There were two noteworthy injuries in the NBA over the last week, each of which elicited diametrically opposite reactions—one to a multimillionaire player, one to a referee. Guess which injury drew which response if you like, but you're going to be wrong.
The injured player is, as is often the case, Dallas Mavericks star Anthony Davis, who sustained significant enough ligament damage in his left hand on Thursday night against Utah that he is expected to miss "a number of months," a period which any ball-savvy theoretical mathematician will tell you could mean anywhere from one to the heat death of the universe. Davis has a long injury history; some internet kinesiologists have suggested that he might be made entirely of Chex Mix. Davis also had the temerity to have been traded to Dallas as the main return in the Luka Doncic giveaway, and so is doubly condemned because unlike college football and basketball, professional players do not have the power to trade themselves. The reaction to this injury, given the history that preceded it and the powerfully meh Mavericks season during which it happened, has been a rude but not entirely unwarranted shrug.
The official is Bill Kennedy, who has been promoted in the past couple of seasons from "Well, he isn't Scott Foster" to a god because of how the NBA's appeals process has let him tap into a previously unknown talent for speaking directly into a camera. Watch this:
Or this:
And also this:
And who could forget this:
Or this:
As well as this:
But now, sadly, there is also this:
Kennedy blew a tire Friday night early in the game between Orlando and Philadelphia and had to be carted off the floor with what seems to be a hamstring injury that left him both out of pocket for the next few months and in tears on the court. But that's not the news here. It's that Bill Kennedy, who once again is an official, will actually be missed rather than mocked, by fans and players alike. It probably helps that he wasn't traded for a generational player.
But also Kennedy is an idol of sorts simply because he inherently gets the relationship between a referee and the outside world, and makes it work in the only way it can—by simply and competently competing for the amorphous entertainment dollar without getting in the way of the actual product. In other words, Kennedy is guilty of having fun with one of the least pleasurable parts of modern sports, and therefore allowing us to have fun with it too.
An official explaining the result of a coach's challenge is the closest sports gets to an on-field HR meeting, with one middle-management drone drily explaining the often-tortured reasonings of other unseen but equally humorless middle-management drones to an audience that would much prefer not to be having that experience. The vacuum power of such turgid fun-sucks is rarely appreciated for its capacity to crush the human soul. It lasts long enough for you to tour the rest of the channels in exasperation but not quite long enough to go to the restroom and use the time for good.
But Kennedy, who has worked in the NBA for 26 years and been a crew chief/replay thespian for the last five, turned these moments of television death into special treats by applying one of the least appreciated skills of officiating—the ability to sell the call without getting in the way of the pitch. As a result, he has become a sort of league-employed version of Red Panda, a non-player known and appreciated for staking out an under-appreciated corner of the business and making it their own. And unlike Red Panda, her stackable bowls and her nosebleed unicycle, Kennedy's only prop is an occasionally upraised index finger for emphasis.
Thus, when Kennedy's leg chose to remind him that he is 59 years old, the outpouring of support was, for a referee, stunning. These people are supposed to be unbearable buzzkills with terrible judgment; that is the role in which their job casts them. And that's the baseline; those are the most admirable of their assigned character traits, and whatever else they bring to the party almost always makes it worse. Officials are there to be loathed and MF'd; in the words of at least one relative close to your author, either to be affirmatively on the take themselves or passively helping the league to fix outcomes. (That's "fix" as in "deliberately arrange results," as opposed to say Saturday's Hornets-Jazz game, which needed to be "fixed," as in either repaired or neutered for the good of the sport.)
Kennedy, though, found the way to actually help with the fun part while maintaining the integrity part, and in so doing invented an authentically new way to be a NBA official. He might not be the highest regarded official in the league, but he is surely the most popular and therefore the one most valued by those most inclined to hate him—a population referred to in basketball circles as "everyone else on the planet."
