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Remembering The NBA In The 1990s

By Christopher Cruz

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For some reason, I’ve been thinking about the 90s a lot, especially the way in which basketball influenced culture. Try to stay with me. That era of basketball brought to us the era of Ray Allen, Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson and Stephon Marbury.

It was an era that was able to completely cloak Steve Nash, because he wasn’t doing the sort of things that my friends and I thought were amazing.

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It was also a time when “And 1” got really popular. Street ball was a thing that we aspired to do, both professionally (because obviously I wanted to be the next AO), and personally out at our neighborhood parks. The crossover, because we didn’t know historically that Tim Hardaway really patented that move, was invented by Iverson.

His crossover on Michael Jordan is etched in memory, like the memory of a first kiss, or your first amazing sports moment. It is hard for me to decipher why the memory of this seems a lot more culturally influencing than the NBA seems right now.

It is not that the NBA isn’t a major part of culture, that seems indisputable. But when I was growing up, the NBA was a place that dominated discourse while children like me emulated virtually every single part of a player. If Allen Iverson got cornrows, then kids showed up with grown out hair and cornrows a few months later.

Baggy shorts became a popular item, not just the type that sag, but the type that virtually covered one’s entire leg. And 1 teamed up with Iverson to take all of my money from the ages of 10-14.

Does anybody remember Steve Francis? That name would only ring a bell if you would watched basketball in the late ’90s or early 2000s, but he was the proto-Russell Westbrook. Check this video out:

How many players other than Russell Westbrook can pull something off like that? That’s probably why we called him Steve “Franchise.”  There was also the unrivaled yin and yang duo that went at it every time they played basketball. That is Kobe Bryant and Tracy McGrady.

Aside from the fact that they both came out with some of the more ugly shoes that we have ever seen on the market, the two shooting guards gave us everything from dunks to three-point shooting, and quite possibly, the casual disrespect of legends.

The more that I think about it, the more that I am convinced that the NBA was different in that players who were drafted in the ’90s seemed to reject authority more. From Iverson’s Jordan crossover, to just trying to dunk over every single person imaginable, there was nobody that was “special” in the eyes of this new group.

It’s possible that this was a result of the hierarchical nature of the ’80s, with its powers being the form of the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics, or the Detroit Pistons. Who wouldn’t want to overthrow those powers? Who wouldn’t want a slice of the proverbial pie?

Things are a bit cleaned up right now, especially since the Pistons-Indiana Pacers melee that broke out in 2004. David Stern wanted no part of that. But there was something amazing about the way the players played in the 90s, or at least the attitude that they carried. It was the precursor to the modern swag movement, a time which we probably may never get back again.

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