Choosing to Believe

Fan support can propel players toward excellence (Mark Sabhoni via espn.com)

Before Manu Ginobili was a franchise icon, a four-time NBA champion and a surefire Hall of Famer, he was a nervous  youngster wondering if he belonged in the world’s best basketball league. And even on the April evening that the San Antonio Spurs set aside to celebrate his dynamic style and prolific contributions, the Argentine guard couldn’t help but remember those feelings of insecurity.

“I was full of doubts,” Ginobili reflected. “I wasn’t sure that I belonged.”

Then he revealed precisely what it was that helped him overcome the self-doubt and ultimately become one of the best players to ever suit up for dynastic Spurs: the fans.

“Every time I came in or something happened, the fans were chanting my name,” he recalled in a prepared video played at his jersey retirement ceremony. “Having that support was a big thing. It helped me boost my confidence and play more like I belonged.”

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In retrospect, it seems crazy that a player like Manu would have to fight such insecurities. It wasn’t crazy then. Ginobili entered the league a wiry, 6-foot-6 kid from a country that had never produced an NBA player. The night the Spurs secured his draft rights, he wasn’t even watching the televised draft, in part because he was playing a tournament in some remote part of the Amazonian jungle, and in part because he had no expectations of being selected. The Spurs took him with the 57th overall pick, one of two draft-and-stash international guards they grabbed¹ with the hopes that one or the other would improve enough to make the roster one day.

Ginobili did improve in those intervening years, enough to collect MVP hardware from the Italian League (in 2001 and 2002), the EuroLeague Finals (2001) and FIBA’s AmeriCup (2001) before he debuted for the Spurs. But it was still far from a foregone conclusion that he’d make it in the NBA. He wasn’t particularly big or strong and he frequently drew consternation from a coach who wanted him to rein in certain tendencies. He missed some games, and he had an up-and-down role when he did play. He was slotted behind three established veterans on the wing depth chart. All of that added up to what Manu described as a “carry-on full of doubts” that he brought with him to Texas.

Little by little, the fans helped him unpack it.

“All of a sudden I get on the court and every minute I’m (there), you guys go nuts,” he told the assembled crowd at his jersey retirement. “You start chanting my name and all of a sudden I felt like you guys had my back. You guys wanted me here.”

Manu often validated the fans’ excitment with his creativity and unique abilities, but for the most part those Spurs fans were making a down payment based on his potential. At the same time, they gave the wiry youngster something he didn’t yet have a lot of: faith in his ability to be a difference-maker. They could have easily expected less from this former No. 57 pick from a spot on the map not known for producing NBA stars. But they chose to believe in him, and to signal that belief early and often.

Their reward for doing so was significant: nearly 27,000 career points, 218 playoff games, four more championship banners and almost two decades’ worth of amazing moments. Against all odds, the Spurs community helped elevate Manu into a franchise legend.

“This was not supposed to happen to me.”

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The moral here is clear: young players with obvious talent and early struggles can benefit greatly from a bit of fan support and belief. That belief costs nothing to proffer, yet not every youngster gets those positive vibes, even some who were selected much higher higher than Ginobili’s No. 57 draft slot. In particular, I’ve thought a lot about the Manu parable in contrast to the fan energy sometimes directed at another skinny, 6-foot-6 guard who entered the NBA more than a decade later. 

Parallel paths?

Like Ginobili, Dante Exum arrived to the league with abilities and attributes that were intriguing, but having proven very little. Like Ginobili, those obvious gifts have often been on display, reminding viewers why he’s special even amid an otherwise uneven start to his career. He has played behind established veterans and seen his playing time and role fluctuate, and his coach has likewise tried to rein him in, sometimes with consternation. Manu and Dante are very different players, but their early experiences as NBA players are parallel in many ways.

Except one. While Spurs fans responded to Ginobili’s potential and gifts with excitement and vociferous support that he claims changed his basketball destiny, Exum has experienced — to put it nicely — a wider range of fan sentiment.

When Exum’s friend and teammate Rudy Gobert posted a picture to his social media accounts of the two of them taking in a Summer League game together, it should have been enough to excite Jazz fans. Here was the team’s most valuable player and a promising youngster building camaraderie and friendship. Many of the commenters expressed precisely that excitement, but a few fans went a different direction. Almost immediately, commenters chimed in with wisecracks about his past injury history and pedantically stating that he “better show up” next season. Eventually more supportive voices drowned out those negative ones, but not before the chorus of faux-clever, fair-weather fans had fired off their one-liners.

Something similar happens almost any time Exum is mentioned. It happened when The Athletic’s Tony Jones shared intel that the Jazz are still very high on Exum, and it happened again when recent workout photos of Exum surfaced. 

And like… why?

These are ostensibly Jazz fans, right? What does it get them to treat Exum’s injuries as fodder for a cheap punchline and assume he’ll fail? The jokes were neither funny nor original, but even if they were, are the clever points worth taking shots at a guy who could benefit from some positive energy as he tries to help the team they purportedly root for? Or are they hoping they’ll look smarter in the end than all the people who believed in Exum’s ability to get in career on the right track? Of course, for the doubters to be right, they have to actually hope that a player in the employ of their favorite team doesn’t succeed. I’m flummoxed. What’s the upside here for a Jazz fan?

