It's difficult to pick a singular moment that defines the career of Andrea Bargnani, professional basketball player. It is more correct, maybe, to understand Bargnani in a series of little looping moments, the flailing Vines and broken-video-game GIFs that have defined his career's desolate second act. When the news broke that he'd signed a two-year minimum salary deal to remain in the five boroughs as a member of the Brooklyn Nets, Twitter, as is its wont, churned out a seeminglyendlessprocessionof LOL's, headdesk-inducing goofery, and deliriously surreal moments in which a supposedly trained athlete lost all ability to control his basic motor functions. There. That is Andrea Bargnani.This is what social media does, for better or for worse, where basketball is concerned. In this echo chamber the derision expands geometrically, the laughter rises to a near-scream, and a relatively minor transaction like the Nets enlisting Bargs to play 10-15 decent minutes a night backing up Brook Lopez becomes a top trending item in the U.S. on a lovely Sunday evening.
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And then there's this.
The America's Funniest Home Basketball Video injury that ended Bargs' first season with the Knicks was viral even before internet wiseasses set it to R. Kelly's Space Jam anthem. It's funny, to be sure, but it's also kind of cruel. That, too, is Andrea Bargnani in 2015. There is no player in recent memory that evokes such gleeful, sadistic loathing as Andrea Bargnani. It's not just that he gets made fun of. It's that it's all not quite in jest.
That Bargnani is barely worthy of an NBA roster spot is pretty much universally known at this point. Not after a 2014-15 season in which he not only had "the worst on-off court differential of any player on the 17-65 New York Knicks" but also "the league's worst Real Plus-Minus among centers last season by a wide margin, and was nearly as bad the year before," as Devin Kharpertian noted at The Brooklyn Game.
But that is just basketball, and the brand of **** that Bargnani catches is deeper than that. It goes beyond sneering at a failed number one overall draft pick, wincing at squandered talent, or even groaning at the star****ing pre-Phil modus operandi that brought him to the Knicks in the first place. No, people just hate Bargs.
Our hero in happier times. Or similarly unhappy, maybe? — Photo by Chris Humphreys-USA TODAY Sports
During his final two years with the Raptors, Canadians booed him mercilessly, to the point that Poutinier and the Beave-type sports talkers were driven to cranking up "Nessun Dorme" and weeping fake tears of unadulterated joy upon learning that he'd been shipped out of town. Knicks fans booed him during the first half of his first game in New York. When he was injured (yet again), and sitting dead-eyed and listless on the bench, they booed his baby pictures when they were thrown up on the Jumbotron. Really.
This seems like a disproportionate amount of emotional energy to expend on a player of Bargs' relative stature and importance in the NBA's hierarchy, to be sure. I say this as someone that profoundly despised his Knick tenure, and giddily joined the mob during Sunday's festival of sniggering. But it's easy to see how and why this keeps happening. In appearance, and practice, it just seems as if Bargs doesn't care. His whole soft, squishy being repels all the revulsion he gets and this only inspires more of it.
The dude is just moist, and not the healthy drenched-in-sweat kind. He looks clammy, nauseated, not-so-well. There's the dead, fish-eyed stare, the way his jaw seems to hang open at all times, often to reveal a soaked and un-chewed mouthguard. The way his tone-free arms would dangle as he literally lumbered around the court. Sift through the pile of Vines and GIFs above, and you will detect a unifying theme, which is that Bargnani is both lost and bored. He doesn't seem particularly interested in defense or rebounding or passing or any other basketball thing save launching the occasional flat-as-hell twenty-footer. More importantly, he doesn't seem to give a rat's ass whether he succeeds or fails, doesn't care that he doesn't care, and seems confused as to why we might care so much.
Take the pile of derp above. Bargs' takes a three-pointer of such mind-numbing stupidity that Clyde Frazier, the most easy-going dude in Knicks history and someone who has seen some things these last few seasons, to wail, "WHAT IS HE DOING? WHAT IS HE DOING, FOLKS? Why would he shoot the ball? Why?" Bargnani has no answer, and just mouths "my bad" and flashes the exact same Mona Lisa-on-Ketamine non-expression he's had for the entirety of his career. There is not an iota of dismay or of any other emotion, and certainly nothing to match the anguish of every Knick leaping up from the bench.
Plenty of NBA players have failed to mature or develop as players—see Smith, J.R.—without being as dour and transparently over-it as Bargnani. On Monday, Frank Isola wrote that, "the aloof Bargnani was unfailingly miserable and not just when he was dealing with the media" and you don't have to hunt far to hear stories about Bargs routinely showing up late, or acting above it all when asked to participate in team charitable functions. He generally came across as sullen, distant, and morose, and either unable or unwilling to work on the glaring holes in his game, let alone endear himself to the organization. Dude doesn't even care about drinking good wine.
There's room for empathy for a dude that scans as so miserable. You can recognize that he may have been shunted into the game by overeager Italian coaches, who saw all that talent and height—and for all Bargs' failings, the skills are there, if buried under a seemingly mountain of slack and shrugging nothingness—and informed him that there was a pile of US currency to be had. You can understand despising a job that you're only doing for the money, even if the sheer size of Bargnani's paycheck makes it seem like a pretty good deal. You can even see how, after ten years as a pincushion, Bargs might have settled on this strange, muted non-personality as a defense mechanism and way to deflect insane public pressure.
But there's a limit to this empathy because, for fans, not caring—or by every available metric seeming not to care—is really the only unpardonable sin. Worse still, Bargnani's affectless perma-slouch comes way too close to reflecting the daily tedium that we watch sports to escape. Basketball looks not just like work but like a job when he plays it, and a job he hates.
But who knows, really? Maybe Lionel Hollins will prove the one coach that can get through to him. Maybe Billy King's right to compare Bargs to Andray Blatche, another equally lost cause who turned his career around in Brooklyn. Bargnani will rediscover his shot, be able to spread the floor, and once more fluster the Dwight Howards of the NBA world. Maybe he'll care, this time. If anything is going to save him, that would be the place to start.
7/15/2015 7:13 PM
