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The Joy of Basketball: An Encyclopedia of the Modern Game
From writer Ben Detrick and artist Andrew Kuo, a vibrant, unconventional, highly opinionated guide to the triumphs, joys, struggles, and heartbreaks of the modern era of the game, for every obsessive basketball fan who loves to hate hot takes.
Foreword by Desus Nice
The Joy of An Encyclopedia of the Modern Game celebrates the meteoric rise of basketball over the last quarter century by ignoring the bland, traditionalist binary of wins or losses. Instead, the book’s focus is on everything else. Using text, charts, and illustrations that upend conventional jock wisdom, the book details the most incredible players in history, draft flops, long-limbed oddballs, superteams, the international talent wave, brawls, scandals, the rapid evolution of contemporary gameplay, coaching, fashion, crime, positional erosion, tragic tales, memes, and the sacred Kardashian Blessing.
Bouncing between witty graphics and keen sociopolitical observations, The Joy of Basketball is a subversive sports manifesto camouflaged as a colorful reference book for your coffee table.
Foreword by Desus Nice
The Joy of An Encyclopedia of the Modern Game celebrates the meteoric rise of basketball over the last quarter century by ignoring the bland, traditionalist binary of wins or losses. Instead, the book’s focus is on everything else. Using text, charts, and illustrations that upend conventional jock wisdom, the book details the most incredible players in history, draft flops, long-limbed oddballs, superteams, the international talent wave, brawls, scandals, the rapid evolution of contemporary gameplay, coaching, fashion, crime, positional erosion, tragic tales, memes, and the sacred Kardashian Blessing.
Bouncing between witty graphics and keen sociopolitical observations, The Joy of Basketball is a subversive sports manifesto camouflaged as a colorful reference book for your coffee table.
352 pages, Hardcover
Published November 9, 2021
30 people are currently reading
237 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
December 13, 2021
My daughter and I were excited to check out this book as we are both big basketball fans. After a minute of looking through it, she handed it over to me. "These are all men basketball players." With the exception of Becky Hammond, she was right! What a huge disappointment! A book calling itself an "Encyclopedia of the Modern Game" that leaves women out is at best an incorrect title. Books do not need to be all things to all people, but if you are writing about men's basketball at least be clear. And you may want to write about the amazing women playing the game because they deserve their own volume.
January 5, 2022
Some of it is fun. You'll learn a few things. But ultimately, it's a book purporting to be an - encyclopedia - of - modern - basketball. The women they cover are Becky Hammon and V Stiviano. What an embarrassment. Even if you're not going to cover the WNBA, where are the Violet Palmer, Doris Burke, Swin Cash the executive, Candace Parker the analyst, and so many other deserving women's entries? It is truly disappointing.
February 15, 2022
Best read over a sink.
April 7, 2023
*2.5 I changed my mind on this book dozens of times while reading it. There were things I loved (like the forward and introduction and some of the made up terms) and plenty that drove me up the wall (how difficult the very clever charts were to read, how for a book about the joy of basketball the authors brought in a high rate negative stories, and the weird pacing within individual entries).
I got this book to read about the NBA, but as other reviewers have stated the book doesn’t make clear that it’s only about the NBA as opposed to women’s or college basketball.
Ultimately this is a collection of hot takes some of which you will agree with and some you won’t.
I got this book to read about the NBA, but as other reviewers have stated the book doesn’t make clear that it’s only about the NBA as opposed to women’s or college basketball.
Ultimately this is a collection of hot takes some of which you will agree with and some you won’t.
April 17, 2024
driving this morning was so ass this was good literal encyclopedia i think it was bearable one of my more modern basketball reads that was pure hoops 🚉
January 10, 2022
I enjoyed this book but felt it was pretty critical of the players. Also it barely mentioned women and when heinous acts of misogyny/violence were mentioned it was casual and short. Kind of a weird reading experience as a woman basketball fan.
