How the NBA lost its cool

0:00So if you get a win tonight, that will breed confidence going into those next four games against teams in similar spots beside you in the table. Where you from, Jim? Ireland. I like your accent. It's tough. I want to learn how to talk like that. But ask your question again. I was too much listening to your accent. Hey, pals. This is Emily, and you're listening to Cujo, a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. So you might not know this about us, but Andrea and I are huge basketball fans. Like, during the regular season, it's on in my house pretty much every day of the week. And today, we are excited to inaugurate a new Cujo tradition, which is that once a year, we get to talk about the culture of the NBA, and specifically, how the sport and its star players function to both propel American culture forward and to hold up a mirror to the culture at large.

0:58So to celebrate Game 7 of the NBA Finals this weekend, I am here with Drew Millard, boyfriend of the pod and co-host of the excellent new podcast Macho Pod. Check it out here on Substack, who is filling in for Andrea, who is currently in Greece eating exotic wild greens. And we are excited to welcome this week's special guest, Ox Portello, aka Jack, who describes himself as a silly little blogger at the Never Hungover Substack and is the author of a viral article titled Toward a Unified Theory of Uncool, Considering the NBA's Swag Crisis, Zinn, and the West Village Girls. For as long as any of us can remember, Op contends, the NBA has been the cultural North Star of the U.S.

1:44But according to Op, the league has become a microcosm of the ways that economic risk aversion and image production in the age of social media are rendering the culture at large increasingly swagless. We discussed the erasure of regional identity in the age of globalization, how aura replaced coolness, and what the basketball superstars of 2025 have in common with the West Village girls. We'll be back with Ox Portello after the break.

2:37Hi, Ak, aka Jack. Thank you so much for coming on to the show. What's up, guys? Thank you for having me. Yeah, thank you. And I have some legal questions to ask you later, specifically related to parlay debts incurred across every sportsbook and if I have to pay those or not. Well, yeah. So you are legally allowed. This is binding legal advice. You're legally allowed to arbitrage sportsbooks against one another and to basically continue cashing in the bonus no-sweat parlay bets. You can make your girlfriend, your loved ones, your parents, your cousins who aren't old enough to sign up themselves yet.

3:18You can keep registering accounts. It's all perfectly legal. And if they come after you, you can just call me. Thank you. so you were watching the eastern conference finals and you were struck by this thought that the nba is currently in the midst of a swag crisis uh or what you call a crisis of cool why how did this pop into your head yeah well i mean the piece was intentionally intended to just kind of be tongue-in-cheek and a way for me to grind an axe against jalen brunson and the new York Knicks. That's just really personal vendettas and my need to kind of fill a blog quota. But it was appreciated that a lot.

4:02Yeah, yeah. As you guys are what Sixers fans? Yeah. No, yeah, we're Sixers. I'm from New York. So I am sort of a Knicks fan, but from a previous generation of Knicks players. Gotcha. You were back when the Knicks were cool. Yeah. So I'm a Nets fan. I'm kind of an aggrieved little brother. And so it was originally intended to be a vehicle for me to kind of shit on what I perceived as this just like toxic corniness that was emanating out of Madison Square Garden. But the piece kind of started spinning out of control and touching on a few other topics and then also randomly really resonating with people.

4:37So like, clearly, something was occurring. And I can't say I expected to become for however brief a period of time, I'm the kind of like arbiter of swag in the NBA. That was a tremendously unexpected development. But I think like the simplest answer is a roundabout one, which is that I'm mostly interested when my team is not competitive. I'm mostly interested in the ways that basketball and basketball fandom can kind of reflect broader aspects of our culture back to us and also just intensify them because I think basketball is just cooler and more fun than a lot of other cultural products that we get to enjoy right now.

5:23And so for a while, I think we'll probably talk about this later, but it felt like the dominant divide in NBA discourse. There's been a few of them, I guess, but all of them more or less hover around what you might consider like an aesthetic purist camp and then this sort of like hyper efficient but worrisomely bland future and I feel like the first time I tried to interrogate that was discussing the great debate between real hoopers and calculator boys it kind of transmogrified into this aura versus what I've called the European slob menace. And then I think the swag piece was my reaction. I think I've said this before, but my reaction to having my neat little conception of aura disturbed.

6:18And so in the piece, I kind of shit on the Eastern Conference more, but the thing that really jolted me into having a panic about whether or not the NBA was capable of producing cool anymore was actually looking at the West because it was this experience I had of watching Shea Gildress Alexander, for those who aren't acquainted, the MVP and the star of presumably the NBA champion Thunders. Although, you know, it's not obvious with the Pacers, what devil magic they're capable of. Seeing Shea as it relates to Ant, because they're both widely considered very, I would have said cool, but at the very least, they're both widely consider to have aura.

6:59I guess we'll unpack that topic later. And I had this really sinking feeling in my gut watching him match up against Ant where I realized only one of them felt cool to me. And I had this moment of waking up for a bad dream where I realized that basically all of Shay's aesthetic, his counterfeit swag, everything he was getting away with was this highly studied, really not risky, just safe maneuver that felt in the moment incredibly cynical and incredibly representative of actually how he plays basketball, where he'll go out his way to contort himself to get a foul because free throws are the most efficient shots, yada, yada, yada.

