Book Review: Can't Knock the Hustle by Matt Sullivan

About midway through Can’t Knock the Hustle author Matt Sullivan explains how one of the biggest benefits ESPN and TNT gained from their television rights deals was not the rights to broadcasting the games live but rather the ability to run a constant stream of highlights through their oceans of on-air and social media roundball-related content. Many fans primarily digest games in bite-sized portions, Sullivan asserts, and often they find the off-court action more compelling than any actual hardball action. This fundamental premise underpins the entirety of Sullivan’s new book, which is effectively a fly-on-the-wall rather than a fly-on-the-court account of the 2019-2020 campaign of the Brooklyn Nets. Focusing almost completely on the team’s personalities and highlighting the increase in athlete advocacy for social justice, Can’t Knock the Hustle is occasionally enlightening but also falls victim to some general tropes of the format. 

As you might guess from the general standards of publishing timelines, this book is about the 2019-2020 Nets and not the “three-headed monster” Nets of 2020-2021 where a healthy Kevin Durant and James Harden joined Kyrie Irving. In 2019 Kevin Durant was on the mend from an achilles injury and the Nets had considerably lower expectations. It almost served as an audition period for many of the role players such as Joe Harris and Caris Levert to see who should make up the core for when the Nets made a championship push the following year. They were a fun team to watch and Kyrie Irving was always a threat to go off when he was healthy and felt like doing so, but they certainly weren’t a juggernaut. I know the top dogs generally attract the most eyeballs but as someone who watched about 80% of the Nets’ games that season I can say that the team had a variety of quite interesting characters with lots of personality. In addition to the perpetually mercurial Kyrie Irving and the sphinxlike Kevin Durant, the Nets boasted a point guard who turned down Harvard, tried to sell shares of his contract to fans, and created a signature shoe from scratch (Spencer Dinwiddie) and a shooting guard who was highly involved in the NBA Players’ Union and international aid efforts, the son of the first African-American athlete at LSU, and husband to a former Miss USA and nuclear scientist (Garrett Temple). And that’s only the backcourt, as Joe Harris is a fascinating representation of the evolution of what is valued in the NBA and the afroed Mario Kart and rocket science-loving Jarrett Allen were also compelling characters. Clearly, Sullivan had a good amount of content to draw from. 

The book is structured as a series of daily entries during the season and Sullivan also frequently cuts back to earlier momentous occasions such as Lebron’s decision and the rise of player empowerment, major events in Kyrie’s career, and some further backstory such as describing forward Taurean Prince’s periods of homelessness growing up in Texas. These flashbacks provide further context for the actions of the present and make for a richer narrative. So far nothing that I have described seems all that different from other season accounts, but what separates Can’t Knock the Hustle from many other books in the genre is Sullivan’s focus in virtually all of these entries: off-the-court matters, especially with respect to social justice. He devotes substantial time to covering past examples of athlete protest including the Stephon Clark protests impacting the Sacramento Kings in 2018 and Donald Sterling-related protests in 2014. Sullivan makes sure to praise the athletes brave enough to make a stand on issues and pillories players such as Lebron James who tried to appease their sponsors and offer modern-day wishy-washy equivalents to Michael Jordan’s “Republicans buy sneakers too” comment. In 2019-2020 the Nets specifically were drawn into controversy early on after they traveled to China during Morey-gate and the playoffs were nearly cancelled after the George Floyd and Jacob Blake shootings brought racial injustices to the forefront of the national discussion. Sullivan devotes considerable time to these topics and how they impacted the Nets specifically, as well as covering Durant’s intense rehabilitation regimen, basically everything Kyrie Irving did during the season, and some profiles of Nets role players. The reader isn’t kept entirely in the dark on the Nets’ on-court results but they are clearly lower-priority. 

My biggest issue with Can’t Knock the Hustle is the fact that I didn’t get much new out of it. And look, I understand that this is often the case with these kind of books, but at the same time a lot of sports books review a little less recent history. My memories of the 2019-2020 season, the Rudy Gobert game, and the bubble playoffs are all pretty fresh and like most basketball fans I was following everything in the bubble quite intently because I wasn’t really leaving my apartment ever and there wasn’t much going on in the world nevermind the world of sports. March through the NBA finals covers the final third of the book and it really felt like a rehash of major events without any new analysis. I grew up in New Jersey and still have a good bit of affinity for the Nets (no worries on them leaving the state, I did too for 13 years) so I watched about 80% of their full games that season and I feel like Sullivan captured most of the biggest storylines, but I would have wanted Sulivan to sacrifice a little bit of depth for breadth with respect to the roster. Sullivan clearly had a good bit of access to Kyrie, Durant, and the Nets front office and I did appreciate some insights around Kyrie’s relationship with his teammates and the circumstances of Atkinson’s firing (which really puzzled me at the time and now makes a little more sense) but I felt like there was too much of a focus on Kyrie and KD and too little on some very interesting players like Jarrett Allen, Caris Levert, and Joe Harris. Additionally, I liked the social justice angle but I would have loved a little more background on what changes happened to journalism/social media to give players this platform and caused the increased focus (and scrutiny) of what NBA players do and think around social issues. 

Overall, Can’t Knock the Hustle is a decent read but I can’t recommend it too much because it covers such a recent event without a ton of new insights for the big NBA fans who would be most likely to seek this book out. It’s well-written and I don’t want to ding Sullivan for the fact that I followed the Nets quite intently and for the fact that Covid happened, but at the same time I do wish there was a bit more on the “why” around the season and the NBA’s increased push for social justice rather than the “what.”