A pet peeve that exasperates me – and I bet I’m not the only one
Sometimes I imagine being an NBA player. Not the soaring and dunking. Not the cashing of huge paychecks. Not the hours of monotonous skill drills and bruising practices most never see. Instead, I imagine how wide the delta is between the public perception and what the players think and feel but aren’t able to say.
I wonder how players who are not “stars” but certainly fancy themselves as more than the label “role player” conveys must feel when the commentariat insists on boiling a few hundred of the best basketball players on the planet into two simple, broad, hazy categories. The notion that an NBA roster is simply zero to two – or in rare cases three – stars and the remaining players down to the end of the bench and on into the two-way contracts are all simply role players is preposterous. I am doing my best to stamp the term “role player” out of my vernacular but it is so deeply ingrained I may use it in future writings and not even realize it.
Watching the NBA growing up, we didn’t call anyone a role player. There were All-Stars, Starters, Sixth Man, Rotation Players, Reserves, and End of the Bench. When I look at an NBA roster, that is still what I see. Sadly, so many of us – because of how this flimsy bit of shorthand has warped the lexicon – refer to anyone outside of the top 30 players in the league as a role player.
There is such variance in function, importance, and eventually legacy between a tenth man and a starting power forward who is amazing but will likely never make an All-Star game. I would venture a guess that players are irritated by this and rightly so.
He’s a Starter. That guy? He’s a Sixth Man candidate. Who is that guy who rarely plays? Oh, he is a reserve but crucial to team chemistry and is always ready to go when needed. Doesn’t it sound better, read better? For players, it has to feel better too – but they’ll never tell us otherwise.