I started to lose interest in the NBA when I moved to Washington in 1990. The Pistons were giving way to Jordan and the Bulls; I couldn’t have afforded cable, even if it had been available in my Capitol hill neighborhood (it wasn’t at the time); and I didn’t have access to Channel 50 any more. The Bullets were bad at the time, playing out in Landover, at the end of the Blue LIne, and I didn’t pay much attention to them. I was vaguely aware of Bernard King, Wes Unseld, Harvey Grant, and the mess of an organization that Tony Kornheiser called Les Boulez, but my interest in basketball was waning.
It was saved by a few things. The first was fantasy basketball, which I started playing with a New York friend and his co-workers. We would get a fax (!) every week detailing the production of our players and our standing in the league. Our performance at first demonstrated our lack of knowledge about rotisserie basketball and the NBA, but I started paying a lot more attention to box scores than standings, and the 3rd iteration of our squad--which we had named Ice Team--led by Patrick Ewing, alongside the playmaking of Muggsy Bogues and the sharpshooting of Glen Rice, was a runaway winner in the 1993 season.
The Bullets also generated some attention from me as they began plans to move into a downtown arena, located in a derelict neighborhood that I sometimes walked through on my way home from work near the White House to my house near Eastern Market. Plus they were contemplating a name change, and the dismal choices--to be determined by a vote that was probably rigged, were also the subject of much derision.
I bought Bullets t-shirts for my groomsmen in 1997, failing to understand that the name change was more about merchandising than anything else, and that the iconic red white and blue motif with the outstretched hands logo was still going to be readily available at the gift shop.
But the new arena was coming and Michael Jordan himself, the man who had ended the Pistons’ run, and who I had watched on WGN when I was in law school, had joined the organization as President of basketball operations. Everything seemed to be going in the right direction for Washington basketball. I spent the 1997 and 1998 seasons in Macedonia, and, although I didn’t see much basketball, the Washington Post (now my hometown paper and internet home page) assigned two excellent writers, Michael Lee and Ivan Carter, to cover the local team, and the quality and breadth of their coverage was fantastic. Despite being 3,000 miles away, without American television, radio or newspaper, I felt like I was closer to a team than I had been since 1988, my last year in the Motor City.
We came back to DC the following year, but I didn’t watch much basketball in the 1999-2000 season. Partly because I had a newborn baby daughter, but mostly because the team, which featured in Juwan Howard, a star who in my view could never be the best player on a good team, and Mitch Richmond, a player who I had heard much about, but never really seen play, because he was on a west coast team that didn’t get any national exposure, wasn’t very good. The team had traded Chris Webber for him, after a promising season and a playoff appearance, but it was quickly evident that he was in the downward arc of his career. It was the type of player I would get used to seeing in Washington.
But give Michael a break. At least he was making moves, and in the 2000-01 season, which was to be Mitch Richmond’s last in the league, his hand-picked coach--a mildly successful NCAA veteran--guided the team to a 7th place finish and a place in the lottery, which in contravention of all Washington tradition, they won, selecting Kwame Brown, a high school phenom who, hand-picked by the GOAT himself, was going to help turn things around.
Anna was starting to talk and soon walk, and it was at this point, the 2001 season that our relationship with the team, and each other, really began.
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