Jazz is to band as streetball is to basketball.
In both cases, black culture took something rigid, and turned it into something more fluid and expressive—a hybrid of personal flair and fundamentals. Putting the ball in the hole was only half the story —you had to look good doing it. Many NBA legends got their starts on grimy, crumbling, blacktop courts, but for years, streetball was given little mainstream respect.
Then, in 1993, Seth Berger, Jay Gilbert, and Tom Austin founded AND1, and middle America rethought its perspective.
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kazaa
In 1998, AND1 started releasing their streetball ‘mixtapes’ on the Internet. At the time, I was 14, and since I had a dial-up modem, I couldn’t watch the videos even if I wanted to—it took over 30 minutes to download a single MP3 off of Napster. By 2001, however, I was in college, and my dorm had high speed cable access. And one of the first things I downloaded off of Kazaa was this.
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In 2001, EA Sports, in collaboration with the NBA, joined the streetball craze, releasing an incredible video game that spawned its own franchise. We are of course talking about NBA Street for the Playstation 2—a bonafide classic with endless replayability. Even though later Street games improved the core gameplay, they’ve never duplicated the freshness and outsized personality of the original.
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Out of all the Stats, Blocking was the most important, followed closely by Handles. There was no goaltending in NBA Street—nothing to prevent you from camping under your opponent’s basket, forcing him to shoot, and swatting the ball out of the air. So, every great team needed at least one big guy. However, if you tried to do a crossover with Shaq, he would trip over his own feet. So, you needed a smaller guy with Handles, to bring the ball upcourt and steal it on Defense. Lastly, you needed a scorer—someone with great Shooting or Dunking stats—to run offense on the fast breaks.
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Today, basketball and hip hop are inseparably intertwined—the NBA, rather than denying hip hop’s spiritual contributions to the game, has come to embrace them. NBA Street was a bold, clear statement to a new, younger generation. As people like Donald Sterling continue to get old and die, and young people of color continue to gain power and influence, their culture, and its brash, hard scrabble values, will be praised rather than pushed to the side. If you still have your PS2, blow the dust off and replay NBA Street.
Dinner’s served!