Stream It Or Skip It: ‘NYC Point Gods’ on Showtime, A Look At How The Playgrounds Of NYC Reshaped The NBA

New York City has long been understood as a hotbed for basketball talent and breeding ground for innovation in the game. Never was this truer than in the 1980s and 1990s, when a new class of point guard arose from the city’s playgrounds. Players like Kenny Anderson, Mark Jackson, Stephon Marbury, God Shammgod, Kenny Smith, Rafer Alston, Rod Strickland and Dwayne “Pearl” Washington reshaped the way the game was played. NYC Point Gods, a new documentary on Showtime, highlights this era and the rise of the Big Apple’s best.

NYC POINT GODS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Today, we take the game for granted. The improvisational style. The flash. The incredible handles, the ankle-breaking moves. But there was a time when basketball looked far different, a time before the influence of a generation of New York City athletes reshaped the game into something simultaneously rougher and more beautiful, something fluid and fantastic and a hell of a lot of fun. In NYC Point Gods, a documentary executive-produced by a team of NBA greats, we get a loving and lively look at how players who rose up from the big city’s playgrounds in the 1980s and 1990s shaped the game so many love today.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: NYC Point Gods is a documentary, but the freewheeling, brash, New York City vibe of the film might remind you of movies like He Got Game or Above The Rim. If you want to go deeper on all things Stephon “Starbury” Marbury, check out the documentary film A Kid From Coney Island. And Rafer Alston also had a prominent role in the recent Netflix documentary, UNTOLD: The Rise and Fall of AND1.

Performance Worth Watching: Kenny Smith, known as much for his broadcasting career as his successful NBA career, offers some of the most entertaining soundbites, including talking about how cocky he was going off to college. “These guys aren’t as good as the guys I’ve been playing against,” he recalls in remembering his willingness to guard then-North Carolina star Michael Jordan. “New York City gave me a confidence that was delusional at times, but it also gave me the confidence to say, ‘I’m gonna be there’.”

Memorable Dialogue: “From the way we talk to the way we lay the ball up, you can tell a point guard from New York out the gate,” writer Joekenneth Museau offers as way of introductory narration early in the film. “But to be considered a legit point guard from here though, you need handles, showmanship, and toughness. But during the ‘80s and ‘90s, during one of our city’s most gritty eras, there was a special group of players who set the blueprint for generations of point guards in our city and beyond.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: “A lot of kids come into the gym and shoot a thousand jumpers, two thousand jumpers. Well, we were doing that with our ball-handling,” longtime NBA player and current college coach Rod Strickland recalls. “And so because of that, I think… it became a part of my hand.”

“Working on my ball skills, I used to do so many crazy things,” former NBA player Kenny Anderson reminisces. “Walking to the grocery store to get eggs, I dribble the ball with my left hand, then I switch the eggs over, right hand, and I’ll see how many I break before I get upstairs… I broke a few. I got cussed out a bunch of times, too.”

“I’ll dribble the air out of the ball if you want me to,” former WNBA player Shannon Bobbitt laughs.

This discussion of the importance of handles is critical to understanding what made the New York City breed of point guard so special. The freewheeling, creative and highly improvisational style honed on the playgrounds of New York would bring a dazzling element to both the college and professional games in time, one that redefined what we think of as fundamental skills in basketball. But it wasn’t just one player bringing it; it was a culture, happening in different places all over the city.

It can be hard to understand if you’re not familiar with New York City, but it’s not one city; it’s a vast, sprawling network of boroughs, neighborhoods, specific places with specific personalities. From Coney Island to Queens to the Bronx, the players who came up playing basketball in New York City had a full-fledged ecosystem to develop ultra-competitive rivalries almost completely separate from the rest of the country. By the time these players hit the NCAA or NBA, they had a sharp, well-developed style that was unlike anything seen elsewhere in the country.

While some of the players profiled here–Stephon Marbury, Mark Jackson–went on to starring careers in the NBA, the more compelling stories in the film are the players whose legends exceed their eventual professional resumes. Great players still rightly fawn over the moves of God Shammgod, whose namesake move, pioneered on the courts of Harlem, is legendary even if his NBA career was painfully brief.

NYC Point Gods keeps things light and fun, with interview and profile segments broken up by spoken-word hip-hop interludes; it’d be criminal to try to tell this story in a dry documentary format, and that’s definitely not the case here.

Our Call: STREAM IT. For anyone who loves basketball, NYC Point Gods is a wonderfully entertaining look at one of the sport’s most exciting eras.

Scott Hines is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky who publishes the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter.