Hoops On Screen

Poetry in Motion

Before I fell in love with cinema, basketball was my main obsession. While I have a general interest in most sports, none of them have been as central to my life as the game of basketball.

I honestly never looked at my love for basketball and cinema as all that different; not just because I watched both on a screen, but because at their core, both basketball and cinema are storytelling. The rivalries, upsets, and unlikely heroes mirror those of cinema’s greatest tales. So, what about when the two worlds collide?

Unlike boxing and baseball, basketball has been underrepresented in cinema. A young sport, not truly gaining mainstream status until the late 1970s, basketball is still establishing itself on the big screen. Despite this, there have been a wide variety of films, shows, and documentaries that explore the sport from different perspectives, even the perspectives that would be deemed unsavory. I’ve gathered fellow writers and basketball fans Frank and Kyle Ryan to highlight our favorite game and its representation in film.

Welcome to Hoops On Screen!

Lenny Cooke - Dir: The Safdie Brothers

When you think of athletes, a certain lifestyle probably springs to mind. Huge houses, expensive cars, and ridiculous contracts seem to come with the gig. Behind all of that luxury is a whole lot of luck and sacrifice. What happens when you’re so close to the mountain top that the way down may kill you if you don’t make it? Lenny Cooke knows the answer to that question.

As we see in this probing doc by the Safdie brothers, Cooke was a top prospect coming out of high school. Being compared to top stars and watched closely by scouts was everything that Cooke ever wanted—it also ruined his entire life.

Lenny Cooke is a film of two halves: the first following Cooke as a promising prospect, while the second catches up with him in modern day. What we see in the latter half of the film is nothing short of heartbreaking. Cooke is a broken-down version of the young, excited kid from the first half. In the film’s most harrowing moment, Cooke breaks down into tears while he drunkenly sings a love song to the camera.

Lenny Cooke’s story serves as a stark reminder of the athletes who are discarded every year. For every LeBron James or Kobe Bryant, there are dozens of Lenny Cookes, kids with all the talent in the world yet no resources to make it mean anything.

• - Matthew P (TheHumanGaze)

Sneakerheads (Series) - Creator: Jay Longino

What’s the price of connection?

Sneakers connect fans to basketball in a way few objects can. Think about the moments. Every iconic basketball image carries the Big Three: the player, the shot, and the shoes.

Nike’s iconic ad campaigns turned shoes into mythic objects and molded a generation to believe that owning a pair of Jordans could make you play like Michael Jordan.
The slogan: “It’s gotta be the shoes.”
The unspoken promise: “Wear the shoe, become the hero.”

So, what happens when one man risks his marriage for a pair of Jordans?

Sneakerheads, a comedy series on Netflix, drops viewers into the sneaker world and the chaotic, high-stakes resale economy that basketball helped create. After losing thousands of dollars in a shoe deal gone wrong, Devin, a recovering sneaker addict, teams up with a misfit crew of collectors to earn it back one flip at a time.

They encounter a community of casual fans, hustlers, athletes, celebrities, and collectors, all chasing the sweet aroma of premium leather. But beneath the comedy is a sharper story about identity, nostalgia, and aging.

What makes Sneakerheads work is that it understands that for many basketball fans, sneakers aren’t just merchandise. They’re memory, aspiration, status, and self-expression.

Ironically, in 2026, Nike is fighting to sell more shoes and reconnect with the culture it helped shape. But the series reminds us that for fans, sneaker value isn’t confined to the leather, the logo, or the resale price.

It lives in the dream that comes with the box.

• - Frank

Love & Basketball - Dir: Gina Prince-Blythewood

Even through financial hardships and widespread ignorance surrounding women’s sports, the WNBA has made some truly impressive strides in the past decade. Amazing talent like A’ja Wilson, Napheesa Collier, and Caitlyn Clark, among many others, have taken what was unfortunately seen as an afterthought (even to “die hard” basketball fans) to a league that gets more popular every season.

It’s great that today’s WNBA athletes can get the attention and praise they deserve; it must be bittersweet for the women who were never able to experience it. Gina Prince-Blythewood’s cult classic Love and Basketball beautifully captures the disappointment and frustration of being an elite women’s basketball player in an era that didn’t value them.

