From all-stars and merch to the necessary personalities of a starting five lineup, we're talking shop on basketball and its followers with two dedicated fans: writer Ben Detrick and artist Andrew Kuo. The pair have made a name for themselves by moonlighting as sports commentators on their podcast Cookies Hoops, which has its multiverse of merch, texts, and events. Recently, the duo connected with Cultural Counsel Account Executive and amateur baller Rachel Roberts to discuss the joy of basketball.

Rachel Roberts: I've become a sports fanatic, a.k.a. a basketball fan, as of about three months ago. But I also played a bit of the sport in middle school. So I’m a connoisseur. I’m even wearing my Cookies merch, so thank you, guys, for my new favorite hat. On that note, I want to hear more about what inspired you to create The Joy of Basketball and launch this broader brand, Cookies Hoops.

Ben Detrick: Chronologically, Andrew and I’s relationship began in the bowels of Max Fish arguing about basketball. We didn’t really know each other on a personal level other than by face, but we would argue about the value of coaching. If it mattered, we’d talk about the Knicks or whoever. So that was how we first met each other.

The origin of Cookies Hoops was Know Wave, a pirate radio station in Chinatown, where I had a show with my buddy. First, it was called The Shammgod Hour, then The ShammdogHour, and then Andrew joined it full-time. It was on Vice for a little while. This shifting synthesis ended up with Andrew and me under the banner of Cookies Hoops. Everything else has grown out of that, whether it was the clothing line deciding to do The Joy of Basketball, going to All-Star weekend, signing books, and any other subsequent projects. It all emerged from this morphing of several art projects and long-term basketball-pilled friendships.

Andrew Kuo: Having a book just made sense because Ben is a writer for the New York Times style section, The Ringer, Grantland, ESPN, Vice, and I added a visual component, and it just was too tempting not to do. The project of Cookies is interesting to me because it is not only about friendship, but it’s also a way to talk about big ideas with small things, such as basketball, basketball players, statistics, new ways of looking at pretty rudimentary visuals or things that could be either talked about in simple terms or broader terms.

BD: Some people want to think about basketball or sports in a smarter way, and that has a certain appeal. You see guys like JJ Redick and LeBron doing a podcast that speaks to more of the nuts and bolts strategy of the game. There have been people like FreeDarko who wrote about basketball more insightfully or philosophically. When Andrew and I were trying to pin down what we wanted to say, The Joy of Basketball as a title made sense because at the root of what Andrew and I love about the sport is that it is a conduit for happiness—a lot of the punditry veers towards negativity. You don’t need to be mawkish, saccharine, Panglossian, or any of these ways of looking at the sport uncritically, but at the root of it is that this sport is awesome, and these players are amazing. Just the feeling you get from watching someone like Kyrie [Irving] or Steph [Curry] or LeBron [James] or Luka [Dončić] ply their trade on the highest level is what gives Andrew and me joy.

AK: Therapy. It’s positive. It’s all these new age ideas, whatever you want to pull from the ether into this thing that has a villain, a hero, a loser, a winner; it is an open canvas.

BD: One thing that Andrew has made me do more of is accept the phrase Are you sure? That's very Kuo. I’ll say something, and he’s like, “Are you sure?” And I’m like, “Hold on, maybe [I’m not].” That was the approach we took to the retrospective elements of the book and talking about players from the past who have these calcified reputations and narratives that basketball has just accepted as a written-in-stone truth. It’s this little bleating Kuo voice repeating, “Are you sure?” And our book did that. We went back and looked at the past and said, “Did we get that right, or was it wrong, and we have another idea?”

AK: Coming from a fine art background, and as a fan of fine art in general, the next painting or sculpture is always in reaction to the previous one. Every time someone adds to that story, it changes the history of everything before it. That's how I feel about every game, every season, every career: What happens tonight? Because it then colorizes yesterday differently.

