What to Read: Marc Stein is obsessing over the NBA

This week, we interviewed Marc Stein, an NBA reporter of more than 30 seasons who writes an eponymous newsletter covering all things pro basketball with zero days off.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Marc Stein

What’s your Substack about in one sentence?

My Substack will bring you news, previously unreported intel, storytelling, informed opinion, and historical perspective from the belly of the NBA ... with some travel writing and food critiquing mixed in for fun because, hey, you can write about whatever you want on here.

Why basketball? 

Like zillions of kids, I wanted to be a pro athlete. But I also had the good fortune of self-awareness and realizing early, by the age of 8 or so, that it wasn’t going to happen. So when I became aware of baseball writers covering the Yankees in the late 1970s, I instantly wanted to become one of them. Then at 13, when tennis took over my life way too late in the game for me to be a sufficiently competitive tennis player, I hatched a new plan: I would make the pro tour as the next Bud Collins and travel the circuit by writing about it.

When I was in college, as part of my first significant writing gig as a part-timer on the sports staff of the Orange County Register, I quickly deduced that you had to cover one of the major team sports to really make a living in this business. 

I started out as a baseball obsessive, but by my college years, I loved the NBA more than any other major North American team sport. Once I got my shot in February 1994 through some very fortuitous circumstances to cover the Clippers for the Los Angeles Daily News, I never let go. Even though I love tennis and soccer as much as hoops, I knew instantly that I had found my world.

What’s a typical day like?

The job involves a lot of calling/texting/messaging people around the league to discuss what’s happening. Fortunately for me, when you’ve done this a long time, you probably field as many calls as you make, because everyone is looking for info. 

I spend an unhealthy amount of time on my phones. I carry two—my trusty BlackBerry KEY2 and an iPhone SE—and still write almost everything first (daily!) on my BlackBerry because I can just grab it and throw five paragraphs together quickly when something strikes me. I write some of my best stuff when I fly, in the back seat of an Uber, on walks—colleagues who were with me in the NBA’s Walt Disney World bubble in the summer of 2020 still make fun of me for walking a circular path in the courtyard we all shared and writing on my KEY2 as I got steps in. 

I have had a career that has gone so far beyond my wildest dreams, I would never complain, but there is a significant time investment to do this sort of work properly, and your family life definitely will suffer. It takes a special kind of spouse (and kids) to put up with me. The notion of curling up on a Sunday and leisurely going section by section through the Times or digging into a good book while sipping coffee ... there’s no time for that. It’s become a 24/7/365 sport, and it is intensely covered by too many good writers to list. A decent chunk of time is lost just by trying to come up with an angle/take/concept that no one else has written.

Read more: Guess what? My BlackBerry still works

How has your approach to writing and covering the sport changed since your early writing days, and in what ways, if any, has it stayed the same?

The landscape is so different now that it’s almost a completely different discipline. When I started, game stories in newspapers still mattered as much as anything. Writing a good one, on deadline, was a true skill. Some 30 years later, they are almost completely obsolete. 

Twitter brings the public into every single game so comprehensively with video, commentary, stats, analysis, you name it. I think the reader today hungers for every morsel of info they can get that is not seen during the game, because so much is so accessible now. That’s what I try to chase: what you can’t see. 

Something else that does work in my favor and meshes beautifully with this platform: sportswriters have the latitude now to be much more personal. I have been gradually writing more and more in my voice as I’ve gotten older, but never as often or freely as I do on Substack.

I love the freedom I have to infuse my day-to-day coverage of the league with travelogues and food stories. I can lead one of my Tuesday Newsletter Extravaganzas with some hardcore NBA issue and then do a second section on the best coffees I enjoyed on my last road trip. Readers invariably like the coffee section better than the hoop stuff. I’ve tried to make The Stein Line as interactive as I can, and I will continue to work at it and keep trying new things. That’s the main goal for Year 2. I voraciously study other Substacks in hopes of finding techniques that might work for our community.

Sportswriters have the latitude now to be much more personal. I have been gradually writing more and more in my voice as I’ve gotten older, but never as often or freely as I do on Substack.

Who’s another Substack writer you’d recommend?

I must subscribe to more than 25 different Substacks, but if you force me to highlight one, I have to give props to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. I get a huge kick out of writing on the same platform he does, even though it’s really not fair how good his stuff is. I can’t shoot a skyhook. I can’t even fake it anymore. Why does he get to outwrite so many of us? There should be a rule that prohibits that.

Browse the Substack publications Marc recommends here.

Subscribe to Marc’s newsletter, Marc Stein, and find him on Twitter.