Hoops

Hoops is not a history of basketball, a tactics manual, or a ranking of the usual heroes.
It’s a field guide: a way of learning how to notice the game.

Basketball is often described in extremes — genius or fraud, clutch or collapse, beauty or failure — but most of what makes the sport meaningful lives elsewhere. In routines, habits, misunderstandings. In awkward footwork, half-remembered plays, local gyms, long seasons, minor obsessions, and the quiet ways people carry the game with them through their lives.

This book wanders through basketball as a lived practice rather than a spectacle alone. It pays attention to the things that don’t always make the highlight reel: the feel of defensive positioning, the strange geometry of spacing, the emotional weather of a game that turns slowly, the private rituals players develop without ever naming them. Along the way, it moves between professional arenas and amateur courts, between watching and playing, between analysis and memory.

Rather than trying to explain what basketball is, Hoops asks what it does: how it shapes attention, creates language, builds temporary communities, and offers a structure for thinking about effort, failure, patience, and joy. There is technique here, but also digression; observation, but also humour; affection for the game without reverence for its mythology.

Like any good field guide, this one is incomplete by design. It’s meant to be carried, argued with, set down, picked up again — a companion for anyone who loves basketball not just for what happens on the court, but for everything that gathers around it.