The last thing you would expect to take place in the middle of a basketball court is a philosophy discussion. However, in true UChicago spirit, the Department of Philosophy, in partnership with the Athletics Department, hosted a discussion on the Philosophy of Basketball on February 2, featuring philosophy professors Mikayla Kelley and Anubav Vasudevan. This event was part of the Department of Philosophy’s Night Owls series, featuring late-night faculty-led philosophical conversations that discuss everything from artificial intelligence to organized violence.
For Vasudevan and Kelley, the purpose of this event was to illustrate the value in taking time to reflect and grapple with complicated questions to encourage thoughtful conversation. The discussion opened up space for serious intellectual debate (and passionate feuds) over basketball and sports in general, from the meaning of being a sports fanatic, the importance of “athletic luck,” to whether Michael Jordan is truly the GOAT.
What does it mean to be a fan of a sport?
Vasudevan began the event by discussing the different criteria attributed to being a sports fan, such as enthusiasm over a team’s wins, sadness over losses, wearing team merch, and having posters and other memorabilia. He called these “subjective constraints,” mainly based on an individual’s level of interest and love for a team. Vasudevan also noted how “objective constraints,” namely geographic location, are often mixed into discussion of whether someone is “a true fan.” Supporters of the same team from different states or countries likely experience fanhood differently due to the presence, or lack thereof, of a dominant local sports community or because local fans feel the bandwagon effect stronger than others. Using these examples, Vasudevan discussed how we create subjective and objective categories of thought, in sports and beyond, encouraging individuals to consider why we insist on having objective constraints, like geographic location, affect our notions of fanhood.
Is there a discrepancy in how we praise and critique player performance?
Also focusing on fans’ role in sports, Kelley continued the conversation by describing the hypocrisy in how fans evaluate player performance. More often than not, the difference between a buzzer beater and an upsetting 2-point loss is a stroke of luck, rather than a shooter’s skill or talent. Yet, a player who makes the clutch shot receives endless praise and recognition while the one who barely misses will likely never hear the end of it. Still, there are some instances of luck that fans intentionally discount, like desperate last-minute half-court attempts taken without proper aim or form and bad refereeing. Fans often want an athlete’s performance to manifest their agency and competence and recognize that they should praise athletes based on their skill and what they can control. However, Kelley noted that fans don’t always practice this. Kelley considered why we attribute some cases of athletic luck to skill and discount others as just being “pure luck,” leading to these inconsistencies in our critique of player performance.
Why don’t we disqualify physical abnormalities in sports?
Vasudevan then shifted the conversation to discuss NBA players’ many physical extremities. He presented a series of statistics regarding their above average height—around 43 out of the roughly 2,800 people in the world taller than seven feet are in the NBA—and extremely lengthy handspans—Boban Marjanović has the longest with 12 inches. Vasudevan noted how height and handspan, among other factors, are valuable competitive advantages for basketball players. We’ve accepted this as the standard in the basketball community and don’t see them as challenges to the fairness of the sport. However, in so many other instances of competitive advantages, we support changes to level the playing field, from eliminating goal tending to implementing a serving clock in tennis. Yet we don’t see abnormal physique as an unfair edge that warrants disqualification. Why do we take physical competitive advantages for granted in sports, while racing to eliminate other advantages?
Will we ever determine who the GOAT of basketball truly is?
Michael Jordan, Lebron James, Bill Russell, Stephen Curry. Both the list of GOAT candidates and the debate for who it is has gone on since the beginning of the sport. Kelley brought the conversation to a close by discussing whether this debate even has an answer. Is it possible to compare players across generations, especially when the sport has changed so much over time? Kelley considered how our obsession with determining the GOAT may stem from our inherent human nature to classify things, from creating lists of our favorite restaurants to reading rankings of the best colleges. However, Kelley also found that determining GOAT-hood is also something unique to sports, noting that we don’t ask ourselves who the GOAT of health or fashion is.
As Vasudevan and Kelley wrapped up their discussion, they encouraged attendees to pose their own questions or offer potential answers. They explored other topics, such as our fascination with athletes’ loyalties to their “home” team and the relationship between fanhood and supporting terrible teams. Balancing friendly debate over sport rivalries and thought-provoking philosophical inquiry, UChicago’s Night Owls event transformed a very un-philosophical topic into a truly captivating discussion, questioning the role of fans in sports, how our virtues and values are tested as viewers of sporting events, and so much more. Unfortunately, no one had an answer for why the Mavericks traded Luka Dončić to the Lakers.