The graphs were pretty but sometimes very hard to read and not easy to decipher. It felt like they were there for fun without much thought about how they would be read/enjoyed.
The illustrations are beautiful! Also, HUGE Knicks bias in this book, which I enjoyed as a Knicks fan but it was very overt.
The graphs were pretty but sometimes very hard to read and not easy to decipher. It felt like they were there for fun without much thought about how they would be read/enjoyed.
The illustrations are beautiful! Also, HUGE Knicks bias in this book, which I enjoyed as a Knicks fan but it was very overt.
October 18, 2022
Broad survey of the meNBA with great visual presentation. Great read but loses points for persistent Celtics slander and next to no mention of women in the game
April 16, 2024
Absolutely essential read. The art throughout the book is amazing. And I loved the writing. I would read this book out loud to my daughter as an infant and now, as a toddler, she demands “basketball!” on the tv at all time. I’m glad that “The Joy of Basketball” has given me a way to share the joy of basketball with my child.
January 2, 2023
Such a fun, beautiful, hopeful, and thoughtfully written book. Reminds me why I love basketball and I’ll always revisit this book
January 8, 2022
yes i read a basketball encyclopedia from cover to cover
January 26, 2022
Thought this book was fantastic, hilarious, full of Twitter hot takes, NBA insider jokes, and very clearly written by fellow suffering Knicks fans. Would be a 5/5 for me if they had at LEAST included WNBA or women basketball stars in the book. The WNBA isn’t even a section when you get to “W.” Or at least altered the title to be clear that this would only cover NBA. Only former female player mentioned in here is Becky Hammon because of assistant coaching for the Spurs. They even dedicate a section to Toni Braxton for allegedly dating Jason Kidd and also Donald Sterling’s former girlfriend.
A disclaimer would have helped make this 5/5 for me on not including women as a part of the modern game. But with that aside I very much enjoyed and laughed a lot. Solid and go to book for a modern NBA encyclopedia.
A disclaimer would have helped make this 5/5 for me on not including women as a part of the modern game. But with that aside I very much enjoyed and laughed a lot. Solid and go to book for a modern NBA encyclopedia.
March 26, 2023
Artful, hilarious, thoughtful, and downright stupid-in-the-best-possible way, Art of Basketball is a collection of mini-essays on everything relevant about basketball from the last 30 years. As a man commonly mistaken for an old-head on NBA Twitter and Reddit, Detrick and Kuo’s not-so-subtle jabs at the slow-footed big men and non-shooting shooting guards of bygone eras stung just a bit, but the duo is entertaining enough that I let it slide without too much of an ego hit.
Besides the essays themselves, the book is chock-full of ridiculous, convoluted graphs ranking anything from different players’ similarity to Keith Van Horn to gatekeeping NBA subculturedom. One of my five favorite basketball books, up there with Dream Team, the Book of Basketball, Breaks of the Game, and How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius.
Besides the essays themselves, the book is chock-full of ridiculous, convoluted graphs ranking anything from different players’ similarity to Keith Van Horn to gatekeeping NBA subculturedom. One of my five favorite basketball books, up there with Dream Team, the Book of Basketball, Breaks of the Game, and How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius.
October 30, 2021
the apex of visual delight and an unimpeachable thesis on the modern game, this book makes the case why basketball is never quite basketball.
no doubt a skill honed through years of navigating the inane snake pit of NBA twitter, Detrick has a gift for the zinger. here’s a favorite: “A human Scotch bonnet pepper, Kevin Garnett had spiciness reserved for the Scoville scale.” and another, “Despite the latticework of rules and draconian penalties created to prevent fighting on the court—a concern that is mysteriously absent from, say, baseball and hockey—professional basketball players are mocked for being uneager to exchange volleys of fisticuffs like inebriated pugilists.” rarely do i read basketball writing with the same gleeful attentiveness as i would, say, a novel, but every entry somehow captures the tensions, paradoxes, understated genius, and mythological heft of the many men and women who made the game what it is.
