Oddballs: Inside Day One Of The Basketball Tournament

The magic of The Basketball Tournament, a national five-on-five, winner-take-all event with a million dollar prize, has nothing to do with the huge stack of money on the table. That doesn't hurt, of course, but that's not it.

The cash is a fine lure, admittedly, and tempting enough to draw in 97 teams spread across four regions, with gobs of ex-NBAers, top-tier college stars and overseas pros littering the rosters. It also has attracted a decent amount of attention, which is something like the point.

These teams made the tournament thanks to an online fan vote; the highest-grossing teams go into the draw, with no entry fee required. This is how TBT, in its second year, can have its cake and eat it, too—how it can promise and deliver both high-quality basketball and an egalitarian basketball showcase unlike any other. It just doesn't necessarily offer both at the same time.

It still looks like real basketball, of course. The games are contested in a standard small-college gym and, like everywhere else, there are referees and uniforms and substitutions. There's even an announcer, or at least a reasonable facsimile of one; over the course of one early morning game, he bungled a starting lineup, misidentified numerous scorers, and repeatedly butchered former Air Force center Taylor Broekhuis' name severely enough that his teammates felt the need to pass along a correction. (It's pronounced "Brook-hice," if you're keeping score.) The word "organized" is bandied about by players throughout the day, and for good reason.

But the interplay between substance and spectacle, of mixing and matching Davids and Goliaths, leads to scenes like the one last Friday. This was the first day of the West regional at Cal State Los Angeles in South L.A., featuring eight games over some 12 hours. One of TBT's organizers said the gym had "a Star Wars bar feel." This is exactly right: a gym transformed into a sweatier, ganglier Mos Eisley cantina, ground zero for a collection of characters that would never, under other circumstances, find themselves together under the same roof.

Take that first game, for instance. On one side was Broekhuis, along with nine other former Air Force players. They called themselves the Bomb Squad, an obvious homage to their careers—eight of the ten are on active duty—but also their main on-court strength, which is shooting. They each donned identical warm-up shirts—blue tie-dyes with a skunk on the chest—and while not all of them had played together, they had the distinct advantage of shared experience. "We all know the Princeton offense and once you know the Princeton offense, it's ingrained in you," says power forward Nick Welch. "You pick it up like riding a bike and everybody knows every single play, and it's all read-and-react." Despite hailing from across the country, they even managed to attract their own meager cheering section.

Their opponents were a team called Too Fresh. They featured only one player who played at a four-year college—Eastern New Mexico, home of the Greyhounds—and just five players in total, which meant that they played both 18-minute halves without a single substitution. A few of Too Fresh's players were on the same basketball team at LA's Carson High School; the rest, they met while working together at the Carson Boys and Girls Club. Their tallest player was 6'5''. No one else cracked 6'3''. While the Bomb Squad had an entry in the first TBT, Too Fresh cobbled together its roster two days before the registration deadline.

The game itself played out about as expected. The Bomb Squad bullied Too Fresh with their size advantage and when that grew old, they poured on 17 three-pointers. Too Fresh had worn down towards the end of the first half, flagging and weary. The Bomb Squad, on the other hand, substituted exclusively in hockey-esque line changes, rotating one complete lineup in for another. By halftime, the Air Force guys had doubled their opponents' scores. They ended up winning by 50.

There wasn't much in the way of competition, then, or basketball aesthetics for that matter. Such was the case throughout the day. Five of eight contests were decided by 20 or more points.

Which is fine, because even a blowout can be entertaining with the right teams. The third game of the day featured a team called Mostly Sports, a group of 30- and 40-somethings named after a podcast cohosted by its shaggy small forward, Jay Devlin, who took the floor in an ankle brace and low-cut New Balance running shoes. They played H-Squad, who drew pregame intrigue mostly for who wasn't there. Ty Lawson—yes, that Ty Lawson—was listed on the active roster but he was one of seven players who hadn't shown up with mere minutes left to go in warm-ups, leaving everyone else to wonder what might happen if a team of three in-shape, recent D1 players squared off against five dudes close to twice their age. (For the record, that was a distinct possibility; Josh Selby, a former Kansas one-and-done, dropped 44 points in last year's tournament while playing 4-on-5.)

