What Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic and an ESPN film can teach us about basketball and rhythm

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‘Rhythm Masters: A Mickey Hart Experience’ reminds us that rhythm and basketball are endlessly intertwined.

Rhythm is everywhere. In the wind blowing the leaves around in your backyard, the chatter of a toddler, a child singing to herself, the waves crashing on the beach — and all over sports.

The rhythmic back-and-forth of a tennis match. The rhythm of feet landing one-two over a screen for a catch-and-shoot. The sound of a basketball bouncing on the hardwood.

On the sidelines in gyms or arenas all over the world, fans and teammates cheer “DE-FENSE” and clap three times, as they have been for decades and will for decades, in a way that’s so familiar to us all that I bet you just sang it in your head when you read it.

Players often say they have to “find their rhythm” if they’re struggling. We talk about timing and being in sync.

In the new ESPN film “Rhythm Masters: A Mickey Hart Experience” — based on Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart’s interest in sport and rhythmic flow, and influenced by talks with his late best friend and basketball legend Bill Walton — the entanglement between music and sports becomes crystal clear.

Sports in general, but particularly basketball, are so closely linked with rhythm that it’s often uncertain when one ends and the other one begins. Hart and Bill Walton talked for decades about this topic, writes Wright Thompson of ESPN, who worked on the movie with them:

They sometimes talked about replacing announcers with drums — using the tools of Mickey’s world to bring new understanding to Bill’s — to see if music could unlock something about athletic performance, movement and collaboration that words could not.

As part of making the movie, Hart talked to various athletes and greats in sports, including legendary basketball coach Phil Jackson. Hart asked him how you get players to understand about flow, and the Zen Master’s answer was insightful in bridging the gaps between the two rhythmic worlds:

“I used to talk about the basketball. … It was kind of like a jazz group. They had the opportunity to go off on their own and have their own little riff, but they always had the idea that where we are as a group — with their positions on the players and where they were in sync with that — so they could go off on their own, but they had to come back to the group. Someone push a little solo, get out there and do your thing.”

Most athletes talk about the flow state with reverence. It is not a conscious place, it’s the sum of thousands of hours worth of practice and experience, when they stop thinking and actions become automatic. This is where music and sports have a lot in common, because that’s exactly the same place a musician accesses during a solo or improvisation.

As we’re seeing the league become more international, we’re also seeing the style of the game change, and some of the dominating players look completely different than what most NBA fans have been used to.

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Dirk Nowitzki was one of the first European star players, with a style of play that was odd compared to the athletic, bouncy swagger of the American athlete in the nineties. It took him years to earn the respect he deserved, and it wasn’t really until he won an MVP in 2007 and a championship with the Dallas Mavericks in 2011 that people started seeing him as one of the greats.

If we move on to contemporary basketball, Europeans Nikola Jokic and Luka Doncic are two of the most dominant players in the NBA today, who at the same time look and play very differently than most American stars. They play at a different pace, as announcers and pundits frequently remind us. But is that all there is to it?

Both players are considered slow, both are talked about as overweight at times, both are great at passing the ball ahead in transition, but don’t run the ball very much, and both prefer to play slow and isolate, dissect the defense and run the game and shot clocks down to the last second.

In other words, they play a meticulous style of basketball, manipulating the floor with their vision, IQ and deep understanding of the game, rather than the traditional way we view athleticism: jump high and run fast.

Former NBA player, seven-time NBA champion and current commentator Robert Horry’s comments about Luka Doncic recently are just the latest from a long list of pundits who seem to value another type of basketball more highly. Many seem to prefer a more straight-to-the-bone, poster dunk kind of basketball rather than the slow tearing-apart-the-defense style of some of the leading Europeans.

There is also a point to be made about how these differences may be responsible for undervaluing players like Jokic and Doncic compared to their American peers, like teams passing on Jokic in 2014 (he was drafted with the 41st pick in the second round, making him the lowest selection ever to win the MVP award), as well as on Doncic (who was selected third behind Deandre Ayton and Marvin Bagley III in 2018).

When so many people dislike or don’t understand a style of play — as seems to be the case with these players — there may be more to it. Maybe it’s ingrained deep inside us, just like our upbringing, culture and traditions. Maybe the rhythm of basketball sounds, looks and feels different in Europe than in America. It’s simply a rhythm we’re not used to, and that may lead to some implicit biases in our eye tests.