kuo’s visual entries, too, are vital statements on the emotional and comic depth of various NBA-related lore. gamelike in their own way, kuo’s abstracted codes systematize a way of reading the game along with the at-times profound moral lessons that go along with it. in a chart that cites, “lessons learned from linsanity”, kuo coolly remarks, “delight is watching an improbable success” and, “two or so weeks every ten years is good enough”. i cannot disagree.
maybe being a fan is, as they admit, a futile effort, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. at its worst, being a fan corrodes our ability to see players as other than the living vessels of our own limitation, whose failures in the game reinforce our own. but maybe it is witnessing the heights of achievement, the innovations on the form, and the significance of basketball to the texture of american life over the past half-century that affirm the quiet moral lessons that emerge if we look closer at the game. at its most abstract, the book argues for an act of reading life as a series of random bounces, a constant fade away in game seven, a ball that bounces to laws unbounded by the false axioms of clutchness or skill. it’s allen iverson’s love of the game when the game didn’t give him all he deserved. it’s accepting the result. it’s the joy of basketball.
no doubt a skill honed through years of navigating the inane snake pit of NBA twitter, Detrick has a gift for the zinger. here’s a favorite: “A human Scotch bonnet pepper, Kevin Garnett had spiciness reserved for the Scoville scale.” and another, “Despite the latticework of rules and draconian penalties created to prevent fighting on the court—a concern that is mysteriously absent from, say, baseball and hockey—professional basketball players are mocked for being uneager to exchange volleys of fisticuffs like inebriated pugilists.” rarely do i read basketball writing with the same gleeful attentiveness as i would, say, a novel, but every entry somehow captures the tensions, paradoxes, understated genius, and mythological heft of the many men and women who made the game what it is.
kuo’s visual entries, too, are vital statements on the emotional and comic depth of various NBA-related lore. gamelike in their own way, kuo’s abstracted codes systematize a way of reading the game along with the at-times profound moral lessons that go along with it. in a chart that cites, “lessons learned from linsanity”, kuo coolly remarks, “delight is watching an improbable success” and, “two or so weeks every ten years is good enough”. i cannot disagree.
maybe being a fan is, as they admit, a futile effort, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. at its worst, being a fan corrodes our ability to see players as other than the living vessels of our own limitation, whose failures in the game reinforce our own. but maybe it is witnessing the heights of achievement, the innovations on the form, and the significance of basketball to the texture of american life over the past half-century that affirm the quiet moral lessons that emerge if we look closer at the game. at its most abstract, the book argues for an act of reading life as a series of random bounces, a constant fade away in game seven, a ball that bounces to laws unbounded by the false axioms of clutchness or skill. it’s allen iverson’s love of the game when the game didn’t give him all he deserved. it’s accepting the result. it’s the joy of basketball.
July 10, 2023
March 20, 2022
The Joy of Basketball, by Ben Detrick and Andrew Kuo, published in 2021, I must say, was not as joyous a read as I’d hoped when I bought the book a while back after browsing through it at a bookstore in Washington Depot, CT. A super-biased “Encyclopedia of the Modern Game,” the book features writing by Detrick and art by Kuo. Both are pretty good, but the former gets sloppier as the alphabet draws onward, with typos and lines like this one, from the entry titled “Walking Buckets”: “Yet walking bucket-hood does not guarantee success, even if it does not come at the expense of it.” Huh? Also, Detrick’s prose tends toward the purple: in an entry called “Wet Noodles,” about guys who play with a “gangly stringiness,” he writes, “Manu Ginobili . . . was the apex fettuccine of his generation. Like any self-respecting paisano, he maneuvered the court with al dente perfection. Bouncy, elastic, and endlessly malleable, Ginobili was just as tasty in a room temperature tuna salad or flicking off buttery parmesan from a skillet of cacio e pepe eaten over the sink.” Very much a product of these guys’ ages and lifetimes (I’m not going to check but they gotta be in their twenties), the book glories in its irreverence—it claims the NBA began with the drafting of Allen Iverson in 1996—and its New York focus. Lots of pro-Knicks entries; lots of anti-Celtics rhetoric. It downplays the Warriors era of dominance, calling it a “blip of inconvenience,” and revels in hip-hop references and salacious rumor mongering. Oh, and the art. It features unique and accurate renderings of the players referenced which are pretty cool, but unfortunately is also over-populated with arcane graphs and tables, most of which are meant to be humorous and edgy but come across as confusing and indecipherable. At least they take up space; the entries themselves are in tiny font that require a meticulous eye. Through all the past days I’ve been reading the volume, for too long I kept asking myself, When is this thing gonna end? It finally did and no—it was not a joy. Only, that is, if long slogs are joyful . . . .
