Jonathan Abrams Writes About NBA Players In Three Dimensions

From 2007 to 2009, Oklahoma City Thunder general manager Sam Presti selected future NBA MVPs Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden in three consecutive drafts, securing the fledgling team an otherworldly core. The results were brilliant and tumultuous. The Thunder started out 3-29 in 2008, but within a couple of years rounded into a fearsome squad that gave the 2010 Lakers a scare, and eventually reached the 2012 NBA Finals, where they went toe to toe with LeBron James’s Miami Heat and lost. Then Presti traded Harden, setting in motion a future that would scatter the trio around the league. As they broke apart, they’d help mold the league into its modern shape.

Jonathan Abrams, a New York Times culture reporter who began his career covering the NBA and has written about it extensively at the Los Angeles Times, Grantland, and Bleacher Report’s magazine, is out with a new book, When We Were Young and Fearless, about these players and their importance in modern NBA history. At Grantland, Abrams wrote longform profiles and oral histories, in which you could relive the Malice at the Palace, become familiar with the particulars of how an almost-dynasty fell apart, or learn that the Orlando Magic came disturbingly close to being called the “Juice.”

It’s that style of dedicated reporting and patient storytelling that enlivens all three of the book’s protagonists, whom Abrams refers to only by their first names. When We Were Young and Fearless leaves the reader with a fascinating image of what the 2010s Thunder could have been, but its greatest feat is perhaps the sympathy and complexity with which it imbues three of the greatest players of the 21st century.