CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A traditional sports documentary goes something like this: Find a championship team. Round up as many of the former players and coaches as you can from that team. Interview them all. Splice in some spectacular highlights. Set them to swelling music. Voilà! You’re done.
And then there’s a guy named Jon Bois, who makes bizarre sports documentaries with basically the opposite formula. He and his colleagues’ latest film — now available for free on YouTube — concerns the Charlotte Bobcats’ 7-59 season of 2011-12.
“The People You’re Paying to be in Shorts” is its unwieldy title, taken from a Michael Jordan quote about how the Charlotte NBA franchise owner now has to live vicariously through his players rather than putting on a pair of shorts himself and laying waste to the opposition.
This is a documentary that interviews absolutely no one. It runs for 147 minutes. It’s about the worst team ever — at least by winning percentage — in NBA history. It has hardly any video highlights.
And it’s weirdly fascinating.
“We like to focus on the sports teams that are like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree,” Bois explained. “You know: The ones that never get any love.”
These Bobcats are getting a little retroactive love now, though, thanks to a movie I’m going to call “Shorts,” just for the sake of brevity.
“Shorts” has already racked up a million views on YouTube. It chronicles the Bobcats’ 7-59 season in such loving, statistical and personality-heavy detail that even though I was there for all of that season and didn’t enjoy seeing it unfold in real time, by the end of this documentary I was wishing for another 30 minutes.
Those Bobcats, incidentally, were the champions of losing in a way that the current Charlotte Hornets can’t come close to matching. As awful as the Hornets have often been this season, they are still winning about three out of every 10 games. Those 2011-12 Bobcats won once every 10 games.
0-23 in final 23 games
A side note: Did you know that there’s a movie coming out in April called “Air,” which is about a young Jordan picking Nike for a basketball shoe deal in the 1980s and everyone involved ultimately making a gazillion dollars because MJ turned out to be, well, MJ?
This ain’t that.
It also ain’t “The Last Dance,” a compelling documentary about the Chicago Bulls that was a massive hit and also worshiped at the altar of MJ.
This instead is about Jordan’s sad-sack Bobcats of 2011-12, a team that started out lousy and just kept getting worse, enough so that it went 0-23 over its last 23 games to edge the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers (who went 9-73 for a winning percentage of 11%) and become the losingest NBA team of all time (winning percentage: 10.6%).
“I’m sure the film probably hasn’t even crossed Michael Jordan’s radar,” said Bois, who works for a production company called Secret Base, which makes web-based documentaries and is part of the SB Nation family. “But I would imagine his reaction if it ever did is that he’d probably be fairly annoyed. Which is fair.”
Bois and his team have made other sports documentaries from unlikely subjects: A six-part, 3.5-hour series on the history of the Seattle Mariners. A seven-part, six-hour series on the history of the Atlanta Falcons. In all of these, they interview no one, dive deep into every statistic imaginable and read an archival website called newspapers.com until their eyes go blurry. Then they come up with some humorously clever narration and a series of swirling charts and graphics that must be seen to be appreciated.
The Secret Base folks prefer newspaper accounts written the day something happened rather than interviewing somebody 10 years later about what they think they remember happened. The Charlotte Observer’s Rick Bonnell — our late, great Charlotte NBA beat writer — has his work quoted so often in “Shorts” you’d think he had written the unofficial Bible on the 2011-12 Bobcats.
Which, of course, he did.
The Diop free throw
Still ... to spend this much time on teams that won nothing?
“These are things that if we were to go to a major studio in Hollywood and try to pitch it, we’d never get any of these stories greenlit in a million years,” said Bois, who is 40 years old and has taken an unconventional path himself to making these films, having not gone to college. “We did another series on a baseball pitcher named Dave Stieb that would have been laughed out of the room. But we have faith in these stories. We know they’re great. The teams and players didn’t win championships. But they have stories as real and compelling and, often, funnier than the ones you’d see in a big-budget documentary project.”
The idea for “Shorts” came from something simple: a missed free throw by then-Bobcat DeSagana Diop during that ill-fated 2011-12 season.
A free throw is a 15-foot shot, and Diop shot this one about 12 feet. It missed as badly as any 8-year-old recreational league free throw you’ve ever seen and, unsurprisingly, made the rounds on social media and in GIF form because it was funny and also a symbol of all that was wrong with that Charlotte team.
Many years later, Bois and his production team were talking about sports in a nerdy way because that’s what they do: They have a long-running series called “Dorktown,” after all. Bois invented the term “Scorigami,” which has a cult following of its own.
And they all remembered the Diop free throw.
“That was the keyhole,” Bois said. “And it turned out that this was a team that was so bad that they changed their name. Well, not exactly, but that’s the way it felt (the Bobcats did indeed later change their team name back to the Hornets, but that was mostly to capitalize on the initial nostalgia around the team’s success in its first decade). And so we thought there was a great story there.”
Losing Anthony Davis
The documentary goes deep into more well-known 2011-12 Bobcats like dignified but flummoxed coach Paul Silas (who died in December, about a month after the film debuted) and the enigmatic Boris Diaw, whose refusal both to shoot and to lose weight caused much consternation.
It also goes off on tangents about obscure players and nearly forgotten moments in history, like LeBron James and Dwyane Wade doing a mock Superman pose at Cam Newton, who was then an NFL rookie and seated alongside Jordan, in Game 2 of that lost season.
Charlotte’s eventual loss in the ensuing draft lottery — when the Bobcats had a 25% chance of winning the No.1 pick and Anthony Davis, but instead got the No.2 choice, passed on Damian Lillard and chose a player who had an unfixable jump shot in Michael Kidd-Gilchrist — is also explored in detail.
If you’re a Charlotte NBA fan and “Shorts” sounds excruciating, it really isn’t.
The team is presented more in a “Bad News Bears,” lovable losers sort of way. Bois narrates part of “Shorts,” often as if he’s speaking directly to Jordan. And while Jordan gets teased and Diop’s free throw is milked for maximum effect, the players themselves aren’t made fun of as much as they are humanized.
“We like to make documentaries about things that normally would not get the documentary treatment,” Bois said. They’ve certainly done that here, and the result is far more watchable than those 7-59 Bobcats ever were.
