2025-26 West Virginia Women
092 · 2026-03-15 · medium
Word came down on Friday that the Big XII Conference, the first college league to conduct championships on an ASB GlassFloor, went back to a regular court for the men's semifinals and title game. The other one was too slippery. This has inspired Discourse, mostly durr hurr late capitalism and ahh lahhk woooooood. You can always tell who doesn't read TMM, but it's especially obvious now with anyone who thinks video courts are some kind of new thing. In September 2016, a "magic arena" was installed at Yoyogi Gymnasium for the inaugural weekend of Japan's then-new professional B.League: the Ryukyu Golden Kings at Alvark Tokyo. The first IRL basketball video game in history was played on a grid of LED screens, and I was there so I can tell you that it was one of the worst basketball games ever played. It was the opposite of the future GlassFloor, ankle-lockingly sticky and tacky, and had so many dead spots in the wide seams that that it was never used again.... for basketball. The official after-movie gives the plot away: the video court was specifically designed for the halftime show, the game was something of a secondary concern, and the top priority was promoting "Take-A-Shot! (B.League Anthem)" by ShuuKaren ft. PKCZ – which was and still is an absolute fucking banger. Alvark has always been owned by the Toyota Motor Company, which had just become a TOP Olympic Sponsor, Tokyo 2020 was four years away, and they had plans for this magic arena thing. Meanwhile, a Bavarian company called ASB had been making squash courts since 1965, and was experimenting with ways to make them out of glass instead – it's cheaper than wood, and Germans are weirdos. In the 2010s, after the iPhone first came out, it was like... why not go all the way? The first ten years of prototypes, all the way up to full FIBA approval in 2022, used ceramic coating and micro-divots to give the ball that wood-like bounce. But the graphics also appeared dull and washed out, and that's the GlassFloor paradox: the more grip it has on your feet, the worse it looks on television. So ASB turned up the brightness and contrast, which makes the ball literally glow like Tron (1982). If you have to stare at one of these things for ten hours, like I did at the 2024 FIBA Champions League playoffs, it will give you a headache. And it will hurt your draft stock. It will very likely turn out that the West Virginia women's team will go down in history as the only American team to ever lift a trophy on a court like this, because all 15 Big XII women's games were played last weekend with precious few complaints. The Mountaineers came out of a No. 2 seed and allowed a combined 154 points to Arizona State, Colorado and TCU, proof that defense wins championships... on an ASB GlassFloor. So what are these things even good for, other than being able to press a button and have Allen Fieldhouse in College Hoops 2K27? I highly recommend [polygon wave] (2021), which is a good way to make your eyes pop out of your skull like a cartoon. It's the only remaining and surviving document of what the Tokyo 2020 Opening Ceremony was originally intended to be, before the pandemic hit, starring the J-Pop girl group Perfume (who we play on The Oceanic sometimes), performed across the same Toyota video floor from the B.League's opening weekend in 2016. As for whether this technology will ever be used again in the United States, outside of an NBA All-Star Game, who you got for the halftime show?