7:43And so while I focused on the East in the piece more because the East is roughly speaking cornier and the Pacers and the Knicks are both led by not particularly charismatic folks, it was, I think really seeing kind of someone who has been touted as the face of the league in the West reveal himself, at least by my account, to be actually really inauthentic and troublingly uncool. You do have some pretty choice words for Jalen Brunson, though. Like, what about him feels emblematic of this? Yeah, so I do feel that I am and was too hard on Jalen Brunson because I I actually think there are only so many ways that Jalen exemplifies the broader trend I ended up settling on identifying, which is that there's this really strict process through which NBA stars are produced right now that basically tamps out your individuality and the rough edges of your personality, the type of things that tend to make someone authentically cool and interesting and risky.

8:51because to become a star in the NBA requires such intense pressure and expectation and professionalization from such a young age that you somewhere along the line have to learn how to be a savvy kind of business operator. The business, of course, being just yourself and your personal brand. And Brunson, I think, obviously exemplifies that to a degree. And I don't think it comes as any surprise to Jalen Brunson that he's having a successful NBA career. You know, he is like the consummate coach's son. He certainly imagined this for himself. And it's not like he was ever some small fry in whatever pool he was in at any given time.

9:30But Brunson becoming a star also feels relatively surprising based on just what his trajectory in the league looked like a few years ago, where he was this just like short, unassuming second fiddle to Luka Doncic. and not someone who it was ever anticipated would become this, if not MVP caliber player, then in the vicinity. And so it's not totally fair for me to pile on Jalen Brunson, but he's remarkably uncool. He posts Eminem lyrics. He takes a tremendous amount of pride in having gone to Villanova, which is just a terribly uncool thing to do. It's the type of thing that's only cool if the next sentence is, and then you became the Pope, but if you're just a basketball player, it's something you should hide studiously.

10:19It's kind of funny from a Philly perspective. Yeah, I guess that's right. I guess what would the Philly perspective be on Nova, the specter of Villanova students? I mean, I don't think that we would necessarily claim to have like secret knowledge of the Philly perspective on Villanova students because we've only lived here like a few years. Or it feels like the kind of thing you would only be proud of if you were from here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like there's something about the way that Bronson going to the Knicks and really doing all the right things, like taking a pay cut to bring his buddies together and secure the future of the team.

11:00all of it is ostensibly cool on paper but when it's recast in the light of getting together your college boys who went to villanova with you it smacks of of murray hill right and just like the wackest least cool parts of new york city but the parts that kind of like grease the wheel for the rest of the city to move because those are the people who work in finance or whatever But yeah, Jalen Brunson feels like the type of guy who is one standard deviation away from being just like a dude at a party where everyone is like a consultant or a finance person. He is so tremendously vanilla. And the problem is it feels like he's been given license through his little ne 'er-do-well friend, Josh Hart, to try and kind of bootstrap a personality into existence.

11:52literally just today the day that we're recording he had some silly little stunt where he tweeted something cryptic knowing that it would get a big reaction and then quote tweeted it being like sorry y 'all i was just talking about love island and it's just the the way that he's so clearly studied what was funny on nba twitter 10 to 15 years ago and is trying to replicate this like javel mcgee i'm so random look at me type shit and also the fact that he's got uh uh just frankly embarrassing podcast he grates on me he really does and that's to say nothing of his on-court play which i think is unethical and uh i guess i guess sixers fans have been conditioned to accept this level of grifting but he he just doesn't play the game the right way but listen when imbeed does it it's because you know he has a very fragile body he's been trained to fall that way because he is you know such a physically large man it's really health management for him when he flops um yeah yeah yeah the the let not our critique of and bead be ableist but i exactly i i think everything i'm saying though again i'm being slightly tongue-in-cheek but this might be a nice juncture to just interrupt myself and and say that when i discuss what i've kind of called jokingly the swag crisis, but what I would actually endorse as a crisis of cool in the NBA, I want to be clear that it doesn't have much to do with what's actually happening on the court with limited exceptions.

13:30Because I do stand by what I said, where I am worried about the NBA's ability to be this kind of cultural North Star in the years to come, because I do think there have been these just systemic structural problems that have have really limited individuality. But that is barely, if at all, reflected in the actual play, which I think is fantastic right now. So what are we really talking about when we're talking about cool? Is it like taste? Is it sort of individual qualities? Is it a sense of danger? Because like some of the NBA players, I think are cool, including Ja Morant and Anthony Edwards, are like a hair away from like just fucking full on cancellation, like at all times.

14:21And that's it for the free preview version of this episode. There's lots more ahead. Get the full conversation and all of our bonus content, plus access to our Discord community, Cujoplex, which is actually how we found this essay, by signing up for a paid subscription, just five bucks a month over at theculturejournalist.substack.com.