The Denver Nuggets and the Hierarchy of Basic
on being a basketball hipster and what it means to be first-order basic
if you want to skip the sportsball talk and dive into the cultural commentary and my theory of basic, scroll to the picture of my second favorite serbian boi
The Denver Nuggets, despite being down 3-1 in a best of 7 series against the title favorite Clippers, have come back and forced a game 7. I am elated. I love the Denver Nuggets, even if there’s no reason for me to love them by the way most people pick their favorite sports team. I have no family members living in Denver. I have never been to Colorado. I have never seen them play in person. They were not the first basketball team I ever watched. I eat chicken nuggets, but that’s about as close as a connection to the Nuggets as I have.
The Nuggets are funky. Basketball aside, the Nuggets have phenomenal uniforms (the alts with the rainbow skyline? shoot me) and a stupid-in-a-fun-way name. They always have one or two guys who they picked up off the garbage heap and turned into solid rotation players. The Nuggets are such a wonky team with a bunch of fun personalities, and they built it exactly the way I would have: take 2-3 unique players and surround them with guys who do everything solidly and won’t lose you the game. They play a fun, freewheeling style of offense, spearheaded by:
Michael Porter Jr. The top rated player in the country in high school who slid in the draft because he has the back of an old man. Definitely thinks he is much better than he actually is. May or may not be an anti-vaxxer.
Jerami Grant. Once, during sophomore year, I was drunk as shit and talking to Erik Jones about basketball and I said if the Denver Nuggets sign an athletic dude who can shoot threes and protect the rim, like a Jerami Grant-type guy, they’ll win the title. I’m a prophet.
Jamal Murray, a young Canadian guard who before recently going absolutely nuclear to help Denver come back from 3-1 down against Utah was most famous for accidentally leaking his sex tape.
Nikola Jokic. My favorite player in the NBA and the man who owns the middle finger in the picture above.
Jokic is a 7 foot, burly, thicc, absolute genius of a player. He was drafted in the second round out of Serbia (aside: seems like I really have a thing for Serbian icons), which basically meant even the team that drafted him didn’t really have high hopes for him. Jokic can barely jump; he famously has more triple doubles (a rare statistical achievement) than dunks in his career. If you look at this doughy mass of a man, you would think he had no business being in the NBA. Half of the shots he makes are complete bullshit, some off-kilter one legged sling-it-from-behind-your-head nonsense that has no business going in. Every time he moves he looks like a chainsmoker who hasn’t run in years in the middle of a marathon. He looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy ate himself. All of this makes it shocking that he is the best offensive center in the world. I have never seen any man surpass the physical limitation of his body the way Nikola Jokic does: he is a wizard with the ball, could probably play point guard, might be the best passer in the league (which at his size is insane), has a deceptively tricky handle, and has such a feathery touch. For someone like me, also bereft of athletic ability, watching Nikola Jokic gives me hope. They say one of the saddest days in a young boy’s life is realizing that he will never be a professional athlete, but Nikola Jokic helps keep that dream alive for me.
For the past two years, the Nuggets have been on the precipice of entering that top tier of NBA teams. They’ve had regular season success but flamed out in the postseason. Not this year. This year, they have faced elimination in five games and won all of them, often coming back from huge deficits. Every time I see Jamal Murray take maybe the dumbest shot I’ve ever seen before he nails it, or every time I see my goofy ass Serbian best boy lumber down the court before destroying the Clippers, who are probably the best team in the league, all by his lonesome, it is like inhaling a saltshaker of cocaine.
“LA Clippers, double dippers, burger flippers, wire strippers. Nuggets in 7”
I have this theory that I’ve developed called the “orders of basic.”
What does it mean for something to be basic? It kind of just means it’s popular, that it’s the first thing you think of, the thing that takes no effort to discover. Think Drake, Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa. At the complete other end of the spectrum is stuff that takes a tremendous amount of effort to discover, stuff by a Bangladeshi 12-year old who only makes music using instruments made from a factory in Lahore between the hours of 1pm and 2pm EST. In between these two we have a bunch of different orders/tiers. Under this framework, the most popular items that are not considered basic are first order basic, and the most popular items that are not considered first order basic or basic are second order basic, so on and so forth. For music, first order basic might be something like Vampire Weekend or Chance the Rapper pre-Coloring book, decently popular and acclaimed but not mainstream. Second order basic would be like Dr. Dog or STRFKR, and you keep going until we reach our Bangladeshi 12-year old.
I really this framework; it’s a fun exercise if seeing how varied your tastes are. Harrison is probably an “Andrew + 1.5” for music, and I am a “Michael + 1.5.” In a sense, it’s the degree of hipster you are. To me, first-order basic is the most interesting tier: in many cases, it means you are conscious of what is basic, and for whatever reason you don’t want to be basic, so you expend the least amount of effort necessary to be “different.” You end up being not basic, but also comfortable; there are enough people that like the things you do, too. You’re interesting, but not whack.
When I think first order basic, I think A24, Philz Coffee, Everlane, Bojack Horseman, Vampire Weekend, working at Stripe, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Cava, Five Guys, Trick Mirror, pescetarianism, Trader Joe’s. (To my dear friends: if this feels like a callout, don’t feel bad. I want most of these things too.) I want to emphasize that there isn’t really anything wrong with liking “first-order basic” things; these are good products and experiences. I think most first-order basic things are, tending to have a higher price or quality than “basic” things, but not exorbitantly so, giving it a kind of accessible prestige.
In many ways, I think this is what drew me to the Nuggets. They’re good, but not elite. They have a star who is incredible to watch, but doesn’t have the household recognition that LeBron has. If I told someone I like the Nuggets, it doesn’t provoke the eyerolls that might come if I said I really liked the Lakers or the Warriors.
In the summer between sophomore and junior year, I worked in New York at a small hedge fund. One day after work, I really wanted Popeyes. I got a little high and had to walk quite a bit to get to the nearest store. It was a smaller location, so seating was kind of tight. I ended up talking with these two guys that used to run catering for Google NY but had quit to open up a healthy fast casual restaurant down the block. At some point I said it’s crazy how whenever I go to a fancier restaurant, the fried chicken is never as good as Popeyes. One of the guys, in between bites, said Of course. This isn’t real food. This was designed in a lab to do nothing but make your brain think that it’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten for 5 bucks. I laughed and asked if he thought that, then why was he eating at Popeyes. He shrugged. Sometimes that’s what you need.
First-order basic is appealing because of the assumption that basic is unappealing. In a lot of ways, mainstream appearances are unappealing; basic books being problematic, basic businesses having bad labor practices, basic food being unhealthy, basic music all sounding the same. But I think a lot of the disdain for things that are popular is unwarranted and kind of silly, that somehow many of these “basic” things are somehow less legitimate or genuine. There’s this phenomenal article that criticizes how people fetishize authenticity, which is what a lot of what “first-order basic” feels like. It is perfectly okay to love first-order basic things, and to call out basic things when they are problematic, but there’s often this slightly pretentious and obnoxious disdain for the mundane underpinning the first-order basic. I think we too often conflate higher orders of basic with higher inherent value when being basic merely means being popular.
Ultimately, we like what we like: as the author of the article said, food either tastes good or it doesn’t. Plus, the mainstream eventually consumes everything, and today’s indie darling will be tomorrow’s headliner. Regardless, I think orders of basic is a fun way to think about things, albeit like with all systems of categorization, incomplete and rife with problems. But that’s for another post. In the meantime, I hope that after reading, this gif is less devastating:
…still pretty devastating.
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