BD: The constant re-evaluation of basketball is what I love about it. Some ideas were on the bleeding edge and became modern and then became retrograde, and you’ll see that process. That applies to life in general; something that you believe is entirely ahead of the curve within no time is the most boring concept ever.

AK: Skinny jeans.

BD: Boom.

RR: In the book, you guys discuss how fans interpret the game, and we're also getting there in this conversation in talking about the romanticism of basketball, but also as it relates to psychology. As you said earlier, basketball fandom can be therapy, but it can also be a day-ruiner. Let’s talk about how we obsess over these moments relating to pop culture. And it's not isolated to just basketball; it can go across any sport or any fandom or art, whatever it is.

AK: One’s interest in something has an arc, right? We have certain built-in ideas and projections when we’re young, middle-aged, and finally done with something. Putting your desires and needs into something that doesn't need you is a realization you come to in your middle age of fandom. In the beginning, you believe in superstitions. I wear the same shirt and the same hat, and I eat the same thing. And then, in the middle, you realize you're not involved, and in the end, you just love it more than ever, hopefully. Our book talks about how you have to come out on the other side of your lifetime of being a fan of something. The goal is not to win a championship but to have a good time.

BD: The beauty of in-person fandom is that you can glaze over the idea that it’s parasocial because when you’re at Madison Square Garden, and the crowd is roaring, you’re the sixth man, you’re part of this, you’re spurring these guys onward.

RR: We feel like we’re a part of the game, and the outcome relies on our participation. There’s some value or weight to being a fan, showing up, and giving support. Speaking of that, I wanted to talk to you both about fan merchandise and this collecting universe that revolves around sports—the impulse to consume in a more materialistic way for our fandom.

AK: I've spent my whole life collecting and creating junk. It is a way for people to attempt to make sense of something magical. And I’m not even talking about sports. I’m talking about time. I have to buy this tour T-shirt if I’m at this concert because it’ll never be 2023 again. I need to make sense of why I'm here and what I’m doing—that is the emotional explanation of it. But the basic description: We like cool shit. I like cool stuff, and I like to wear cool stuff that invites other people to try to discuss this stuff with me. It’s a sense of community.

The compulsion I’ve always had to make things in my professional life has been a blessing in Cookies because it’s a way to not only fold a corner of a book page over but also to keep track of this thing that moves so fast, whether that be basketball, New York City fashion trends, or just years; at this point, Ben and I have been at this for longer than I think.

BD: I like Andrew’s point about bringing people into the merch itself because last night I played pickup ball. A lot of the guys were younger than me, and I was wearing a shirt that Andrew made pre-Cookies, which was like a 2016/17 Knicks championship shirt. Now, you may not be a huge basketball fan, but let me tell you that the Knicks did not win a championship in 2017. The guys started looking at the shirt and realized that it was an odd novelty item for a championship team that had never existed. They started pointing out the obscure fringe players on the 2017 Knicks. There’s Kuzminskas. There’s Ron Baker…people just started talking about that team and this shirt. That’s the greatest example of what Andrew is great at; his shirts inspire a reaction and thought.

RR: There's something to be said about this new wave of fans, the alternative fan, and this kind of approachable community. Obviously, you guys are contributing to that with something like Cookies. You can also disagree if you’re like, “No, this generation's always been around,” but I wanted to hear your thoughts on this moment in pop culture as it relates to the fandom.

AK: I think it has been going along for a while. Most famously, Bill Simmons, who Ben used to write for at Grantland, which is no longer around, was known as a fan voice. But everything has a delay, and it takes time; he [Simmons] eventually becomes the establishment because he’s excellent at this, and his interests involve getting bigger and bigger, and he’s produced a pretty incredible thing, but that leaves a vacant seat. Ben and I try to occupy that space—we’re weird, we’re New Yorkers, we keep weird hours, and we enjoy a Knicks game as much as we enjoy eating at a strange restaurant. That mentality is helpful when talking about a thing that everyone’s watching simultaneously.

