Hacker News Reader

Comment by hk__2 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

I'm not a basketball fan and know very little about the sport and this was an incredibly moving and well-written story about the human tale behind a transient sport moment. I guess you need to know that getting a ball-sized object through a ball-sized opening from 80 feet is an INCREDIBLY unlikely thing to occur, something the article spells out, but it's only the entrypoint into a story about how sporting event contests and insurance work, how players relate to fans, how players protect themselves, and how normal people's lives can be changed by even those transient moments. It's beautiful writing.

There are perhaps two parts that you might not understand - the rules of the sport (or specifically this trick shot), and the celebrity players on the team of the 1993 Chicago Bulls.

The rules are mostly discussed in the article - you have to loft a large ball (larger and firmer than a soccer ball) into a hole (technically "hoop", a horizontal metal rim, with a soft netting underneath that slows the descent) that's a bit bigger than that ball, without getting closer than 80 feet to the target.

For the sake of this discussion Michael Jordan is analogous to Pelé or Messi of football (soccer) fame.

I'm not into basketball, it made 100% sense. I assume most people have played basketball at least once in their childhood, even if not from the US. And also mentioning names like Michael Jordan who is known worldwide by most people regardless of if they know basketball well or not.

Not every article/thing posted on HN is made literally for you. Chill.

I know absolutely nothing about basketball and don't live in the USA. I can't say I found any part of it basketball-centric enough to challenge my enjoyment of the overall piece and story it told.

The article focuses very little on the actual sport, though.

This doesn't really have anything to do with Michael Jordan playing basketball tho, nor is it one of his famous "shots" -- for example, a fadeaway buzzer beater he hit later this year in the playoffs that became iconic.

I don't know, I'm from France like you, barely know anything about basketball (besides playing it a few times at school), yet I still know who Michael Jackson is and understood what the shot was.

Jordan :-) Though I don't doubt you probably know who Michael Jackson was as well.

lol, can't believe I didn't catch this after sending it :) That's what happens when writing a comment while being distracted

How could it have been written such that people who know nothing of basketball or that way it is played in the USA could understand it better?

With an introduction on the context and on the terms it would use in the rest of the article, a bit like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37034987 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37034996.

Okay, but for people who DO know about basketball, this would make the article laborious.

If you write something you assume some base level of reader knowledge. As you say, if you go back to first principles for everything, 1.) You now have 1,000 words of boilerplate that will make the average reader turn the page very quickly and 2.) It probably still won't work for someone with zero knowledge and probably not much more interest.

> Okay, but for people who DO know about basketball, this would make the article laborious.

Well, then let’s close HN since every single article will be laborious for the people who DO know about the subject.

If you replaced "Basketball" with "Football" it would roughly be 98% the exact same story.

Yes, which is why we don’t see football/soccer stories on HN.

I’m not a “sportsball” person myself - but you’d be surprised at the number of extreme tech geeks that live and breathe the statistics of sports (particularly baseball). For them it’s about the mechanics and statistics and not the personalities.

The best baseball game I ever saw was Greg Maddux's 77-pitch complete game. There are a distressing number of people who would consider it boring (MOAR HOME RUNS!), but it was an absolute masterclass in trajectories, velocities and psychology.

Erroneous on both counts!

1. Articles about the barbados grenada game has popped up here multiple times recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbados_4%E2%80%932_Grenada

2. This article isn't about sport, it's a human interest story and really a story about insurance companies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com