For that matter, consider that one of those conversations took place inside Gobert’s social media comments. Why would anybody who roots for the Jazz want to send the team’s MVP — a free agent in two summers — the message that (some) Jazz fans only support the players when everything is going right?

Or, more central to the point here, why would you want a talented youngster to hear that noise when he could instead hear what Ginobili heard: belief?

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For fans, it costs nothing to believe. 

They don’t charge more for season tickets or cable packages just because you like all of the players on your team. You don’t get demerits or dings on your record or get your fan card suspended for being convinced that a player on your team is going to get better. They don’t revoke your fan card if you choose not to believe, either, but that just seems like a weird, less rewarding way to support a team.

You can invest the same amount of energy in subscribing to any of a wide range of outcomes, so why do some make the active choice to be contrarian? Maybe it’s an attempt to look smart and incisive, while others are just out to score the cheap laugh.  Either way, there’s nothing in the fan code that prohibits someone from being that negative voice; it’s just an odd choice to make.

There are, of course, different kinds of doubt. In recent years, there have been players with whom the community didn’t connect at quite the same level because they didn’t really fit the culture and identity of the team. But those guys are gone now. The Jazz climbed the ladder of relevance in part by replacing such players with guys who wanted to defend, work hard, and play as a team, even when that meant jettisoning someone who might be more talented in raw, on-paper terms. Then, in this latest phase of the rebuild, they built on that foundation by upgrading talent without making a cultural tradeoff. For example, George Hill to Ricky Rubio was roughly a talent-neutral² transition made largely because of what’s in Rubio’s heart and bones, and then Rubio to Mike Conley was about taking the talent to the next level without sacrificing what Rubio brought emotionally and intellectually. The same thing happened when Utah replaced Joe Johnson with Jae Crowder, and later upgraded to Bojan Bogdanovic.

The end result of that multi-phased construction project is that the Jazz have a team full of talented guys who are also easy to root for and support. There’s nobody left who complains about practices, refuses to defend, or openly kvetches about feeling “isolated.” What’s left is a locker room full of guys whom Jazz fans should eagerly want to see succeed, and who are poised to do just that. There’s no statute requiring followers of the Jazz to emotionally invest in any of those players or the composite, but neither is there a compelling reason not to.

In Exum’s case, there are still plenty of reasons to be excited. While his early career has had its ups and downs, he is still just 24 and he has established a pretty safe “floor” by ensconcing himself on the foundation of a couple of elite skill sets. Players who are elite in one area tend to have long NBA careers, even if they’re mediocre at everything else³. Players who have two elite skill sets have a chance to be really, really special. Even if Exum remains exactly who he is at age 24, he has already shown a capacity to be elite in two really important areas of the game: the ability to break down defenses with his speed⁴, and on-ball defense. 

Again, that should serve as an encouraging indicator for Jazz fans to consider. Yet when I verbalized that thought earlier this offseason, the dialogue that resulted from a columnist saying nice things about a player on their favorite team was again peppered with the same doubts and unfunny jokes.

It’s easy to comprehend fan frustrations with Exum’s injury history. Nobody is more frustrated than Exum himself; he’d rather be playing! And nobody tweeting about this stuff from their comfortable sofa has enough knowledge about Exum’s specific injuries to pretend to know if any of them represent some sort of future inevitability. So far, his injuries have been separate traumas. A guy jumped on top of him. His ankle bent 90 degrees the wrong direction. Tendons in two different knees. While those injuries have undeniably hurt his progress as a pro, there is no indication available to any of us that he’s somehow constitutionally flawed or destined to perpetual injury. And insinuating otherwise is cavalier, unfeeling and just factually wrong.

Look, there are a lot of ways to be a fan. There is no law that says you have to believe in the players who wear your favorite team’s colors. You can continue to predict their failure and make jokes at their expense, even if doing so implies less success for your team. 

But there’s literally nothing to lose by going the other route. 

And especially after hearing a Hall of Famer say that fan support literally changed the course of his career and elevated him to stardom, isn’t it worth finding out what happens if you choose to believe?

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The night Ginobili’s jersey went into the rafters, he told fans that it was toward the end of his third season that he finally started to feel like he belonged in the NBA. Which, for starters, is bona fide crazy since by the time his third season was over, Manu had already made an All-Star team and won an NBA championship. But still, it took nearly three seasons before he felt secure about his place in the world’s best basketball league.

That stuck with me, in part because Exum has played 204 regular season NBA games to date — the equivalent of about two and a half seasons. He is also three full years younger than Manu was at that point in his career, and he’s coming off his best stretch as a pro, a six-week stint from December into January that prompted his coach to declare that he had turned a corner.

“Dante has established himself,” Quin Snyder told an Australian basketball site in January. “And there’s levels of establishment, but what he’s done over the last month, his game’s taken a step, and he’s taken a step.”

Exum likely won’t match Ginobili’s basketball achievements. Only the tiniest fraction of NBA players ever do. But it’s a good reminder that even some of the most exciting and unique NBA youngsters need time to realize the best versions of themselves. Reasonable people can disagree about how good the best version of Exum can still be; what seems fairly obvious, though, is that he’s certainly not at it yet.

Believing that he will get there is another matter, as is the choice of what belief a fan base expresses to a player. Choosing to believe in a dynamic, unique, fun player like Ginobili or Exum feels to me like it’s what being a fan is all about.

And thanks to Manu’s reminiscing, we know what can happen when a player like that is supplied with reasons to believe in himself.