to the die-hard, but to the real hooper. To Ball Don’t Stop, the world is divided into virile, virtuosic hoopers (joined, in an act of solidarity, by those who “know ball”) and anemic, anonymous casuals, a sickly underclass attempting to undermine basketball in some sort of Revenge-of-the-Nerds-style coup. Ball Don’t Stop’s definition of the casual, too, grows slippery. He speaks of “casual culture” having poisoned the way basketball is consumed by pathologizing legions of fans into robotic debating machines. He veers into labeling as casual anybody who believes defense is a valid basketball concern. At times, his casual is a fan who can only process basketball through its flashiest practitioners; overwhelmingly, however, Ball Don’t Stop’s imagined casual is the fan who fetishizes numbers and statistics above all else, ignoring the game entirely to advance a coldly, calculatedly technocratic agenda.

Ball Don’t Stop’s tilting at the casual windmill is easily mocked. So, too, does his obsessession with the casual invite amateur psychoanalysis: to wit, a Kobe Bryant Stan’s inability to grapple with parasocial grief in specific and a deeper mourning over time’s passage and death’s inevitability in general as displaced and projected onto a legion of nefarious bugmen conspiring to steal from him his last source of joy and beauty. Still, his conception of the casual is worth taking seriously if only for its similarity to basketball’s other great boogeyman: analytics. Ball Don’t Stop’s conception of the calculator casual reads almost exactly like a conventional critique of the rise of analytics in basketball: if analytic prerogatives force players into certain roles, shots, strategies, and structures, then the casual blog boy accepts these new modes as natural at best and commendable at worst. Analytics, the concern goes, degrades a living, breathing game in service of numerical efficiencies; Ball Don’t Stop’s casual harvests these numbers from basketball’s bloated corpse to denigrate Kobe’s legacy on Twitter.¹

Analytic anxiety, on its own terms, is understandable. The analytical revolution has decidedly changed the way professional basketball is played, fundamentally transforming the very style, presentation, and operation of the game. On a more existential level, the rise of analytics can feel part and parcel with the inescapable creep of technology and data harvesting into every realm of modern life; watching the sport you relax to at night transform itself in service of numbers can trigger a certain panic when one’s life is already so dictated by the prerogatives of Big Data. But the problem with performative opposition to analytics, as Tosten Burks writes in the Los Angeles Review of Books, is that “ironically the so-called ‘modern game’ backed by dry math is spectacular to watch.” Analytics deprioritize certain styles, surely, but they pave the way for exhilarating others to flourish; here is evolution, even if ruthlessly efficient, not extinction.

Still, Ball Don’t Stop’s casual is more than just a personification of the efficiency-fetishizing technicians he believes are ruining the game of basketball. The casual, in his mind, is as much a creature of social media as they are one of the analytical revolutionar. “Crazy to think a lot of people, especially Twitter, started watching or getting into basketball around 2014 when that social media boom kicked in and you started seeing the game all over your feeds,” Ball Don’t Stop once wrote. “Unfortunately these are also the key years in the beginning of casual culture.” Elsewhere, he is less precise:

When Ball Don’t Stop discusses social media, he comes closer than anytime else to offering a unified theory of the casual: the casual not as a stand in for the imagined fan prioritization of cold numbers over real hoops, but for the quite real phenomenon of the actual sport of basketball proving less interesting to many than its attendant the soap operatic fanfare. His complaint, contextualized as such, feels deeply resonant. The anti-casual crusader, the real hooper or ball-knower, might be nothing more than someone who has felt social media and the exponential growth of content corrode their lives and strip the joy from the things in which they once sought refuge; what sentiment could be more broadly felt? As a heuristic of Ball Don’t Stop’s media criticism, “casual culture” is uncharacteristically perceptive within the specific context of the NBA coverage landscape. The NBA has become, moreso than any other professional American sports organization, the internet’s league, fodder for legions of painfully enthusiastic bloggers and soyfacing League Pass watchers to comment endlessly. NBA Twitter, and its constant, breathless celebration of #ThisLeague, simultaneously enhances the experience of watching basketball and also threatens to supersede actual basketball as the center of the NBA’s attention economy. At its worst, the social mediatization of basketball discussion renders the actual basketball mere pretense for the glossolalia of metatextual discussion that basketball supports. Following the NBA means following player personalities, dramas, eccentricities, mental health crises, sexual assault scandals, geopolitical dustups, Chinese propaganda tours, cryptocurrency grifting, strip club still lives, vaccination statuses, Instagram likes, Twitter bios, viewership numbers, stories about stories. The biggest meme of the offseason has been that the best player in the world does not actually like basketball, the biggest conversation during the NBA Finals was whether enough people were actually discussing the NBA Finals on their own terms. The analysis has, like the snake eying its tail, turned inward; the conversation threatens to engulf the spectacle.

While Ball Don’t Stop is far from a rigorous structuralist, his anti-casual agenda strikes a chord despite its being wildly overstated. If Lillard’s spiteful message is any indication, then battle lines are being drawn: real hooper versus casual, the game of basketball as expression of beauty through competition rather than as excuse for more opining and analysis. A league that rode the internet content boom to newfound popularity, full of players who have wed themselves wholesale to social media’s branding economy, attempting to free itself from the dictates of attention and return to something like existence for its own sake. It’s not clear whether the hoopers stand a chance, but it is hard not to root for them.

1. Never mind the fact that engaging with numbers and statistics is tiresome, tedious activity that would feel the exact opposite of “casual” fandom.