Enjoy Basketball Talks To Katie Heindl

Think about every feeling that basketball has ever caused you to experience. The joyous ebullience of a playoff win or the self-pity-tinged frustration of a heart-shattering loss to that rival team are probably the first memories that come to mind.

But what about every feeling in between? The fleeting (but fully engrossing) nostalgia that hits you every once in a while after a player leaves your city, a city where they spent formative years of their career? Or the unease of watching an obsession with public image take precedence over real progress?

Katie Heindl articulates those feelings better than anyone else.

In her newsletter BASKETBALL FEELINGS, Heindl spurns chronology. While traditional sports coverage walks you through the events of a game in a sequential manner– the end of an article running parallel with the end of a game– Heindl takes a different approach, often starting with the feeling that a news story, game result, quote, or even single play planted within her, then working to determine why exactly that feeling prevailed above all the rest.

By the end of her pieces, “basketball” is so intertwined with “feelings” that deducing where one started or which came first just seems trite.

Enjoy Basketball recently caught up with Katie — whose work can also be found in Dime, Gaming Society, and The New York Times Magazine — and discussed finding range within your voice as a writer, a fun Finals prediction, and the nuances of dunk contest props.

EB: Is there a specific player, team, or moment that made you fall in love with basketball?

KH: Growing up in Toronto, I was a kid when the Raptors NBA expansion was announced. The city’s paper did a write-in poll with some of the names that were in the running for the team. Jurassic Park had come out a few years before and when you’re appealing to dinosaur-obsessed kids, the other name options like Towers and Tarantulas didn’t stand a chance. I obviously voted for Raptors, but there was something so exciting about the feeling of being involved in a team from the beginning. I’d loved watching Dennis Rodman and the audacity of the Bad Boys-era Pistons, but this one was mine. My parents got my older brother and I tickets to some of the first games, when the team was still playing at SkyDome where the Blue Jays play.

Shoppers Drug Mart sold the tickets for $7. Pretty soon after, my dad put up a hoop on the garage, I got a Raptors Starter jacket, and the deal was sealed.

EB: You recently wrote a piece for The New York Times (congrats!) about your love for the dunk contest. Do you have an all-time favorite dunk contest dunk?

KH: Thank you! I know there comes a point where you have to start giving yourself due credit, but that is still a very, very surreal thing. And geeze. While I can manage to find something redeeming or compelling in most every Contest dunk, I’m a solid prop person.That’s different than any prop (e.g. Kia), but I love the thought behind a well-placed or timed prop. Gerald Green’s blowing out the candle on the cupcake dunk, JaVale McGee’s 2nd hoop, Dwight Howard’s phone booth, even John Collins’ airplane. But my favorite all-time dunk is Jeremy Evans’ painting dunk. He painted himself dunking over the painting, and then dunked over it and yanked the cloth off the canvas for the big reveal. There are so many layers of thought and weird planning involved in that, from concept to execution, it kills me.

EB: If you could choose one current NBA player to compete in next year’s dunk contest, who would it be?

KH: Sorry if this is a cop out, but I feel like a huge part of the Dunk Contest is intent. You have to want to do it. And this is not roundabout support for the people who claim no real stars want to compete (no real stars, at their time of competing, were real stars yet), if opening it up to the G League compels more people to enter, then do it. That said, Jeremy Sochan seems like he’d have fun with it, and I’ve seen Jaylen Brown do some highflyers in warm-ups. Chris Boucher doesn’t get enough recognition for his rangy, discombobulated in-game dunks either, so give that guy some runway and back up.

EB: What has been your favorite storyline to follow this season, and what are you looking forward to watching for as we approach the playoffs?

KH: The Kings, in general, and a bit selfishly. I got to go out to Sacramento in September, just before the season started, to write about Keegan Murray, and while I was there I just felt like things were about to happen. There was an energy around the team. And I know we say that a lot in basketball but there really was! All the players and team staff I spoke with were so upbeat, so open and excited. The practice facility was lively, everyone was chatty and curious. The way they talked about the basketball they wanted to play sounded so complete, like they’d already been playing it for seasons. I got home and told my husband, “The Kings are going to be good” to some skepticism, but he has periodically reminded me of that throughout the season so I feel like a smug seer.