Kennedy wasn't particularly famous before he found his true value to the league, save for coming out to his employers as gay in 1999 in response to a spurious complaint by a female usher in Phoenix who claimed he touched her inappropriately. He was suspended by the league but reinstated after missing six games when he informed league officials that he was both gay and innocent; he later came out publicly after being on the receiving end of gay slurs from people within the NBA community who should have known better.
But it was the replay mechanism that vaulted him to the NBA's version of non-LeBronian stardom. He made it his own moment by making what was designed to be a rote process of dreadful mutterings into a bit of performative theatre, and in the process winning over fans who were used to seeing officials as only one of three things—blind, stupid, or screwing with their bets. The few NBA officials who are known are known for being either Foster, Zach Zarba, a part of a faceless army of imperious and detestably interchangeable nincompoops, whether they deserve it or not. The league, in its retrograde view of its referee class, has long subscribed to the idiotic notion that officials should be invisible in any and all circumstances. That has served to enhance the imperious/detestable/nincompoopish status of the people doing the job, a bit of indefensible nonsense that Kennedy has managed to pierce at least for those who enjoy the NBA's mutant subculture.
There is one obvious problem here, though, which is that Kennedy's act cannot be usefully imitated. None of the other officials in the league can use the arcane art of replay cabaret as their ticket to popular adoration, or just awareness/toleration. That is plainly Kennedy's gig, and imitators tread at their peril. Indeed, there are few officials with Kennedy's longevity as a known quantity; like anything else of value, instant stardom is the result of decades of grinding.
That it took Kennedy as long as it did to be noticed for making the replay must-see programming is a measure of that; the many stories about him that have proliferated online since his injury all but called his injury a tragedy of incalculable proportions, and suggested among other things that he was one of the few NBA officials whose name fans would bother to plug into a search engine. I mean, who has an interesting Gediminas Petraitis story, let alone a companion who would want to hear it? Who walks into an arena and says, "Man, I sure hope Pat Fraher is working tonight?" After years of making officials into robots who all look, act, sound, ignore players, and bungle out-of-bounds calls in exactly the same dull way, the fact that Kennedy slipped through the cracks as he did is an administrative oversight that borders on the miraculous.
With all this global sympathy flowing Kennedy's way in the wake of his injury, Anthony Davis and his bum hand must surely wonder how he gets nothing but scorn for his own medical mishaps. Davis is in many ways a tragic NBA figure—an exemplar of the talented and well-meaning man cursed by his own body, lunkheaded team administrators and simple dumbassed bad luck. As a player, he's fascinating and a little bit sad simultaneously, a cautionary tale of the cruel backhand of fame. As a character, he has no pivot from his perpetually unhappy face as he sits in streetclothes at the end of the Mavericks bench. Unlike Kennedy, he has no secondary gimmick quite like the Simba gag.
The league will go on, of course, as it did when Red Panda returned to action after four months with a broken wrist incurred at the WNBA Commissioner's Cup final in July. But the halftime shows sucked during that time because if you've seen one dachshund playing the accordion while wearing a light-up fez you've pretty much seen them all. Kennedy's return, whenever it happens, will be hailed as a victory for the profession and all within it, and we'll put a hundred down now on a replay request from one of the coaches within the first minute as a tribute to a true impresario with a whistle. Boston Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla asked for replay once "just so I could hear Bill explain it." This is remarkable because Mazzulla, like all NBA head coaches, gets personalized explanations from any official on anything whenever he wants, and is more remarkable still given that he is Joe Mazzulla.
We'll know Kennedy is back for sure when the NBA figures out how to monetize his return, because who wouldn't want his face on a $189 hoodie instead of Trae Young's? Sometimes opportunity knocks on the strangest doors, and the normally soporific phrase "After further review" has, thanks to Kennedy's charm and joy of performance, somehow become an absolute wallet-grabber. Adam Silver should have his best people on it. In a league beset by a hundred problems, Bill Kennedy approaching the scorers table with that rogueish look in his eye is the best response the NBA has to whatever it is the Sacramento Kings are trying to accomplish.
