A new wave of basketball movies is aimed at expert-level fandom

polygon.com:

Toward the top of Ben Affleck’s sneaker procedural Air, the bigwigs of Nike’s basketball division sit around a conference room table debating the merits of players in the 1984 NBA draft. They have a $250,000 budget to split between three prospects, which means they’ll inevitably be outbid by the giants at Converse and Adidas for the right to sponsor the draft’s top picks. So they look further down the draft board: The fifth pick, Charles Barkley, is mired in “clubhouse issues,” and “nobody is going to want to see him on TV”; the 16th pick, John Stockton, played his college ball at Gonzaga, and “no one even knows where that is”; Melvin Turpin, drafted sixth, seems like the safest bet — he apparently has “great vision,” though Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) notes that he only averages one assist per game. In 2023, of course, we know that Barkley and Stockton are Hall of Famers, Gonzaga is a perennial powerhouse, and Turpin never did much of anything in the league.

These kinds of nods to in-the-know viewers, hidden throughout Air by rookie screenwriter Alex Convery, are nothing new. Since at least 1980, when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar complained about dragging Walton and Laimbeer down the court for 48 minutes in Airplane!, knowing nods to a savvy, basketball-watching audience have been embedded in films that touch on the sport. But a new generation of basketball movie has reflected a new generation of basketball fan, one who’s as versed in collective bargaining agreements, overseas scouting, sports gambling, and shoe deals as they are the on-court product. In a world where every move an NBA GM makes spawns a hundred podcast episodes, Hollywood has adapted, delivering a spate of films that dig deep into aspects of the game that seemed