If basketball and music interconnect in this special place called flow, as Jackson referenced, then obviously the space that one needs to enter to get to that would look, sound and feel different, depending on where they came from and what their experiences are. The reason being that we all are the sum of our past and culture, and approach life with that history.

To put it in a different way: What if we all play to the rhythm of our home country, our childhood, our heroes, the music and timing we grew up with and recognize as ours?

And more accurately, what if all cultures play to their own rhythm?

To investigate further, let’s compare the two most dominating players of the different continental basketball cultures: LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers, and Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets. One American, and one Serbian.

If we take a look at a classic highlight reel from earlier in LeBron James’ career, possibly his peak, it’s packed with fastbreak dunks, explosive putbacks and downhill, athletic (in the ordinary sense) offense or secondary transition plays; just some of countless instances where he took advantage of his size, speed, explosiveness and bounce.

Now let’s watch a highlight reel of reigning MVP, Nikola Jokic’s, best plays this season.

It’s high-IQ passes that, granted, sometimes LeBron makes as well. Behind the back, no-look, quarterback-type of transition passes. Pick-and-roll, high-post center playmaking, one-on-one post moves and incredible touch in the paint.

But what’s sometimes missed in these highlight reels is the ebb and flow of a full game. The slow offense, what happens on a broken play, who steps up at the end of the shot clock. As well as the full offensive and defensive possessions, probing in the paint to get a shot up, the reading of the defense to get a teammate an uncontested shot.

Ideally, these two highlight reels would be set to the music of their home countries. I wasn’t able to find one with Serbian music, but here’s an idea of what that sounds like compared to American music:

The tempo and timing differ, as do LeBron and Jokic’s respective feel for the game. Sure, the way they are able to move their bodies is not very similar, but it’s more than that. The rhythm they play to may just be so far apart that it’s like they’re listening to different music. Both technically precise and impressive, but effective in different ways.

Another version of this rhythm is seen in the play of fellow Euro and Balkan superstar, Luka Doncic — who by the way speaks Serbian — and shares a lot of cultural traditions with Serbia, because his dad has Serbian heritage.

Doncic’s methodical offense that punishes defenses as soon as they make a mistake, and his probing and reading of the game are similar to Jokic’s.

Like the slow step, as Doncic likes to call it (others call it deceleration); the ability to slow down to get a defender out of balance that Luka is able to pull off in a way that no defender, American or otherwise, has found a way to stop.

If you compare those slower dissections with those of LeBron, or Kevin Durant, or other American superstars or future stars like Anthony Edwards or Ja Morant, it sometimes looks like they’re playing a different sport.

But maybe they’re just playing a different genre of it. Could it simply be that the rhythm with which they’re thinking and moving is different than American fans, analysts and players have seen before?

The problem is that you don’t know what you don’t know. If you hear one type of basketball or musical rhythm in your head that you may not even be aware of, it’s impossible to know if and when someone else is hearing it differently.

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The idea that we all play to different rhythms depending on where we’re from is a logical deduction of this theory. It’s obvious in many ways for this European writer, who finds Jokic’s way of playing more familiar than LeBron’s.

The NBA is becoming more international, there’s no doubt about it. And with this change, we’re seeing new styles of play, different ways of thinking about the game — and new and exciting rhythms. New things can be scary, but also exciting and enlightening. They can broaden our worldview and help us see things from different perspectives. So maybe we should just celebrate and acknowledge these differences — and not let our unfamiliarity devalue them.

The link between basketball and music is undeniable. There’s no doubt that players have to improvise in the same way that musicians do, and that reaching the flow state for both is very similar. If you’ve ever played a sport or an instrument, you may have encountered this special place where everything is right and everything works. Where time stands still or slows down. Your brain shuts off and you’re just in the moment.

Sports, like music, is a pathway to the now, as they say in “Rhythm Masters.” A reminder of the ancient way of life where humans lived day-to-day, hour-to-hour, unable to worry about the future, because the now was all there was. A simpler way of life. Maybe more akin to the life that we are made for.

The amazing thing about sports is that it forces you to be in the moment, whether you’re playing or watching, or maybe even reading. So I leave you with one last question: Have you found your rhythm yet?