With all due respect to the Drew League, the VBL, or the newly-rebranded Crawsover in Seattle, the best summer hoops action is wherever LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Kevin Durant, and company happen to be playing pickup games, and in recent days, all those names and more headlined some star-studded runs at Life Time Athletic at Sky in New York City.
Basketball trainer to the stars Chris Brickley has been kind enough to document footage of some of these pickup games — which is also where we saw Melo firing up perfect sky hooks in a sweat suit — and edit them together into neat packages of highlights of the most entertaining pickup hoops in the world.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BX03-sCDfHq/?hl=en&taken-by=cbrickley603
The video also features Bron’s teammate J.R. Smith, KD’s former-teammate-turned-detractor Enes Kanter, Dahntay Jones, Marshall Plumlee, and more. It’s difficult to gauge from an edited highlight video, but these games certainly appear to be competitive, with all of the high-profile players named above giving each other buckets up and down the court.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BX03NoZDTjw/?hl=en&taken-by=cbrickley603
What we wouldn’t give to be inside that gym watching some of the game’s all-time greats playing pickup basketball up close and personal (although we recoil to think what the annual membership fees must be at a facility like this). It must also be a nice release for LeBron and Melo, as they each face plenty of uncertainties ahead regarding their respective futures with their current franchises, to get out and just escape to the basketball court with their friends.
The start of training camp is still more than a month-and-a-half away, but by the looks of it, a lot of these guys are in pretty good basketball shape already. We’ll be counting down the days until we finally get to see some real action again, and until then, this will have to do.
