Why we love this game

A splendid collection of basketball writing, just in time for season finals.

- Erik Spanberg

This month brings the climax of the college basketball season – March Madness, remember? – followed in April by the start of the two-month marathon that is the National Basketball Association playoffs. And if that’s still not enough roundball, Basketball: Great Writing About America’s Game, a new Library of America collection of the best basketball writing, offers an embarrassment of riches.

Longtime Sports Illustrated writer and contributor Alexander Wolff curated the collection, and he’s done it so well that this reader has but one quibble: Why leave out an excerpt from John Feinstein’s “A Season on the Brink,” the 1986 bestseller chronicling a year inside the Indiana Hoosiers program with coach Bobby Knight?

That complaint aside, Wolff has put together a fast-break compilation that takes the reader from the beginning – in a sliver of memoir from James Naismith on how he invented the game in 1891 – to the present-day reign of Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors.

Curry, writes Rowan Ricardo Phillips, has taken pure shooting into the realm of artistry.