©JPME 2022
The Joy of Basketball, by Ben Detrick and Andrew Kuo, published in 2021, I must say, was not as joyous a read as I’d hoped when I bought the book a while back after browsing through it at a bookstore in Washington Depot, CT. A super-biased “Encyclopedia of the Modern Game,” the book features writing by Detrick and art by Kuo. Both are pretty good, but the former gets sloppier as the alphabet draws onward, with typos and lines like this one, from the entry titled “Walking Buckets”: “Yet walking bucket-hood does not guarantee success, even if it does not come at the expense of it.” Huh? Also, Detrick’s prose tends toward the purple: in an entry called “Wet Noodles,” about guys who play with a “gangly stringiness,” he writes, “Manu Ginobili . . . was the apex fettuccine of his generation. Like any self-respecting paisano, he maneuvered the court with al dente perfection. Bouncy, elastic, and endlessly malleable, Ginobili was just as tasty in a room temperature tuna salad or flicking off buttery parmesan from a skillet of cacio e pepe eaten over the sink.” Very much a product of these guys’ ages and lifetimes (I’m not going to check but they gotta be in their twenties), the book glories in its irreverence—it claims the NBA began with the drafting of Allen Iverson in 1996—and its New York focus. Lots of pro-Knicks entries; lots of anti-Celtics rhetoric. It downplays the Warriors era of dominance, calling it a “blip of inconvenience,” and revels in hip-hop references and salacious rumor mongering. Oh, and the art. It features unique and accurate renderings of the players referenced which are pretty cool, but unfortunately is also over-populated with arcane graphs and tables, most of which are meant to be humorous and edgy but come across as confusing and indecipherable. At least they take up space; the entries themselves are in tiny font that require a meticulous eye. Through all the past days I’ve been reading the volume, for too long I kept asking myself, When is this thing gonna end? It finally did and no—it was not a joy. Only, that is, if long slogs are joyful . . . .
©JPME 2022
February 5, 2025
This read was enjoyable, I found myself cutting deeper and deeper into the book on a nightly basis. There’s an entertainment quality that works here, which is especially odd for an encyclopedia. Nobody hears about a a fun encyclopedia.
From the tip, this book is filled with eye candy. I loved the designs by Andrew Kuo as the simplistic and wiry outlines work due to the extreme colors. This book is ridden with mindless graphs about pop culture, basketball, and other random things- by midway through I stopped trying to discern them.
On the writing front, Ben Derrick employs a very flamboyant and flowery rhetoric. It was really difficult to grapple onto in the beginning; however, I grew accustom to the style. There were some verbal laughs while reading and some cringeworthy moments. The writing jargon heavy but it still describes things, players, and such perfectly juxtaposition. Therefore, it works.
My biggest setback was the “social awareness” ridden from cover to cover. Often times it felt impertinent to include several left-leaning perspectives onto basketball, a form of entertainment. For example, there’s a blurb about Charles Barkley and the majority of his profile is about his political incorrectness, rather than his Hall of Fame career. Just a bit much for me, honestly.
