Thunderstruck

Butch McRae. Stacy Patton. Billy Hoyle. These are the names of some of the most memorable basketball players of my childhood, but you won’t find them on NBA.com or in the Basketball Hall of Fame. Why? Because they are characters from fictional basketball movies, a genre that is all but deceased.

Throughout the ’90s, professional athletes wanted to be in Hollywood, and Hollywood followed suit releasing a number of basketball movies starring actual players. Whether they played themselves in odd situations (Space Jam), or fictional characters in reasonable scenarios (Blue Chips), the roles were there. And best of all, the basketball scenes were incredibly believable and exciting because they were performed by world-class athletes.

Blue Chips starred three recruits (Shaquille O’Neal, Penny Hardaway and Matt Nover), where in real life two of which were NBA All-Stars and the other started on a Final Four team. The story showed their recruitment by the fictional Western University Dolphins, and the moral dilemma that Coach Pete Bell (played by Nick Nolte) faced while enlisting “friends of the program.” The director realized that having authentic basketball scenes was more important than having Oscar-worthy acting, and the movie was successful because of it. Plus, when you have Nolte screaming for 65 percent of your script, there isn’t a lot of room for extraneous dialogue. Would Blue Chips have been half as rewatchable if Keanu Reeves was running the point, throwing backdoor alley-oops to the guy from the “Make 7UP Yours” commercials? No. Just watch The Replacements, it’s probably on TBS right now.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to say that Eddie doesn’t rank as one of the all-time greatest sports movies. But they took a fun idea – that a random fan could become the head coach of the New York Knicks – and gave 25-plus NBA players and coaches either major roles or fun cameos in the film. All I’m saying is that any time a movie assembles a team of Gary Payton, John Starks and Anthony Mason, and pairs it with a major acting part for Dwayne Schintzius, I’m sold.

Between White Men Can’t Jump, The Air Up There, Celtic Pride, Sunset Park, Above the Rim and He Got Game, the ’90s brought us a lot of entertaining basketball movies. But somehow over the last decade these movies have become almost extinct. Will Kevin Durant‘s acting debut in Thunderstruck change this trend? That’s still yet to be seen. But you can bet that I’m hoping it does.