Andrew Unterberger

This week in the NBA, two perennial All-Star players returned for the first time to the home arenas of the franchises that originally drafted them. On Monday, Dwight Howard paid his first visit as an opposing player to the Amway Center, where he spent the first eight seasons of his career playing for the Orlando Magic. Two days later, Carmelo Anthony suited up for the first time in the away locker room at the Pepsi Center, where he led the Denver Nuggets to the playoffs for seven years before leaving midway through his eighth. Needless to say, upon their respective returns to the buildings they once considered their home offices, neither player was treated warmly

Fan booing, like many aspects of fan-player relations, has gone far too unmediated for far too long. Fans boo everything. They boo opposing players they don’t like. They boo referees who make the wrong calls, or take too long to make the right calls, or who make the right calls in a timely fashion, but ones detrimental to their home team. Fans will even boo their own team for just about any reason — team not playing well enough, team not playing hard enough, team not playing entertainingly enough, team not making a concerted enough effort to win fans free tacos. It is, at times, extremely ridiculous.

I don’t mean to suggest that booing should be outlawed — freedom of individual and collective self-expression is one of the hallmarks of the sports spectator experience, and just about all of these types of boos have their place. (Well, maybe not the taco bit, but I already covered that elsewhere.) But we need rules about these things, spoken guidelines that let fans know when booing is and is not acceptable. Otherwise players and teams end up getting booed at inappropriate, inopportune times, souring player-fan relations and creating bad blood where there need not be.

Fan booing in its totality is far too wide a topic to be handled in one article, so I’d like to focus on the more topical aspect, that of the once-beloved home team hero coming back in some sort of disgrace. Was it OK for Magic and Nuggets fans to boo Dwight Howard and Carmelo Anthony? Or should the good times those players once shared with their respective franchises have outweighed the discord since created by their exits? Here’s how I see the scenarios breaking down, first the qualifying ones, then the disqualifying ones:

BOOING IS OK IF PLAYER MEETS ONE OF THE FOLLOWING QUALIFYING CONDITIONS (AND NONE OF THE DISQUALIFYING):

1. Player caused distraction by demanding a trade, for not entirely basketball-related reasons.
The most typical scenario for fan booing, and the one that Howard and Anthony both more or less found themselves in. Obviously, if a player wants out in order to play with superstar friends or gain greater exposure playing in a big market, as appeared to be a priority for both of those guys, that’s just about the biggest snub one can face as a home fan. Especially if it comes after an endless will-they-or-won’t-they saga, as happened with both the Melodrama and the Dwightmare. It’s textbook booing, and it’s hard to argue with.

2. Player forced trade with either purposefully or ignorantly destructive behavior.
If a player acts so poorly — either dogging it in games, skipping practices and refusing to play through minor and/or suspicious injury, or by doing something really stupid like calling a teammate a gay slur or picking a fight with an equipment manager — that the team has no other recourse but to get rid of the guy, that’s obviously fair game for booing upon the player’s return. (Kings fans are about two incidents away from broaching this one with DeMarcus Cousins, and you can’t imagine they’ll have much self-imposed decency when he makes his eventual comeback.)

3. Player left franchise in free agency, going to a lesser team for financial or market-based reasons.
This is a little bit of a greyer area, since of course if the player is one worth booing and he found a better offer elsewhere, chances are pretty good the home team low-balled the guy a little. This is more applicable for situations where a player says (with words or actions) something like “I’m sick of playing in Oklahoma City, and Dallas made me about as good an offer, so I’ll go there instead.” It’s not as destructive as demanding an in-season trade, but it can be just as hurtful.

4. Player left franchise in either trade or free agency, making pointedly disparaging remarks about city or fan base on way out.
This requires a greater offense than Chris Bosh complaining about Toronto cable, but if a player was to complain about how boring the city he was leaving was, or to call their fan base hicks or something, that’d be a great enough affront to make booing permissible. Complaining about the franchise itself is OK, as long as you don’t cross certain lines, most of which Charles Barkley probably crossed at some point or another after leaving Philadelphia and Phoenix.

5. Player left franchise in free agency, in a particularly public and humiliating manner.
May as well call this the LeBron James rule. Needs no explanation.

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It probably wasn’t the express intent of Glen Grunwald when building his New York Knicks roster this year, but there came a point in Monday’s game against the Warriors where Carmelo Anthony, J.R. Smith and Kenyon Martin were in the lineup at the same time, and then you think to yourself “Wait a minute, don’t they also have Marcus Camby on the bench somewhere?” Suddenly, it all comes flooding back to you — the sea of tattoos, masked in light blue and yellow, the kamikaze offense and one-on-five defense, the sight of George Karl looking contemplative and kind of sad on the sideline — that’s right, Grunwald had reunited the 2008 Denver Nuggets. All the Knicks needed was to coax Anthony Carter or Allen Iverson out of retirement, and they could have played a full five-man unit.

It’s fun to see these kind of unplanned five-year reunions in the NBA. Not only does it remind you of the old teams now forgotten, but you also just imagine the guys embracing like old college buddies on their new squad, falling back into old habits in the locker room, sharing inside jokes that leave outsiders confused and angry, forming their own little clique on team buses and flights. It’s like when they used to bring old “Cheers” alums onto “Frasier” sporadically, or when the cast of “Veronica Mars” assemble at an L.A. Kings game for no discernible reason. Who knows if it actually translates to on-court production — the first returns from the Knicks this year wouldn’t lend much credence to that theory — but for the fans, it’s just good times.

So if the Knicks have the ’08 Nuggets on lock, what other memorable squads of recent years can we reassemble? I tried it with five teams from the last decade, reuniting them on specific contemporary teams (assuming next offseason), in ways that I could see being at least mildly plausible. For this exercise, you need at least four players from the old squad, and at least one had to already be on the new squad. Some were natural, some took a little stretching, but all would be f—ing awesome if they actually came to fruition. Check out my tearful reunions below, and let me know if you can think of any other good ones. (I tried but failed to find good homes for the ’06 Suns and the ’10 Wizards, and would be grateful for good ideas for those.)

1. 2004 Detroit Pistons — 2014 Memphis Grizzlies

Pieces in Place: Tayshaun Prince

Necessary Moves: Sign Chauncey Billups and Rip Hamilton in free agency, coax Ben Wallace out of retirement.

Explanation: This one seems easy enough. The Grizzlies are already ’04 Pistons-esque in their primarily defensive mindset, and relatively starless, ball-movement-based offense. They need some stability and veteran experience in the backcourt second unit, so Billups takes care of that. They need a scoring guard and shooter to be an additional half-court weapon, so that’s Rip, assuming the Bulls decline his option next year (which they almost certainly will). And without a true backup center on the roster (besides Dexter Pittman), they could probably use Ben Wallace (who never officially even retired, as far as I can tell) to spell Marc Gasol in the middle for stretches.

Of the four guys, Prince would probably still be the most impactful — he’s the only one who was drafted in the 21st century — but they could all play a part for the Grizz and remind fans of the impossibly tight-knit squad that made six straight conference finals in the ’00s. And if Sheed’s feet are feeling up to snuff and he wants to come along for the ride too, the more the merrier.

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