4 Maybe also the 1977 world champion Portland Trail Blazers, a team on which McKinney served as assistant coach. Which, okay, a handful of Bill Russell’s ’60s Celtics teams would like a word. “Until now,” he confides, to the viewer, of his brand-new, jazz-not-classical, appearance-of-chaos-masks-underlying-order scheme, “nobody’s been dumb enough to do it.”
He’s been screening footage of the previous season’s team listlessly running set plays, the results “methodical, predictable, and slow.” The offense he wants to run will be the opposite: inventive, flexible, swift. “This is how everybody in the league plays basketball,” he tells players at training camp Magic’s rookie season.
Reilly, the fifty-six year-old man currently playing him through a haze of charisma and cologne.) There’s no angle here, just a house style, McKay’s 3, and the desire to streamline, to flatten for the sake of narrative and emotional clarity.Ĭonsider this moment, one that I’ve been worrying for weeks: “Winning Time” credits coach Jack McKinney with developing the up-tempo, fast break offense that made the Lakers so exciting to watch. Jerry Buss, the team’s owner, “was forty-six but looked thirty-five.” He did not.
ALEX POPKEY SERIES
I’d like to clarify that I like “Winning Time.” I mean, it’s fun! Only I have questions, primary among them: Why make a show about a historical moment on which you have not only no new perspective but no apparent perspective, period? (I could ask the same of Jeff Pearlman, author of the book on which the series was based, who lost me when he claimed Dr.
ALEX POPKEY CRACK
If the images (basketball, ballet, crack cocaine!) flash by too quickly to communicate much more than themselves and, together, the idea that, gosh, Los Angeles sure was wild in the ’80s, well, it’s a credit sequence you don’t expect it to. There are Laker girl butts (covered) and one skater boy butt (nude). But the credit sequence is “Winning Time” as its truest self 2 : all rapid cuts, throbbing music (The Coup’s “ My Favorite Mutiny ”), grainy film stock. The best part of any given episode is the acting, is one of any number of honest moments between remarkable performers doing careful, subtle work. “Winning Time” peaks early, with a slick, saucy credit sequence. Not the ’80s as they were but as they are now remembered the ’80s as they appeared in ads. None of it tethered to anything stronger than a sweet vibe. The polyester, the Aqua Net, the mustard yellow the 16mm look, the 8mm look, the VHS look. Disappointed that, for all the trouble the production team went to, “Winning Time” is fundamentally vapid, an aesthetic in search of an idea. This is my way of explaining why I may sound, from time to time, salty. This is me, turning on “Winning Time,” a happy sucker, the show’s would-be mark. This is the NBA of Magic Johnson and his rival Larry Bird the NBA on the cusp of Michael Jordan. “Winning Time” finds the Association at a crucial moment: post- ABA merger, post-seventies doldrums, post-introduction of the three point line, the game as we know it today struggling to be born.
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