The fun dampened momentarily when two more starters materialized at the last minute, only to ratchet through the roof thanks to H-Squad's coach, Normela Upshaw. An Indiana basketball Hall of Famer and the first female head coach in LA's prestigious Drew League, she coached the way one would expect someone to with seven-figure money on the line, which is to say that she stalked up and down the sideline, yapping and gesticulating and occasionally jawing with her players. When Mostly Sports made a run midway through the first half, she barked at her charges, every one of whom she'd coached before, like a testy mob boss ordering around muscle: "I need a bucket! Get me a bucket, I don't care how you get it!" She went apoplectic after a foul call, only to immediately carve it into her own underdog narrative. "That's OK, we don't need help anyway!" she yelled, mostly to herself as she marched away from the action in her hi-tops, baggy shorts and polo. "We can win by ourselves!" Before the game, Mostly Sports' coach lounged around as the team went through layup lines. Upshaw, meanwhile, joined her players in mandatory half-court grapevines.

She was awesome, in other words, as was so much else in otherwise nondescript blowouts. It was awesome that the Pistol Shrimps—an all-female rec team of models, actresses and musicians—had a forum to play against LAUNFD, a crew of Los Angeles ballers that featured former Warriors lottery pick Ike Diogu and which was "coached" by the Prince of Swag himself, Nick Young. Ditto the story of West Coast Ronin, who met for the first time in warm-ups. They were assembled by Alan Walls, who works in HR for a tech company and heard about TBT on the radio; he recruited his team by spamming Facebook messages to players through the region. The best of them turned out to be Martin Santos, the only one on the roster without college experience, who made the trek from Seattle and his job in home loans to tally a team-leading 18 points on 7-of-12 shooting.

They lost to 13th-seeded Team 23, a group of aging overseas pros with ties to the Phoenix area. Team 23 was not there for fun, but subsistence. "My kids need some shoes," said 32-year-old small forward Larry Owens, who has spent time on three NBA rosters. For 37-year-old Oregon product Alex Scales, it was diapers. Nigerian big man Augustine Okosun's mother is in the process of immigrating to America; "she's got [to be] taken care of," he said. When the weekend was over, they were one of four teams to advance out of the West region, and the only double-digit seed to do so.

Their next stop is the Super 17 in Chicago, uncharted ground for TBT. The tournament hasn't grown so much as it has erupted – in just one year, the prize money has doubled (from $500,000 to $1,000,000); the field has tripled (32 teams to 97, with the extra spot awarded to the defending champion Notre Dame Fighting Alumni, who received a bye into a play-in game at the Super 17); and the number of regions quadrupled. The spike in coverage is even more dramatic. After only streaming the championship game last year, TBT is now streaming all but nine games on their website, the remainder of which will be aired live on ESPN's air.

It's a leap that the rest of its infrastructure has not quite caught up with yet. The rickety bleachers rumbled whenever the teams ran end to end, which might have had more to do with sparse attendance than faulty construction; there couldn't have been more than 30 spectators in the gym at any time over the first three games. As for media…well, I was the only one there, which did make for easy conversation in the Cal State LA classroom that doubled as the makeshift interview room. And there's also the matter of that announcer.

All of that can be remedied over time, though. The basketball is what matters most, and that part they got right out of the gate. "I'm playing open gyms here in LA, back in San Diego every day," said Marek Klassen, the point guard for West Coast Ronin and a National Christian College Athletic Association All-American for Point Loma. "That's what it felt like. You go into an open gym and there's a lot of pros, a lot of good college hoopers, and you kind of just jump on a squad and play. I feel like this is very basketball culture."

That, as much as the money, is why every team says they'll be back next year—even Too Fresh, the beleaguered five-man squad who got trounced by the Air Force team.

"Next year we're getting past the first round," boasted their coach and general manager Derrin Goudy, before setting more realistic goals. "We'll have eight players at the least. I'll guarantee you that."