Can’t Knock the Hustle audiobook

Can't Knock the Hustle: Inside the Season of Protest, Pandemic, and Progress with the Brooklyn Nets' Superstars of Tomorrow follows the 2019-2020 NBA season with a focus on the updated roster of the Brooklyn Nets. The author offers a look into the lives of Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant, and all that went into their decisions to move to the Nets. But even more so, the focus of the book is everything that went on surrounding this season, including the sudden death of Kobe Bryant, the Covid pandemic, and a new civil rights movement after several instances of police brutality. The 2019-2020 NBA season was certainly one that was unlike any other, and Can't Knock the Hustle does a great job covering the whole host of events that occurred during this time. There are many parallels to past events presented throughout the book, and I thought that it really added to the story. More so, the book really covers the struggle for athletes to address difficult social issues, along with the threat of backlash and powers in place attempting to profit off of the same topics. I appreciated the author's attempt to cover seemingly controversial and misunderstood players in Kyrie and KD and tell their sides of their stories a bit more. I'll admit a minor bias on my end reading this book as a long time Golden State Warriors fan, but I found the accounts very interesting and informative. Can't Knock the Hustle is good book covering the year that anything and everything happened and its relation to the NBA and the Brooklyn Nets; I would recommend this book to readers with an interest in the NBA.Thanks to Netgalley and Dey Street Books for this ARC; this is my honest and voluntary review.

It's easy to write off a book about NBA players during the pandemic as nothing more than the soap operatic saga of juvenile multi-millionaires oozing with machismo--but to do so with "Can't Knock the Hustle" would be a tragic and overly simplistic mistake. As Sullivan shows, the NBA sits at the nexus of pop culture, race relations, capitalism, geopolitics and American politics. Through the lens of the 2019-20 season of the Brooklyn Nets, Sullivan paints a rich portrait of the collision of the NBA's superstars like Lebron James, Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving with the likes of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and even at one point Kim-Jong Un. Consider just a smatter of the storylines in the book. Lebron James, chasing after the glory of surpassing Michael Jordan, slowly develops a social conciousness after being humbled by the sheer brutality of police violence in the U.S., yet, also finds himself sitting in a sinful silence during the Hong Kong democracy protests out of fear of disrupting his $90 million shoe deal with Nike. Later, all star players Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant bring their mutual distrust of concentrated authority and institutions with them to the Nets and exert their strength over the owners of the team via their ability to collectively rally, not just their teammates, but also legions of loyal online fans. And as the power dynamics begin shifting between all star players and owners, the NBA Players Association collectively begins a public campaign to assert that economic power should ultimately reside in the hands of the players, awakening a nascent communal sense of class solidarity as workers among many of the athletes. Oh, and not to mention, this is all happening while the league is playing, by some accounts, the greatest basketball the sport has ever seen. It's a thrilling vehicle to consider how the social fabric and culture of the United States has evolved in just the past few years. Sullivan clearly understands that the confluence of social unrest, media saturation and the pandemic clearly created a tectonic shift in societal values, and his ability to weave those into the personal sagas of the bizarre characters that populate the NBA is masterful.

In many ways, great sports books are great because the author got lucky. They decide to cover a specific team during a specific season hoping that the season is as interesting as planned, and that the access is as promised. In this case, it’s clear that Matt Sullivan got as lucky as one can hope to get. Sure, writing about the Nets after getting two of the best free agents in the NBA is an interesting enough premise, but the fact that he ended up with this season — a season upturned by a racial reckoning and a pandemic — is a totally unexpected turn. Sullivan is a very good writer who really does get the reader in close to an unprecedented NBA season. I liked how this book was much less about the specific games (as a lifelong Nets fan, I can tell you that there wasn’t much interesting about that season’s performances) and more about how the NBA merged with popular culture. I really enjoyed the stuff about the Kyrie/Kobe relationship, especially the way Sullivan foreshadowed Kobe’s death in the process; and the access he had to Garrett Temple. This is an important book that serves as an artifact for a really strange NBA season.

This book is an ethnography of the Brooklyn Nets 2019-2020 season. There isn't much basketball in the book. Rather, it's a book about the political and economic empowerment of NBA players, especially the superstars. The Nets faced a series of crises, including a contretemps about democracy in China, civil rights issues, a coaching change, and COVID-19. The book focuses on the two injured stars, Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, but we are also introduced to such interesting players as Spencer Dinwiddie and Garrett Temple.

I know very little amount of basketball. The Nets are an even lesser known quantity in my mind. In fact I grabbed this book because of the title. I'm really glad that I did though it's a fascinating look at the past five years in basketball, in society, and it financial impacts of those two worlds. The writing is really good the research is really well done and the overall tone of the book is intriguing.

KD!

Gives great insight into the 2019-2020 season from the Nets POV.

Surprisingly well-written for one of these types of books - not as "breezy" as I anticipated it. However, the ending was a bit too much "A New Hope", when the entire book was "Empire Strikes Back".

4.5 stars

Very easy read. As a sports fan, I felt that the book flowed very well and is very well written. The book uses the 2020 Nets as a means to explore the state of player empowerment in the current day NBA, and feels like a fresh breeze of a book.