Are highlights hurting basketball? This is what Austin Rivers, player of the Minnesota Timberwolves, defends, and obviously he is not the only one to believe it.
Highlights (or mixtapes) and basketball are a bit like clouds and rain, it seems hard to separate. Whether at the NBA level, as in college, in the amateur league, fans love these compilations of spectacular action. We see a 15-year-old kid banging a windmill on an interior and we strongly think that he reaches the NBA to do the same thing every night. In short, the culture of show and highlights is something very widespread these days, much helped it is true by the rise of social networks. Is this omnipresence, these compilations with the shovel a scourge for basketball? If Austin Rivers is to be believed, the answer is yes. In a video on Tiktok (to be found at the bottom of the page)the Wolves player explained his vision of things.
First of all, mixtapes are so common these days that we don’t distinguish between the really good players and the others.
“When I was performing in high school, you only got a mixtape if you were a top guy. At the time, you had to work. Constant work. You had to make a name for yourself to get a mixtape and it was an honor to have a BallIsLife mixtape. It was an honor to have a Hoopmixtape. But we didn’t play to get one, I didn’t walk into a game doing something to be on Hoopmixtape.
“I went to the game to win and be myself, and Hoopmixtape and the others were there following me. I didn’t ask Hoopmixtape to follow me. I didn’t pay Hoopmixtape a dollar. I didn’t pay BallIsLife a dollar. They just followed me because I was that guy. They followed Bradley Beal because he was that guy. It was like that.”
The reason Rivers insists on this is that anyone can get a mixtape these days, all the parents have to do is get their hands dirty. Getting a dose of hype is possibly ensuring a better future and is therefore an investment that is worth it.
“The landscape has changed now. Parents pay these people to come to games. Everybody’s got a mixtape, everybody’s looking at the camera now and banging their heads when they dunk on somebody. It’s just a succession of highlights, and now the kids only watch that. They don’t watch the real basketball game, the purity of the game.”
Through the purity of the game, you can also understand the fundamentals and all the little things that make a player really valuable to his team. Not just by dunking on so-and-so’s face or taking a shot from midfield.
“Make the right pass even if you’re not going to get an assist, drive the game so someone else can get an assist. Diving on the field, speaking in defense, playing in defense period. Take good shots, make the game easy, be efficient with the ball, score on one or two dribbles rather than 15 dribbles. … Highlight culture has absolutely killed basketball.”
A clear opinion therefore and which is shared by several NBA players. Kyle Kuzma had already addressed this point ten days ago and Nicolas Batum relayed the Austin Rivers video on Twitter to validate his arguments.
Highlight culture absolutely killed the game of basketball. The nuance is lost…
— autumn (@kylekuzma) January 7, 2023
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— Nicolas Batum (@nicolas88batum) January 16, 2023
