It’s NBA Expansion Week at The Ringer! With a break in the schedule, we’re examining one of the biggest questions about the future of the league: Should the NBA expand beyond 30 teams? We’ll examine all the possibilities and complications, plus take some strolls down memory lane and examine some expansion teams of the past.
I. When Glass Falls
Take it all in. Big man descends from a bent rim. And all above him, shattered glass. This is Final Four practice, 1995, Seattle’s Kingdome. Seven feet, 275 pounds of lemme-get-that-for-ya. Basketball Bunyan. Like Craig Sager said, “They do grow ’em big in Gans, Oklahoma.”
He’s the colossus with the word discipline splayed across the back of his practice jersey and the word defend smack on the back of his shorts. He wears no. 50 because that was the biggest jersey when he was in sixth grade. Black Nikes and white socks. A pristine, supreme flattop. A burly, celestial cut for the ages. Hair you could sit your drink on. Hair you could build a house on. And when he landed, it was raining.
“We was just doing a drill where one of the coaches tosses it up off the backboard,” he says. “You go get it. You stick it back in the hole. You try to dunk it. Coach Dickey gave me a perfect pass off the backboard so I decided to try to dunk it backwards, and when I did it just happened to shatter. Only thing I heard was a big crash, and here come glass.”
Jags on the back of his neck, at his feet. Someone in the stands screams “Big Country!” in exultation. It’s the second backboard he’s broken in 10 days. Glass hates this man. Growing up, he broke so many rims that his father, Carl, had to put up four new ones in a two-year span. Carl was a supervisor at the Whirlpool plant in Fort Smith. Legendary sportswriter Berry Tramel once described him as “a man who spends the daylight hours outdoors because air conditioning ‘will ruin you.’”
“Yeah, we put several [rims] up,” said Carl. “I put them up. He tears them down. That’s been a practice for a few years.”
He is Bryant “Big Country” Reeves and practice is over.
Back then, Reeves was one of the faces of the sport. Big mammoth on campus, absolutely. He had Gallagher-Iba Arena in regular hysterics, the down-home, homegrown kid who stayed local and became a star. A two-time Big 8 Player of the Year at Oklahoma State and a three-time All-American. Reeves brought the Cowboys to the Final Four for the first time in 44 years. He got there by going through a lot of premium bigs. Reeves sent home Antonio McDyess and Alabama, Tim Duncan and Wake Forest, Marcus Camby and UMass. That’s one guy that went no. 1 in the NBA draft and two other guys that went no. 2. The clip of Reeves breaking the backboard was, amazingly, the first thing ever posted on ESPN.com.
In 1995, Reeves became the first draft pick in Grizzlies history. Country was such a force, the Grizz bet their beginning on him. Hitched their expansion franchise to his enormous wagon. They took him sixth in the draft, one spot ahead of Arizona’s Damon Stoudamire, one spot below a wiry power forward coming straight out of high school by the name of Kevin Garnett. The NBA draft is a place of great beauty and great suffering.
NBA Expansion Week
Reeves played six seasons in the NBA, every one of them with the Grizzlies. He looked amazing in the jersey, like a turquoise grain elevator. He somehow had Shaq’s number, O’Neal naming Reeves as the player he had the hardest time guarding. Country starred in ads for the NBA on TNT/TBS, running his fingers through that sweet, sweet flattop. “Aerodynamics, man. It’s all in the aerodynamics.” The guy doing the voice-over in the commercial sounds like Alec Baldwin narrating The Royal Tenenbaums. It might be Baldwin. The point: The kid from Gans was worth highlighting.
II. Free Pups Pitbulls
“I’d like to, you know, move back to a country setting. Settle back and relax.” —Bryant Reeves
Gans is a bite-sized town in rural Sequoyah County, way out in eastern Oklahoma. Current population: a smidge over 250. It’s an embryo on the map, a mile or so off I-40, a little under a half hour from the Arkansas state line. The town’s so small that during Reeves’s high school games, the population would almost double. Some nights, over 100 college coaches made the trip.
I was 6 years old when Reeves got drafted. In the early ’90s, if you were a basketball-loving kid in rural Oklahoma, Reeves was a god. A small-town kid who had the goods and was going to the league? Felt like a miracle. I remember finding out he grew up only an hour from me and thinking that somehow made me special. I’m 7, going up to my dad’s friends at parties and smugging, “Yeah, my uncle actually played against Country in an all-star game once.” Looking at it now, what it did—it said to me, the world is also yours.
On the way into Gans, there’s a sign that says “Home of ‘Big Country’ Bryant Reeves and ‘Country Bumpkin’ Cal Smith.” Shouts to Smith, who, despite his lesser nickname, has a song called “The Lord Knows I’m Drinking.” A taste of the chorus:
The Lord knows I’m drinking
And running around
And he don’t need your loud mouth
Informing the town
Cal said, “Stay outta my business, gasbag. I talked to God and he thinks you suck.”
A tour would take about five minutes. I was there this winter and the trees and streets are mainly empty. Less town, more townlet. A quiet village. Not a hotbed of commerce. Seems there are four places of business: Gans Git-N-Go, Jerry’s Paint & Body, Grizzly Mini-Storage, and a weed shop called Mary J’s. There’s also what looks like a volunteer fire station, a sign that says FREE PUPS PITBULLS, and another sign that says SIN HAS CONSEQUENCES: REPENT.
