At one point Domantas Sabonis had snow brought to Sacramento. It’s the Christmas episode of Starting 5yet another Netflix series about sports that should emulate Formula 1: Drive to Survive. Sabonis, of the five NBA players chosen to be followed by cameras during the 2023/24 season (the others are LeBron James, Jimmy Butler, Jason Tatum and Anthony Edwards), is the least over the top, the one who throughout the 10 episodes of the series he will be less able to pierce the screen, to find a story to tell us.
Yet, despite this, despite throughout the series he passes himself off as a low-profile boy, all about basketball and family, for Christmas Sabonis has snow brought to a place where the last real snowfall dates back to 1976. We see the trucks that arrive with great fanfare, and the workers who begin to create this artificial snow mound in front of a house planted in the middle of nowhere in the California Central Valley.
There’s something surreal about this scene, and it’s not so much a climate issue, let’s pretend it’s not a disgrace to the real world trying to drink his watered down drink using compostable straws, but the idea that this thing it should be communicated to the world, that the world cares enough to put it in a series aimed at millions of people that should talk about basketball and that it is not better to leave it in private. Sabonis justifies this extravagance with the fact that, due to his job, he cannot take his family skiing at Christmas: it is the most classic of “if Muhammad does not go to the mountain, the mountain goes to Muhammad” (almost in a literal sense). In a promotional interview he explained: “If you don’t know me personally, you might think I’m a little crazy, or whatever the fans think of me on the pitch when I’m focused. Outside of basketball, I’m the complete opposite. First of all, I’m a husband and a father, and I just want to take care of my family.”
It’s the message that all the protagonists try to give throughout the series, that they are normal, loving people, and it’s just a boring message. Did anyone really think Sabonis was “a little crazy”? I don’t know him personally, I’ve never even seen him live or inside an NBA locker room, but really it’s enough to watch him play for five minutes, or hear him speak once, to think the exact opposite and certainly to have seen Starting 5 it won’t make me change or broaden my opinion of him. But the whole series is like this, an attempt by the players to confirm something we already knew and to do it without cross-examination. We needed a new series to let us know that LeBron is a loving father (at most, he’s accused of being a father too affectionate)? That Butler is an eccentric and emotional person, while Edwards is a boy who is still maturing?
Familiar scenes fill Starting 5 as if it were a product closer to A place in the sun that not a Drive to Survive. Netflix’s idea, perhaps, is that to attract an audience for the NBA (if that was the intent, but after having seen it I doubt it) we need to show us minutes and minutes of LeBron James preparing for his Halloween party, with Hollywood makeup artists who transform him into a gargantuan version of Beetlejuice and keep him from talking per Really of basketball, despite being – by all accounts – a kind of genius of this sport, even off the court. The only coach to speak is Joe Mazzulla, who however does so in his somewhat cryptic, holy man way, while looking at a fixed point in the void. He gets miked a couple of times during the match, and his advice to Tatum is among the most interesting things in the series, but they are rarities and totally out of context.
The Halloween celebration, on the other hand, is contextualized very well.
There where Drive to Survive managed to talk about the rivalries between drivers, make us understand how a team works, make us passionate about the fate of the unlucky cars, in Starting 5 it is also difficult to understand well that the players are part of a team and are not just random personalities followed by the cameras who win or lose matches on their own as if by magic.
Se Starting 5 If it were a series created to titillate the voyeurism of the contemporary world, and maybe it is, it wouldn’t be bad and I recommend it. For about 500 minutes the focus is, although almost never in a critical or interesting way, on how LeBron, Butler, Sabonis, Tatum and Edwards spend their time off the court. We discover that LeBron wants to be a funny person (spoiler: he doesn’t succeed), that Butler is obsessed with coffee, that Tatum takes his son around the NBA arenas, that Edwards plays a lot of video games and that the father of Sabonis gives him advice on how to be an NBA player. If we were in the 90s it would also be revolutionary, but today, in 2024, to know all these things we would just need to spend a few minutes on their social pages.