For $7, it’s a steal. I’m happy with it. If my fellow basketball enthusiasts can stomach pretentious writing and scurvy piecharts.
From the tip, this book is filled with eye candy. I loved the designs by Andrew Kuo as the simplistic and wiry outlines work due to the extreme colors. This book is ridden with mindless graphs about pop culture, basketball, and other random things- by midway through I stopped trying to discern them.
On the writing front, Ben Derrick employs a very flamboyant and flowery rhetoric. It was really difficult to grapple onto in the beginning; however, I grew accustom to the style. There were some verbal laughs while reading and some cringeworthy moments. The writing jargon heavy but it still describes things, players, and such perfectly juxtaposition. Therefore, it works.
My biggest setback was the “social awareness” ridden from cover to cover. Often times it felt impertinent to include several left-leaning perspectives onto basketball, a form of entertainment. For example, there’s a blurb about Charles Barkley and the majority of his profile is about his political incorrectness, rather than his Hall of Fame career. Just a bit much for me, honestly.
For $7, it’s a steal. I’m happy with it. If my fellow basketball enthusiasts can stomach pretentious writing and scurvy piecharts.
January 11, 2023
More to be perused/leafed through at leisure than read straight through. Funny on both a sentence-by-sentence level and in the angles it takes on certain subjects. Weird, too, on both of those levels, and thus a bit hard to pin down: so many different riffs and references that probably come across better in podcast or tweet form. It's mortared together by some really beautiful artwork and some truly strange bespoke charts. Also, Desus' opening essay is really good, and it contains a truly fascinating number of quotes from P.J Tucker. I'm more of a casual than someone who truly knows ball, but I dug this and will keep it on hand for when I'm up too late watching two teams I don't really care about because I saw on Twitter that someone is going OFF.
July 19, 2024
A fun, informative read about the modern NBA for the most hardcore of basketball lovers. Lots of awesome illustrations, unique and humorous graphs and charts, and tons of cool information about the modern game of basketball and all its quirks. While I really enjoyed reading it, I suppose there was definitely some bias and ignorance regarding some aspects of the sport- to give all the credit to Allen Iverson for shaping the modern game is a very hot take and one that many might disagree with. Irregardless, I loved this book. I am obsessed with basketball and being able to read a big old encyclopedia on it is something I can’t even complain about.
March 25, 2022
I have a slight feeling this book is meant to be consumed over time as a coffee table book 🤣 and I did definitely pick it up because of its cover … BUT still a fun read during peak March Madness season!
February 18, 2025
This was a fun read mostly, but as it's an encyclopedia, there were times that I needed a break from all the facts. Big miss on leaving out WNBA and women's NCAA info. Not cool. Some of the art graphs were difficult or tedious to look at, but on the whole they made the book fun.
April 10, 2022
This isn’t an enciclopedia, it’s a Bible.
June 13, 2022
This is not the book you read if you want a comprehensive introduction to basketball. However, if you are looking for a lot of shit-talking about hoops today in the tradition of the Free Darko and Shea Serrano guides, with some shit-talking nonsensical infographics, then this is for you.
July 22, 2022
Beautiful visually and well written to match the tone of the modern game
October 20, 2022
No joy for me.
January 23, 2023
Only for basketball lovers.
February 25, 2023
An artful reference work prepared with love
January 5, 2025
A lot about basketball by people who don’t….know much about basketball. Were they paid by the word?
March 9, 2025
This book goes from very enjoyable to almost worthless from “chapter” to “chapter”. The art-work is a plus.
February 22, 2022
very enjoyable. its more like 60% joy + 40% snark.
December 15, 2025
I go back and read through this book a lot. Especially when I see someone talking about Allen Iverson's true shooting percentage online. Detrick's takes are astute like a capuchin monkey. I wonder if Kuo thinks of colorblind people. Why does the Allen Iverson part makes me tear up everytime? This is my favorite basketball book.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews