Hoops at 20.

I will not come last in my fantasy basketball league this season.

Okay maybe that’s not my motto for this upcoming season, but it is a significant portion of why I wanna take following the league more seriously this year. In some respects, I’m experiencing this second era in my NBA fandom. The first was the one where I was a child, growing up and watching hoops since I could remember. It was seeing the first two or three seasons of LeBron’s career and deciding as a five-year-old that I would stick with him till the end. It was being the non-Warriors fan everywhere I went growing up, going to games at the Oracle cheering for the one time every few years I could see the Cavs & Heat. Or it was going to Warriors games when half of Oracle was filled and Monta Ellis was the star in the late 2000s.

A little after Bron won his chip for Cleveland, school and other life things finally caught up with me. For the better part of the following three years, I rarely watched any games except come playoff time. And even then, the kid who wanted to rush home at all times to catch games just didn’t have that interest anymore. So, for a few years, my excitement about hoops went dormant.

And then the bubble happened. Amidst the pandemic, when I had nothing to do, was anxiously waiting to get back to Chicago for the fall remote quarter, there was one thing that was allowing me to help take…