BD: I can’t think of when basketball has felt this much like a part of New York City and the larger culture than it is right now. I ran into a guy from the neighborhood on the street yesterday. I talked to him for a second and as we gave each other a quick pound, we both said, “Go Knicks.” At the same time. And after I walked off, I was like, “What just happened? What was that? Are we using ‘Go Knicks’ as a goodbye now?”

AK: Dude, I passed a 60-year-old man on Broadway in Brooklyn yesterday, and he was wearing this pretty basic but odd outfit, and he caught me staring at his fit, and he stares at me and goes, “Go Knicks.” And I’m like, “Go Knicks, buddy.” It was incredible. But to your point, we are also doing the main character thing, and sometimes I think everyone lives the most incredible sports life ever lived, right? And currently, we're in the best era. But if you talk to Michael Jordan fans, they live in the best era. Or Clyde Frazier fans, Dave DeBusschere, whatever. Is what we're talking about now unique because of technology? Isn't Cookies a technological discussion? Isn't all sports now a reaction to social media?

BD: The prior era was a reaction to the internet and League Pass and being able to watch all the teams instead of just the ones on TV. And the prior era was a reaction to it being on cable-

AK: Podcast.

BD: Then it goes back to radio. And now they're writing about the sport in the newspaper, well...

AK: AM radio must've been crazy when that dropped.

BD: AM radio is different.

AK: It’s hard to tell if it’ll be observable or not, but it is safe to say we’re in the post-statistical embrace era, and there’s a pushback to that now, and I’m glad for it. We end up with a more enjoyable thing if we can talk about rivalries, emotions, villains, heroes, and the story that we know and understand before we get into metrics. That evolution has happened in the last five or six, ten years post the Moneyball era.

BD: We’re not going post-metrics in terms of how teams operate. They have these numbers; they’re going to use these numbers. But Andrew makes a good point: that, in some ways, a war has been waged between metrics and gut instinct. Generally speaking, everyone arrives at the same place knowing that if stuff is quantifiable, it is valuable, and we can find out what those data sets are. But there are also a lot of moving parts; what creates them? That’s up for debate. Is it just a skill set? Is it having more dawg?

AK: Thematically, how we talk about something procedural like 82 NBA games will reflect what collectively we think about politics or our concerns out in the real world. We saw the NBA cycle through an era of player empowerment, social justice, and the worker versus the owner, and these echoed ideas we were talking about in other places. Where the NBA goes in the future is dictated by elections, policy, and supreme justice rulings. In small ways, that unrest informs how we talk about a black-and-white idea of winning and losing. It was no accident that we had a reality TV real estate mogul as president, and all we argued about in the NBA was authenticity. Is this person playing the right way? Are they playing ethically? This was a theme throughout that era in real life.

RR: There’s something to be said about the performance aspect that we’re talking about. There are so many more variables that people are paying attention to as the game itself advances. Going back to this “Caitlin Clark effect,” there was an interview with Steph Curry where he was talking about how she's a performer like him. I think that in itself, dare I say, makes it an art form.

BD: If you look at the OKC versus Dallas series right now, you see Luka [Dončić], Kyrie [Irving], and SGA [Shai Gilgeous-Alexander]. You can observe these very distinct styles of play, but they do things that are magical and anomalous—you don't see them from other people. That’s where I would draw the parallel to art in that way: when you watch Luka throw a weird pass behind his head, or you watch Kyrie float in midair and switch hands and flip the ball around two defenders, or SGA do this hyper-advanced footwork. Those are the brushstrokes, for lack of a less obvious analogy. This is their art. And that’s why some of them are virtuosos. They have a signature look and a signature sound, and the things they do are not replicable by other players. If they are, we know what they did. Like, “Oh, that's the Dirk one-footer.” We all know that move. Dirk popularized that. And now, if you do it, that’s “the Dirk.”