Monica (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy (Omar Epps) formed a connection through their mutual love of basketball. As they get older, they both discuss dreams of playing the sport professionally. This film expertly weaves their pursuit of athletic greatness with the magnetic pull they have over each other. Sports and romance may seem like an odd couple, but they certainly looked great together here.

• - Matthew P (TheHumanGaze)

He Got Game - Dir: Spike Lee

Spike Lee is just as much an icon in basketball as he is in cinema. The legendary director is a staple at Knicks games and can be seen courtside at most of their home games. He also directed the iconic Air Jordan commercials in which he portrayed the character of Mars Blackman (originally featured in Lee’s student debut, She’s Gotta Have It). It’s no surprise that a director so synonymous with basketball would go on to create what is probably the definitive film about the sport.

He Got Game shows reverence for basketball while not being afraid to portray its more exploitative elements. Imprisoned deadbeat dad Jake Shuttlesworth (Denzel Washington) is offered freedom if he can convince his estranged son Jesus (Ray Allen) to commit to “Big State”.

Lee shows us how the powers that be treat these young athletes less like people and more like assets. Jesus Shuttlesworth is stripped of his autonomy and is treated like an avatar for the rich men in suits that secretly pull the strings. Culminating in a climactic father vs son 1-on-1, He Got Game perfectly balances family drama with institutional critique all while celebrating the great game that sits at the center of it all.

• Matthew P (TheHumanGaze)

Teen Wolf - Dir: Rod Daniel

Wolfman’s Got Balls?

In 1985, Canadian actor and international treasure, Michael J. Fox, exploded into the pop cultural stratosphere, with two hit movies spawning multiple sequels, television series, and an eventual Broadway musical, while simultaneously co-leading one of the biggest hits on broadcast television. Family Ties, gave America, Fox’s stand out mega wattage charm and almost infinite marketability, and Back To The Future, further launched him into the biggest star on the planet. But as this series’ theme is basketball, and not time travel or being a republican with liberal parents, the smaller yet no less subtle hit, Teen Wolf, is the home court in which we will play.

Teen Wolf is a beloved movie in my house. Basketball is my favorite sport, the werewolf is my favorite monster, and I watched Teen Wolf countless times as a kid in the late 80’s and 90’s. I even loved Teen Wolf 2 and the terrible cartoon series that lasted only one season. Even today, Michael J Fox is my daughter’s favorite actor besides Bruce Campbell and Kurt Russell (scientific proof she is biologically my child), and she also shares my loving DNA for a movie simply about a kind of nerdy, struggling athlete inheriting lycanthropy, transforming into a furry, pointy eared Howlem Globetrotter, while also van surfing, buying kegs of beer, and scoring girls and countless fans with ease.

Teen Wolf is objectively not a great movie. I can’t credibly argue that it’s even good. In fact, the premise is so ludacris, so howl the fuck did this get made, that in no other decade outside of the deliciously synth heavy, coked fuel insanity of the 1980’s, could a coming of age werewolf, high school sports comedy (that wants to so badly be a Fast Times At Ridgemont High, raunch-fest, but transforms back into PG-13 territory before letting the story ever get truly hairy) be made. Teen Wolf as a concept, morphed from some inebriated idea, blurted out in the bathroom of some Hollywood mansion, into some fools writing an actual to god script, and then other fools in charge saying “fuck it, take our money and make it”, as they snorted a line with $3,000 hookers on Mulholland Drive. Teen Wolf is basically, I Was A Teenage Werewolf and Full Moon High, but the star werewolf dunks a ball while wearing a headband and 5” shorts.

As a werewolf movie, it is not scary, and lacks any teeth or tension. As a teen comedy, many of the jokes fall flat as Tom Brady’s game ball, and scores way more points in unintentional comedy. As indicative of the decade, the actors playing high school students, look to be at least 25 years old (receding hairlines and burgeoning crow’s feet abound), and the scenes of actual basketball play is maybe the worst I’ve seen put to film. Not an irl athlete in the troop.

