The Dust Files: I Love Watching Basketball Players Kinda Play Themselves in Movies Like Blue Chips (1994)
I know some of you might disagree, but in my mind, it’s the peak of basketball season.
Sure, the most exciting weekend of the sports calendar was three whole weeks ago. But a national champion was crowned earlier this week, and the NBA play-in games are happening in a few days. The college season has just ended, and the professionals are gearing up for the playoffs.
But there’s something in between those two realms. Something more advanced than college basketball, yet somehow inferior in the eyes of the general public. I’m speaking, of course, of the NBA G-League, formerly known as the D-League.1 And in the lead-up to today’s basketball-themed journey back into the Dust Files, I’d like to give a eulogy of sorts.
Because the Birmingham Squadron, my beloved hometown G-League team, have been laid to rest. Well, technically, they’ve been moved to the suburbs of New Orleans, but they’re dead to me.
Basketball has been my favorite sport since high school, and I’d always dreamed about a legitimate semi-professional team here in Birmingham.2 I mean, we’ve got more than a million people in the metro area, so why not? The Atlanta Hawks are pretty close, and the Memphis Grizzlies aren’t much farther away.
In October of 2018, the third-closest team—the New Orleans Pelicans—announced that they’d be creating a minor league team. And they’d be putting it in Birmingham.
Of course, I had to get season tickets on day one. Thankfully, I’d just gotten a new job when their inaugural season kicked off in the fall of 2021, so I could finally afford to do so. I paid way more than I should’ve, but I got four seats to bring a rotation of friends and family. I was living the dream.
That first year went pretty well, thanks in part to a roster that included an Auburn star (Jared Harper), an Alabama star (John Petty Jr.), and a future NBA regular (Jose Alvarado).3 But attendance only went downhill from there. The Squadron were playing in an arena that’s simply too big for a G-League team (more than 17,000 seats), and it was a struggle to consistently get to even 10% full. Basketball is a hard sell for a city that mostly only cares about football and its state’s two premiere college programs.4
After four more poorly attended seasons—for all of which I renewed my season tickets, against my better financial judgement—the Pelicans finally pulled the plug about a month ago, announcing that the team would keep their name and branding but move to Kenner, Louisiana, where they’d be known as the Laketown Squadron. I knew it would happen eventually. Frankly, I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did. But after five years of valiant effort, our semi-pro basketball experiment is finally over.5
I struggled to make it to even half of the games (there were 24 each season), and the tickets had very little value if I was able to resell them at all. But when we came through and cheered on the Squad, my people and I had a great time.
We got to see relatively big names like Amen Thompson, Scoot Henderson, G.G. Jackson, Mo Bamba, Mario Chalmers, and three-time NBA Dunk Contest champion Mac McClung.6 We enjoyed halftime shows that ranged from Red Panda and Christian and Scooby to local dance teams. We collected dozens of giveaway goodies like bobbleheads and pickleball paddles. We drank numerous $2 domestic beers. We even got upgraded to courtside seats a few times. And in our final season, I got to bring my wife and stepdaughters to a couple games. We had a good run, Birmingham.
On the plus side, now I can use my free time to do other things, I won’t feel compelled to spend money on basketball tickets, and I can stop pretending to kinda like the Pelicans.7
Maybe one day a former Squadron player or opponent will wind up in a feature film. Alvarado just co-starred in an AT&T commercial after all. Until then, I’ll enjoy films like Blue Chips that star actual NBA players and wonder how Penny Hardaway has managed to keep his job as the Memphis Tigers head coach all this time. And I hope you’ll enjoy this dusted-off piece from 2022.
Best of luck to your NBA team in the playoffs! (Mine…did not make it.)
I miss when it was called the D-League. It made more sense; they were there to be D-veloped into NBA players, ya know? Gatorade had to come along and ruin it.
When I lived in Louisville, Kentucky, for two years, our student-athletes might as well have been semi-professionals the way they filled the stands. I had student tickets my second year and that really spoiled me.
Another current NBA player, Jaxson Hayes, also played at least one game in Birmingham that season.
It didn’t help that the schedule was so sporadic. The Squadron wouldn’t have a single home game for as much as three straight weeks, and then they’d have something like 10 games in 22 days. I understand that this was likely meant to reduce travel costs, but it was the most frustrating part about being a season ticket holder.
When the news broke, many of my friends reached out to comfort me as if I’d lost a family member. Which is very kind, but also hilarious.
I should note that our G-League era also included three Pelicans preseason games, and those tickets were included in my package. So I also got to watch the likes of Kevin Durant, Zion Williamson, Trae Young, Alperen Şengün, Brandon Ingram, and Dejounte Murray, just to name a few All-Stars.
As a Grizzlies fan, I really only ever tolerated them because our guys sometimes got called up to New Orleans. It was hard not to root for the Memphis Hustle when they came to town.
So: the G-League is the NBA equivalent of baseball's minor leagues?
Growing up my family had outside seats to the Australian equivalent of the G-League for a team called the West Sydney Slammers, which would go on to join the main league as the West Sydney Razorbacks. It was always a blast.