What remains interesting then is the little that filters, by mistake, between the folds of these ideal and idealized athletes. Butler not only has a bar at home, which I might do if I had his salary, but he actually has a bartender inside houseto whom he sometimes turns to ask for a cappuccino or whatever else he feels like at that moment. Or: He not only has a passion for music, like almost all people on earth, but he has singers who come to his house to record music with him. He doesn’t go to concerts, but takes part in music videos, like that of Fall Out Boy. LeBron has luxury cars parked inside his house, keeps family memories in a Louis Vuitton suitcase, travels on a private jet and not with the team. Edwards has an uncle who packs his suitcase when he goes on business trips, and one suitcase is just for video games. Edwards who is expecting a child and it seems like the most beautiful thing in the world, even if he is then annoyed by the idea that it could be born during the match (and the fact is ignored that, in the same weeks in which the series was filmed, tried to force a woman to have an abortion promising her money via messages on Instagram).
In short, it’s the same old thing, but we like to repeat ourselves: why isn’t there sport in these series about sport? Why can’t we ever see even the slightest hint of the discussions between LeBron and Darvin Ham, which we know took up the Lakers’ entire season and ultimately led to his firing? Because we get to see the birth of Edwards’ son from inside the operating room down to the smallest detail, but when we talk about the comeback against Denver in Game 7 we can’t know what adjustments they made in the second half, or at least what they said to each other , what did they do, what happened? How do players prepare for a playoff game? We arrive at entire surreal sequences, such as those that tell the story of the All Star Game, with voiceovers describing everything as the culminating moment of the life of an NBA athlete, while the images of last year’s game scroll by, with the players who don’t even pretend to try and with a final score of 211-186 that is put on display as if everything were normal.
I’m not saying they had to give us a series of X&Os, but at least remind us that we’re talking about sport and athletes, and not about influencers, whose only product is their image. From this point of view Starting 5produced by LeBron James’ production company, by Payton Manning’s and by Michelle and Barack Obama’s, seems like an unsuccessful cross between an explanation about NBA for dummies (like the scenes in which they try to give prestige to the NBA Cup as if they were the playoffs, but in which the players themselves only manage to say that it is worth playing for the 500 thousand dollar prize) and LeBron’s desire to leave us a legacy his life philosophy or how many songs he knows by heart.
Which would also be a lucky series. Choosing among the best, Starting 5 manages to bring his cameras into the two most vivid moments of last season: the playoff series between Minnesota and Denver, which ended with the comeback of Edwards’ team in Game 7 and the Boston Celtics’ title victory, quite obvious from what we saw on the pitch , but notable for Tatum’s journey and the franchise’s long wait. These two moments, despite having a certain importance in the series (they are the last episode), manage to add almost nothing, unless you were good enough not to give yourself spoilers, that is, get to watch Starting 5 without knowing a result of the previous season, given that – matches that were played months before – are described as something new or in the balance.
Of course, it’s not all to throw away: the images from the games are of high quality, and with the slow motion shots you can really enjoy the details to the maximum: the adjustments to LeBron’s body to use his body in post, the fluidity of the shot from the Tatum’s dribble, as Butler reads the opposing passes first. Some statements, then, are interesting, such as those of Edwards, the youngest and perhaps least astute in front of a camera, when he has to play the final against Kyrie Irving.
A second series, however, has already been confirmed. The Starting 5 will consist of Kevin Durant, Jaylen Brown, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, James Harden and Tyrese Haliburton. All phenomenal players and also interesting from a basketball perspective, but how much will we see of their seasons?
KD will be the LeBron of the moment, who wants to convince us that he is a showman (spoiler: he is not), Harden will try to clean up his image as a killjoy. Right, Brown could give us some interesting moments, perhaps coming out on top against Nike with whom he has a long (difficult) beef. For the third season, if there will be a third season – Break Point (il Drive to Survive of tennis) stopped at two – my advice is to take journeymen from the League instead, or in any case those who have to fight for a contract, those who are cut before the season, a particularly unlucky rookie. If we have to see life off the court anyway, wouldn’t it be more interesting to see those who live on the fringes of the NBA and not in the world of fairy tales?
