Can't Knock the Hustle

Starred review from April 5, 2021
Sportswriter Sullivan takes readers on a propulsive ride in his tour-de-force debut, pulling from over 400 interviews to offer a behind-the-scenes look at the 2019–2020 NBA season and the resurgence of the Brooklyn Nets. Starting in May 2019—when Kevin Durant prepared his move to the Brooklyn Nets—Sullivan follows the Nets’ rise from a coachless team in early 2020 to a star-studded group of vocal activists at the epicenter of a civil rights movement. After the death of George Floyd, the Barclays Center became a “recognizable gathering place,” as protests erupted in Brooklyn and worldwide. During this time, Nets players decided to take their politics from the court to the streets, using their fame to bring attention to the growing injustice. Sullivan leads up to this with news of other earth-shattering events, like Kobe Bryant’s death to the looming chaos of the pandemic. Perhaps most illuminating is his recounting of the NBA playoff bubble in the summer of 2020, when players wrestled with the decision to play as the Black Lives Matter movement reached its apex. Sullivan’s detailed account will intrigue anyone who cares about sports and the role it plays in social justice today. Agent: David Granger, Aevitas Creative Management.

May 1, 2021
A sportswriter and investigative journalist delivers "a contemporaneous history revealing how everyone from LeBron James and Kyrie Irving to shifty billionaires and calamity-stricken Brooklynites were forced to evolve as frantically as the world did" during the pandemic. In 2020, everyone's story became one of life and death, of personal choices about racial inequality and political beliefs, of playing it safe or taking risks during a global pandemic. In this ambitious book, Sullivan captures all those aspects in the lives of the Brooklyn Nets, including one of the NBA's biggest superstars, Durant, one of its most controversial, Irving, and the rest of a team poised to win a championship this season. The author embedded with the Nets back in 2019, when no one could have imagined the hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 deaths or millions of Black Lives Matter protesters taking to streets across the U.S. Sullivan's eyewitness accounts of the team's private moments and in-depth interviews with players and coaches yield explanations for those crises as well as behind-the-scenes details of some of the biggest stories in sports, including the international incident surrounding the Nets' exhibition game against the Los Angeles Lakers in China and the deliberations over whether the team should finish out the 2020 season in the NBA-created bubble in Orlando. All of the author's cogent reporting allows him to place these events in a deeper context. "It continues to be a despicable and particularly American reality," he writes, "that the oppressed so often, and especially with the undue pressure of television and social media, are expected to both withstand and overcome, to survive and speak out at once." He also reveals remarkable details about Durant's recovery from injuries, Irving's Indigenous roots and headline-grabbing behavior, Spencer Dinwiddie's forward-thinking business strategies, and Garrett Temple's plans to study law. More than a basketball book, this helps explain race relations, celebrity power, and personal choice in a changed world.

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Starred review from July 1, 2021

Going beyond the on-court plays, sports reporter Sullivan analyzes the NBA's culture and power dynamics through the lens of the 2019-20 Brooklyn Nets season. He describes a player empowerment movement that's at the center of the present-day NBA, in which players (rather than owners or the league office) dictate business ventures, their own futures, and social agendas. NBA superstars Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving are Sullivan's primary focus here; Durant struggles with coming back from an injury, while Irving questions basketball's importance in his life, and the death of Kobe Bryant impacts Irving and other current stars mentored by Bryant. The narrative also introduces lesser-known Nets player Garrett Templeton, who pushes for social justice reform. Sullivan writes that many NBA players became more politically active after the murder of George Floyd and debated how to address the Hong Kong protests and whether to boycott the NBA's Disney Bubble experiment, with views that differed based on players' economic standings and social justice beliefs. VERDICT A must-read for its in-depth look at the mental, economic, and political tribulations of NBA players. A good complement to Ben Golliver's Bubbleball that will give readers a full understanding of the struggles and dynamics of the 2019-20 NBA season.--Chris Wilkes, Tazewell Cty. P.L., VA

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