Over the past two weeks, I’ve found myself enraptured by the world of docuseries. From D.B. Cooper to Anna Delvey to Malice at the Palace, my roommate and I have watched it all, and I don’t see this obsession ending anytime soon. I mean, what’s not to love about longform learning in a world where all the information you need is right at your fingertips… and all the information you didn’t know you needed is in the third or fourth episode of a docuseries about something so niche it nearly blows your mind that this much content can be created about it?
Here are four modern NBA stories I believe need deep, subtly dramatized analyses.
1. Joel Embiid vs Karl Anthony Towns
While this series would revolve around the biting comparisons and heavily-pushed rivalry between these two star centers dating back to 2016, the build-up will boil down to the fight between the two that took place on October 30th, 2019. After Joel Embiid forced Karl-Anthony Towns to turn the ball over midway through the third quarter, KAT threw the first punch, and Joel was dragged out of the fight. By the time the camera panned back to KAT, Ben Simmons had him on the floor in a chokehold, surrounded by players and officials.
The series will take a sharp turn here, declaring Ben Simmons’ chokehold on Towns the beginning of his downfall. After this moment, Simmons experienced a string of back injuries, went down with a subluxed kneecap during the Bubble, made an infamous Game 7 pass to Tobias Harris, ghosted the Sixers, and got traded to the Brooklyn Nets at the deadline in a blockbuster trade for James Harden. He still hasn’t played in a single NBA game since June 2021, and his reputation among NBA fans and players alike has been absolutely obliterated. It’s a bold claim, but I really do believe that the chokehold was the beginning of the end.
Maybe this would really be a documentary about Ben Simmons, but I’d also pinpoint that fateful night as the day the “Joel vs KAT” argument died. Since the fight, Joel has made leaps and bounds above KAT’s talent level, placing second in MVP voting two years in a row and carrying the Sixers to the second round twice. Maybe there would be episodes dedicated to every involved player’s perspective in the aftermath – Joel’s rise to greatness, KAT’s struggles with COVID and forging his own path in its wake, and Ben’s breakdown. It’s so interesting to me that these three previously intertwined players grew so far apart after this one singular moment in time – Joel taking off, Ben taking off, and KAT now playing second fiddle to… Rudy Gobert?
Joel and KAT ended their feud at the start of the 2021-22 NBA season, uniting over their struggles with COVID and the realization that life is bigger than basketball. The most interesting twist this docuseries will take is that Ben Simmons, who threw himself into the line of fire for Joel during that 2019 fight, ended up betraying him worse than KAT ever could have, and turned himself into Joel’s enemy in the process (literally).
Woooooh. Quite biblical!
2. Dario Saric’s 2012 DUI
Listen, I couldn’t write an article about things I’d be entertained by without sneaking this one in. This docuseries would answer the question: what really went down on the night of November 18th, 2012 on the streets of Zagreb?
The story goes a little bit like this: Dario Saric was a free agent during the 2012 Euroleague offseason after ending his contract with KK Zagreb and winning a lawsuit against his parents, arguing that a contract they signed for him when he was 15 was invalid. On November 18th, 2012, Dario crashed his Jeep Grand Cherokee into three parked cars in Zagreb and fled the scene. He was arrested the next morning on the basis that there was alcohol in his system. There were no witnesses and no charges pressed against him. Eight days later, he signed a $550,000 (I know) contract with KK Cibona, a team that Dario never previously mentioned wanting to play for, and that didn’t have the money to sign him.
The story flew mostly under the radar, but some bloggers and forum users pointed out a few suspicious (and important) discrepancies:
It was illegal for an 18 year old to own a Jeep Grand Cherokee in Croatia, and the car was reportedly legally registered under Dario’s name.
If a hot-headed young basketball star totals your car, you’re going to want some money out of it… right? Why were there no charges pressed? And if it was a busy street and the crash happened before midnight, why were there no witnesses?
According to a Vice article on the saga, Josip Klemm, a businessman who had just bailed out two war criminals, was on the podium with Dario when he signed his contract. By the way, Cibona didn’t have $550k to sign Dario with…
According to the same Vice article, Dario said this on the podium: “Fortunately, no one forced me to do anything… the decision to play for Cibona is totally mine.”
