1988-89 Atlanta Hawks
134 · 2026-07-27 · medium
There has been discussion that the EuroLeague may readmit the eight-time champion Central Army Sports Club as soon as the 2027-28 season, as road warriors. CSKA was banned on the last day of February 2022, and everybody knows why. This news comes closely after the IOC provisionally lifted its long-running suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee, which hosted the Winter Games only a decade ago. It's hard to believe that it's already been four years since Russia began its generally unsuccessful attempt to occupy eastern Ukraine, four years since the largest mass subscription cancellation in TMM's 22-year history owing to my rock-solid support of said invasion. At least that's what flag-emoji folks were saying and posting, since my long-stated position of Both Sides Suck doesn't settle well into binary bird brain. (And like usually tends to happen, history tends to prove me out.) My preferred outcome is that Russia and Ukraine could go back to being two vaguely similar nations that sit next to each other playing footsie, resolving their differences in passive-aggressive ways. You know, like Greece and Macedonia, or Greece and Turkey... or Greece and Albania. Once the 21st Century's second-dumbest war finally ends in the mid-2040s, when there are no more Ukrainian males or Amazonski warehouses, future generations may wonder what the whole point of this was. Did keeping Alex Ovechkin out of the Olympics have any negative effect on Russia's supposed "war machine"? Why did we make Aryna Sabalenka play under spacer.gif instead of a flag? And how many more continental club championships would CSKA Moscow be earning, seeing as that it's still the best club on the continent in pure ELO terms? Anyway, the Cold War. The day before the EuroLeague news broke, one of my favorite YouTube accounts posted an extremely rare 1988 summer exhibition game between the Atlanta Hawks and the national team of the Soviet Union. I had never seen this in full before, much less with hilarious "auto-dubbed" Google Gemini announcers straight out of a Bubbaprog nightmare. ("Tit staff, better than you see at McDonald's. Yeahhhh... 24-hour CT scan!") Alphabet Inc. lets you turn the volume down – for the time being – so you can pleasenjoy stuff like the Russians misspelling Hawks. You can scroll through old articles about Nique & Co.'s first-ever NBA journey behind the Iron Curtain, where Wilkins himself got stranded without any rubles at the Moscow airport for 12 hours, staring down soldiers with AK-47s... and we ain't talking about Andrei Kirilenko. “Cucumbers and tomatoes,” according to Atlanta radio voice Steve Holman. “That’s what we ate for 15 days... It was the best they had. But the milk had lumps in it, for example.” Didn't matter to Ted Turner, who was still trying to get the Goodwill Games off the ground. There was a great Jack McCallum Sports Illustrated article about the trip that I read when I was a kid; now it's barely clinging to life in the Wayback Machine, and it's mostly about basketball because Jack McCallum is a god. A post-SI article from 2017 is mostly about dirt roads and collapsing buildings and cold showers, and therein lies the clue. The West has a lot of nostalgia for the days when Russia was a dumb punching bag, when Soviet Unions you, when America had a rival superpower that was actually powerless and couldn't even speak English. Oh, you have a flag? You like your flag? Well guess what, now you don't have a flag. Bitch. Our world now is terrifying, ambiguous, and nothing's in black nor white anymore. We want that clear superiority, that ritual humiliation, much much more than we want peace.