Some yards empty, some adorned with various modes of transportation. Riding mowers and trucks, dirt bikes and Winnebagos and boats. I got into a staring contest with a horse. The post office was next to a building that housed both the town hall and senior center. Roadside ads hawking satellite internet. Roadside ads for Jesus. And then there’s the school and the Bryant “Big Country” Reeves Fieldhouse. There’s a bear on the wall outside the entrance. Beside his head: Home of the Grizzlies.
III. Mount Up
Vancouver’s first NBA team was supposed to be called the Mounties. Problem was, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police weren’t having it. Disaster dodged. Enter Grizzlies. All that information can be found on the Grizzlies’ website, along with this logo description, circa 2006: “The intense gaze of the Grizzly represents a serious and competitive team, and the team added subtle references to the colors of Egyptian royalty.” I guess there is a pyramid in Memphis.
Obviously, they backed into a winner with Grizzlies. Stellar mascot, local, cool. The entire aesthetic rips. Every note is right. The jersey design, the colors, the bear, all of it—pure, absolute heat. When the NBA added the Grizzlies and Toronto Raptors as expansion teams in 1995, it upped its sartorial game tenfold. The original purple jersey with the red raptor on the front? The original Grizzlies turquoise? All-time classics. Some of the finest artwork in the history of North America. And Big Country was there to benefit, have a full-circle moment, and be a Grizzly again.
In the league, Reeves didn’t quite have the weaponry to be a consistent menace. His game was old-school with a twist. There was big-on-big brutality. Bashing a shoulder into a chest and taking it to the glass. Beefy drop steps. Funky hooks. He could surprise with some finesse. A deft pass, a jumper from 15 feet. There were games when he looked really good. Put up 41 and 12 on the Celtics once. Scored 30-plus 17 times. But high highs aside, people get pissy when the big man’s making big money but rarely healthy. His body rebelled, there were conditioning issues, intense back problems.
After six years, he was done. He saw some beautiful things in his time, though. Lee Mayberry, late-period Otis Thorpe, Pete Chilcutt. He got to be part of a starting frontcourt with Othella Harrington and Shareef Abdur-Rahim. We used to be a society, etc. He played all six of his seasons in Vancouver. He was still with the team when they moved, but was hurt and never played for Memphis. An NBA expansion legend, a ghost of moves past. When he retired, he made good on a dream and moved back to his country setting, back home to Gans.
IV. An Incomplete List of People Who Have Called Me “Big Country”
This guy working a funnel cake stand at the Wisconsin State Fair in 2014. The dude selling demos near the Times Square Olive Garden in the fall of 2017. My dad’s friend Dice. A skycap outside the Hollywood Burbank Airport in 2018. An impatient guy waiting his turn at Dave & Buster’s, Chicago, 2013. A bartender at Mullen’s in Chicago, 2011. Think it’s a Shake Shack now. We careen toward our end.
V. Nicknames
The best nickname in basketball history is “Chocolate Thunder.” The second-best nickname in basketball history is “The Dream.” The third-best nickname in basketball history is “The White Lobster.” Real name: Bryant Barr. He was a role player on those Steph Curry Davidson teams, is still one of Curry’s closest friends, and made some big shots in their 2008 tournament run. The fourth-best basketball nickname is Big Country and, honestly, that’s probably too low. Reeves got the name freshman year at OSU. His teammate Byron Houston came up with it. Reeves had never flown before and was in awe of how big America was. I imagine the first time Houston said it, he began to glow. And angels sang. And the clouds broke. And the air changed. It smelled sweeter. The nickname was and is immaculate and the hook set immediately. Big Country. Yes, exactly. Thank you, Byron. You’re right and you’ve tapped into something holy.
Because some people are fussy, not everyone was on board with the nickname off the bat. Animus cranked up on the road. Opposing student sections would call him Jethro, inbred, Big Ugly. Big Country, big target. Thing was, he’d just keep motoring, keep dominating. His play was too loud, nothing could stick to him. Big Country stuck so thoroughly that announcers would sometimes shorten that and just call him Country. A nickname is potent when it births another.
Something about a top-shelf nickname like Big Country, announcers get so excited to use it. They really go for it. If Reeves ever wowed them with anything they were liable to start screaming all kinds of country nonsense. Doing everything but wearing chaps. Grown men on the mic yelling things they’ve never said: “yeehaw,” “hooo doggie,” “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” Reeves had a transition dunk in Vancouver and the play-by-play man hollered, “Oh, Big Country. Bringing biscuits and gravy to the table and packing it down.”
Hubie Brown: “Now we know he has slowness of foot. … Great hands and a very soft shooting touch.”
Unknown: “Bryant Reeves. Tall as the majestic fir. Hair flat as the prairies. Like Canada, he’s predominantly rural.”
Rick Pitino: “Picture him riding the subways of New York? Everybody immediately gets off.”
Unknown: “That’s for the hundred head of cattle back home in Gans, Oklahoma.”
YouTube comment: I saw him at Walmart the other day, in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, my hometown. We are all so used to seeing him that we really don’t think much of it when we see him in public. He carries himself just like a regular dude. Usually wears a white T-shirt and jeans.