EB: In BASKETBALL FEELINGS, you write about basketball in a sort of amorphous way, with the sport itself almost playing a complementary role to the sentiments you associate with it. Contrarily, in DIME Uproxx, you often speak with NBA players and cover the league in a more tangible and concrete manner. Is it difficult to make that switch between styles so consistently?

KH: It’s a good question. I’ve always liked the freedom to be fluid in how and what I write about (and acknowledge the privilege of having so many places to write for). I started Basketball Feelings because I felt that prose-y, literary way I enjoy writing in wasn’t getting flexed as much, and I didn’t want to lose it. And I’ve done that kind of writing for Dime, too, like with the ‘Year None’ series, but it obviously has to be a little more honed. I like the challenge of writing in different styles, and then within those styles, pushing myself not to fall back on the same habits and rhythms. All writers have their own style, and I’d hope if someone read me at Dime or Basketball Feelings or NYT Magazine they’d still know it was me, but when every piece starts to read the same I don’t think the person behind it is pushing enough. So, I never want to get too narrow.

EB: What’s the most memorable NBA moment you’ve seen live?

KH: I was at the November 2014 game when Vince Carter finally stopped getting booed in Toronto. Game ops started playing his tribute in a timeout and Toronto fans— always primed because they’d been booing this man for exactly a decade by then— started to go, but then it was like some collective acceptance took hold. Within seconds the jeers turned over, everyone was cheering and crying, Carter was crying, of course I was crying. I’ve got to talk to him about what a hard-earned acquiesce that was since then, but I got chills.

EB: If you could combine three NBA players’ specific skills into one person (for example, Luka’s passing, Steph’s shooting, and Brook Lopez’ shot blocking) whose skills would you mash together?

KH: It’s funny because one of the last NBA fanfic stories I wrote for The Classical, (the wonderful David Roth’s now defunct website) was called ‘Dunkenstein, Or The Modern Basketball Prometheus’, and it was about Phil Jackson doing this very thing but with NBA players’ body parts. I think you can still read it here (though the date says it was from last year and the author is someone called Usman). I love a very savvy, very cerebral basketball player, but I also like a bit of a smirk and bounce and some attitude. I think the vision of Kyle Lowry…

the speed and fearlessness (and weird aerial contortion layups) of Desmond Bane…

and the comforting (and lockdown) presence of Marc Gasol.

Not sure if that imaginary composite would be good, but you’d love them.

EB: How much of a structure do you have in place when beginning a new BASKETBALL FEELINGS? Do you know how you feel about a specific piece of news when you start writing about it, or are you discovering your feelings in a more spontaneous way, sort of learning as you go?

KH: It really depends on what’s been going on in basketball and in my life. There are weeks where I go in riled up over an event and the writing comes clean, sharp and immediately organized, my feelings behind whatever it is acting as direct propulsion. There are other weeks where I go in with something loose – an interaction, an observation – that’s personal and stuck out to me, and I trust myself enough to know it’s going to get somewhere. Those ones are tougher, but if I have the time to sit and mess around, let the writing take over, I end up enjoying picking up loose threads as I go and doing my best to weave them together. Other times something – a specific athlete, team, play – will just sit in my brain like a gargoyle for a while and I won’t know why, but I usually take the hint. Travel factors in too, which I always hope is not too insular for my subscribers (lord knows I love a long descriptive passage on atmosphere of place), but I find it very generative and kind of a momentum cheat. Especially if I’m in a funk.

EB: Can you give us a bold prediction for the rest of the NBA season?

KH: Cavs-Kings Finals! Not only could they light the beam, but Jarrett Allen, electronics genius, could probably build Cleveland their own rival beam.