AK: There’s a difference between aesthetics and art. Art discusses time, context, intention, or movement towards something. Of course, you can make a beautiful painting of a sunset, but when I think of these magicians—and Ben used that word—like Steph Curry and Caitlin Clark, they capture our imaginations in ways that are hard to put into words. But that is different from art to me. Is an old Italian grandma making ravioli an artist? What she does is beautiful, but it’s not necessarily art. If we pull back far enough, we can turn aesthetics into meaning always. With basketball, I try to resist that. To be present as a fan and to get as much as I can out of a game or a season is just to appreciate stuff on its aesthetic level, which is powerful and beautiful, but it’s not necessarily art.

BD: It’s interesting that you said all that just to get back to some more of your anti-Italian food takes.

AK: Chinese food with tomatoes and cheese. Prove me wrong.

BD: All of that just to say that Chinese people invented spaghetti.

RR: That was inspiring. My last question for you guys is: if you were to draft your own team and you have a starting five, but the team itself is made up of cultural figures, who're you putting on that starting five?

BD: I’m picking five Andrew Kuos. The team is called The Tall Kings, and I am the mascot.

AK: All right. Ben actually needs some time to think about this because this is a lot to process. We're talking about our favorite chefs, painters, and fashion designers, that kind of thing?

RR: It can be anyone.

AK: So, what makes a great team? You need a little of everything. You just can't have five scorers because there are not enough shots to go around. Let's make a team together, Ben. What would produce the most wins?

BD: If you start with a point guard, you need a general worldview person, like a philosopher, someone with a great understanding of the landscape. An ASAP Yams could work in that example.

AK: Oh, I was going to say José Andrés, but ASAP Yams, okay. Backcourt, Yams, and Andrés.

BD: That's a strong backcourt.

AK: That is a very strong backcourt. Then, for the wing and the three, you need a specialty guy who has some advantages size-wise but can do specific things. You don't need him to do everything. Call out a fashion designer.

BD: You want an Antwerp Six guy. Is that what you're saying?

AK: Mm-hmm. This is your pick right here.

BD: Are we going Dries [Van Noten]?

AK: I love it. Dries at the three. All right. All right. Four?

BD: Four, they need to be a little more substantial, secondary rim protection.

AK: They need to be main characters to control the ball.

BD: We need a woman here as well. We gotta shake this up.

AK: Who you got? Anna Wintour.

BD: That’s a good four.

AK: She’s solid. She’s dependable.

BD: She’s got the Horace Grant goggles on at all times.

AK: All right. We got Wintour at the four. And then five, we got the protector. Who is the protecting king or queen?

BD: Stalin?

AK: What world haven’t we dabbled in yet? We have chefs, we have designers, we have editors. What about writers? Poets?

BD: You're going like Tolstoy. I’ve been stuck on the Russian defender. But Europeans generally have shorter arms, they have a reputation in the NBA for being more offensively oriented than rim protectors.

AK: Protector, would it be Gandhi or...

BD: Gandhi is too problematic. We got to steer clear.

AK: Would it be Arnold Schwarzenegger as Commando? Are you still on the Bernie Sanders ride? Can it be Bernie?

BD: I'm thinking more of [Jean-Claude] Van Damme.

AK: No, he’d be a terrible five. Why is the five the hardest one?

BD: They have to be the most solid person.

AK: This is hard because we're talking about the best person ever, the protector, the enforcer, right?

BD: Who holds it down the most? The Department of Sanitation.

AK: Oh, can it be an entity? Could it be the UN? I know the UN's controversial.

BD: International Monetary Fund. Greenpeace.

AK: Paul Newman. Rest in peace.

BD: Great. Done.

AK: Newman’s own.

RR: Sick. What's the team name?

AK: Well, hailing from Rochester, Ben can make this a regional Rochester team…The Rochester Garbage Plates. Here we go.

RR: I love it.

BD: Yeah, that sounds perfect.

RR: I can’t wait for the season. This has been so wonderful, you guys. Go Knicks.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.