“I don’t really care to score,” says Chinle Wildcats guard Dewayne Tom in Netflix’s newest sports-doc series, Basketball or Nothing. He just… wants to help the team win. Huh. This kid doesn’t want to transfer to some rival high school to hoop with that dope kid he met at a summer basketball camp? Or use a burner account to rage-tweet his teammates from the back of the school bus?
You don’t realize how reality shows like Hard Knocks and Last Chance U—which clock in at about three sociopathic tirades per 10 minutes of screen time—have broken our brains until you witness the wholesomeness of Basketball or Nothing. Or just sports in general, really—where a new team is one tweet away, and coaches like Steve Kerr openly admit: “We’re all actors in a soap opera.” So you can consider the series, which runs at a Fleabag-sized six episodes at 30 minutes each, a necessary palate cleanser before the NFL and NBA get going again.
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Basketball or Nothing introduces us to Chinle High School, the largest high school in the Navajo Nation—where its basketball team, the state-championship-chasing Wildcats, are the pride of the town. They play a style of hoops called rezball, which is basically NBA 2K come to life (run and gun, no defense, all fun). And its players are a far cry from the peaked-in-high-school variety—amongst them Cooper Burbank, the quiet, Durant-like sharpshooter, and Josiah Tsosie, the 5’4, humble-as-hell point guard who consistently crosses up bigger dudes.
For the most part, Basketball or Nothing lets the cameras roll on Chinle’s practices and games—spaced out by an interview here and there—which all feels a little slow at first, but eventually, if you let it happen, it lulls you into a Great British Baking Show-like trance. It’s overwhelmingly pleasant, almost unbearably so: The kids are all best buds and have been playing basketball with each other since they were little. Their moms make a pot of spaghetti for the whole team to eat before games. Before they hit the floor, the coach tells them to make sure they have fun. Then you hear the cheerleaders, whose go-to chant is: “We’re proud of you!”
Even though its runtime doesn’t really allow for it, the show, to its benefit, does go deeper at times. In the first three episodes, we find out that the kids lead tough lives at home: Tsosie and his family live in poverty, forward Chance Harvey’s father passed away when he was young, and many of the guys work part-time jobs to help out their parents.
Add to that the long, painful history of the Navajo Nation—which Basketball or Nothing makes very clear connects directly to the struggles of today’s people, including the players we meet. It’s explained well by Chinle’s athletic director, the kind-hearted Shaun Martin, who says, “When we talk about resiliency and how it relates to our kids, our culture has unique aspects of resiliency that have been built into who the Navajo people are and how we live today.” He then details “The Long Walk of the Navajo,” where over 9,000 Navajo people were forced to relocate from their homeland in 1864. This moment comes at just the right time in Episode Four, right before the Wildcats begin their postseason—setting the context, and the stakes for what we see in the rest of Chinle’s journey.
In a sports-doc scene that often shows us more beefing than bro-hugs, Basketball or Nothing is an important reminder that we need heart, history, and fun in our athletics at least once in a while, right? That’s why it’s worth your time to stick around till the end, when the show’s greatest moment comes not through some buzzer-beater—but rather, in watching a young man being offered a post-basketball life he never could’ve dreamed of. Let’s see Stephen A. rant about that on First Take.
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