There are only a few articles and forum posts out there about this incident — most of them have been lost to time, even with the WayBack Machine. Coincidentally enough, there’s actually already a documentary on Dario, although it’s self-produced and gives us basically nothing besides an uncomfortably intimate look into a definitely-normal family dynamic and their totally real shipping company. There is a forklift and a Brett Brown interview and a shed. It’s $5 to rent if you’re morbidly curious, but I have a link to an mp4 (email me).
A decade later, Dario’s parents are still causing a bit of a ruckus in NBA media – claiming he’d recover from a torn ACL in five months among other things. (Side note: did Dario’s dad dupe the Suns into thinking Dario would be ready halfway through the 2021-22 season?) Basically, we have a 28-year-old NBA player whose parents are speaking for him in all media outside of official Phoenix Suns press releases, and if this docuseries serves no other purpose, it’s to answer some questions for me specifically. Are there financial motives behind the media moves? Who’s really in charge of Dario’s contracts? Was there even a car crash to begin with? Whatever the case, I am intrigued.
The Downfall of the 2021-22 Los Angeles Lakers
Who doesn’t love a good train wreck? After being predicted to win it all, this aging superteam composed of LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Russell Westbrook, Dwight Howard, and Carmelo Anthony, among others, missed the playoffs by a long shot (literally).
Although their downfall was one of the funniest things to happen in sports this year, I’d like to do these players justice, showing off their talent in prior seasons and what they may have been able to achieve had they decided to team up eight years ago. Maybe, like the Nets, they’d serve as a cautionary tale against the myth of the superteam – there has to be some sort of rhyme or reason to your team construction, or you’ll end up bounced and made fun of across the internet before you can even say “play-in.”
With head coach Frank Vogel fired, the 2020 Bubble championship a distant memory, and the starting five marching wearily towards retirement without a young core to take over, the future looks quite bleak for the Lakers, and depending on your take on the team, this docuseries will leave you either laughing or shaking your head with a deep sigh.
Also, LeBron’s April Fool’s Day tweet that wasn’t an April Fool’s Day tweet still gets me to this day. Thank you, Jack Dorsey.
The Washington Covizards
Mo Wagner, pinkeye, and a “murder web,” oh my!
I asked the other KILTRites how they’d feel about a docuseries on the NBA’s “COVID seasons,” and while that got dazzlingly shot down like a malfunctioning firework over the Epcot ball, I felt compelled to include this interesting but still 99% harmless moment in NBA history:
The time the Washington Wizards were spreading COVID around the league and fans figured it out before the COVID protocols squad.
The story goes that NBA fans on Twitter kept track of the players who tested positive between December 2020 and January 2021 and found that the majority of them had played versus the Wizards three days to a week prior to their positive test. This went on for at least two weeks before the Wizards themselves started testing positive, with Rui Hachimura, who spent the weeks prior to the Covizards saga out with conjunctivitis, being the first to drop, followed by Mo Wagner, who had guarded several opposing players in the previous weeks who tested positive for COVID.
Really, I just want to be the one to mix the dramatic music when the camera pans across an empty Capital One Arena and the narrator hesitates for a moment before saying “Rui Hachimura didn’t just have pinkeye.”
As far as the internet was concerned, the dots were connected. Everybody and their NBA-watching mother had a theory on who was spreading COVID, where they got it from, and who they gave it to, in their own Covizards “murder web” that I’d be incredibly giddy about designing for the docuseries set. The only people who were late on connecting the dots were the NBA officials themselves, who suspended the Wizards for six total games in mid-January while fans of the league begged for a two-week total shutdown. All of the other games that were cancelled by the NBA had at least one team present who had recently faced the Wizards.
By the way, as someone living in DC during the time of the Covizards, this story has a specific personal flair. My friend told me she ran into Mo Wagner at Trader Joe’s once, and it wasn’t until she told me that she ran into him on January 14th, 2021 that I was interested. This story had DC basketball fans in a… chokehold. Sorry!
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If you’re a director or a Netflix executive and you’re reading this, hello. If you’re not, I’d love to know your thoughts on these ideas and if you love watching documentaries as much as I do! Either way, the docuseries is one of the most dominant and easily-bingeable forms of longform entertainment right now, and I hope to see a few more NBA docuseries on their way soon.
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