Fox as Scott, is not the most credible point guard, and the majority of the starting varsity team physically appear less athletic than the extras seated second string on the bench. Not to mention, everyone in the town seems to not be terrified at all and is immediately accepting of, an actual, previously believed to be, mythical werewolf in their midst. No, almost everyone is down to fully celebrate teen wolf’s arrival and turnaround of a losing season against other rival teams that confusingly seem like they all go to the same school. Also shockingly, there is not one media source, including print or television, outside of the small, Nebraskan town, that is remotely interested, or ever shows up to report on, the existence of lycanthropy, let alone a werewolf’s three-point shot. Odd, yet all this is wildly awesome.

Teen Wolf does pull off a sincere, pubescent, coming of age narrative about struggling with the horrors of a changing mind and body, in maybe the most vunerable four years of our lives, that the gender swapped, Ginger Snaps, perfected in truly horrific fashion, less than twenty years later. As a traditional underdog sports movie, it is middling, but on rewatch, what I find most interesting, is its accidental take on what would become an ongoing international controversy of performance enhancing drugs being taken by athletes, especially within modern professional and Olympic sports.

A pro baseball player may take steroids to improve their batting average, a cyclist to ride longer and faster. Scott does not take PED’s, and his lycanthropic enhancements are strictly genetic and not injected or ingested, but he quickly learns to conveniently flip the switch from teenage boy to wolf at will to gain the advantage over his peers. His athletic skills and popularity increase with each winning game, but at a dark price his fellow werewolf dad warns him of, to help Scott avoid the same mistakes. Throughout the movie, Scott loses sight of what matters and relies on “the wolf”, creating an environment of vanity and inequality, leading to losing friends, the respect of his teammates, and the right girl for him; he’s been blinded to the whole movie, and ultimately, himself.

Scott, at a crossroads, learns that by shedding his unnatural advantage, winning at basketball and life in werewolf form against humans, is not really winning. It’s not conquering fears or goals or dreams as yourself. To truly prove what we can really accomplish by pushing our mental and physical abilities without supernatural or pharmaceutical assistance. The game must be fair to count. That makes an even playing field, and that’s how we measure greatness on and off the court. Real basketball. Scott’s humanity is what truly earns a “W”. For win not werewolf, guys, c’mon stay with me!

Outside of the obvious, bucket-filled with nostalgia I carry for it, Teen Wolf is a confidently sincere cheese-fest with a fantastic soundtrack, where everyone involved knows the assignment, which is to just let Fox be Fox, and make us, the audience, love The Wolf along with his whole fictional town. The basketball doesn’t really matter technically, other than the novelty of watching a werewolf ball, but like any good sports movie worth playing with, the game of basketball is strangely the perfect vessel to dribble the metaphorical catalyst of lycanthropy and growing up. Teen Wolf tries for nothing and still succeeds in putting forth no effort other than being just fun and competent enough to push it over the line from “so bad it’s good territory” into the 80’s weird, sports cult classic it has become. A true underwolf story.

• - Kyle Ryan

Uncut Gems - The Safdie Brothers

Sports gambling is a cancer, not just in the context of sports, but to the world as a whole. Parasitic “prediction market” companies like Kalshi and Polymarket have taken the same tendencies into the wider world. Now you can make money by predicting the next war crime! Set in 2012, Uncut Gems explores the world of sports gambling before all of this madness started but you could already see the seeds that were planted.

The gambling-as-cancer metaphor is more literal than we may think in Uncut Gems— the film’s creative title sequence taking place in our protagonist's colon. Howard (Adam Sandler) isn’t just addicted to gambling; it’s the only real motivator in his life. Everything else—his business, wife, and children— takes a backseat to the possibility of a quick fortune.

The most tragic thing about this story is how many breaks Howard is granted just to fumble them all into an even worse situation. He’s not a guy with bad luck who can’t learn a lesson like you might expect from a story like this; he’s a narcissist who abuses his own luck until it becomes a punishment from the universe. A psychedelic soundtrack and an amazing performance from Kevin Garnett as himself give this film an almost mythical feel, as if the supernatural exists in this world without being explicitly stated.

• - Matthew P (TheHumanGaze)

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Thank you to Frank and Kyle Ryan for your wonderful contributions to this piece!

Want more of the On Screen series? Check out the first two installments below!