Filmmaker and writer, Shaun Scott, is a Laker fan. He grew up in New York City and now lives in Seattle. He’s also one of my favorite people to talk sports with. With the start of the 2014-2015 NBA season starting Tuesday, I thought it best to ask him a few important questions about the Sonics, the Thunder and post-ice ages. 

Jake Uitti: The Seattle SuperSonics moved out of town (read: were stolen from the city) in 2008, yet you and I maintain a strong love for the NBA. Since the season is tipping off Tuesday, allow me to be the first to ask: how have you been spending your life these past six Sonics-less years?

Shaun Scott: The Sonics leaving in 2008 was one more hemorrhage in a time defined by hemorrhages. It’s difficult to overestimate the depressive effect that the Bush Administration had on me, and on members of our generation. Cornel West once described the era of American history from 1980 thru 2008 as a “political ice age”, and while I was living through the tail-end of that period, it felt like absolute zero.

The recessions, the wars, the lies, and the terrorist attacks were concussive events which dampened my expectations as I was graduating from college in 2008, and underwrote what I now realize was a pessimistic outlook. I got married and started my career as a filmmaker in the summer of that year, when a guy named Barack Obama was still a long-shot to dismantle The Clinton Machine. The career lasted; the marriage—in part a casualty of my own selfishness and short-sidedness—didn’t.

To answer the question, I’ve spent my time since 2008 redefining my outlook on life in America, repairing the damaged values of cynicism, criminality, and isolation that I upheld at a time when the country valued those things as well. Honing my craft as a filmmaker has been central to that shift, as has rediscovering my love of professional sports in general, and competition in specific. My politics have grown to be complicated: a residual distaste for the influence corporations wield in politics, coupled with extremely leftist social views and fiscal conservatism, often wrapped in black nationalist packaging. So let’s get one thing clear: I don’t love the NBA—at least, not unconditionally.

I enjoy the league to the extent that it sponsors images of African-American empowerment, endorses a competitive worldview that inspires us to embrace a steady work ethic, and fosters municipal pride. But as a corporation with parasitic tendencies that leverages depressed cities against one another, preys on their insecurities which are based on a condition of perma-recession that set in as a result of deindustrialization, and enables racist owners like Donald Sterling, I detest it. If it were possible to have Kobe Bryant and The Sonics and the fascinating storylines surrounding LeBron James’ career choices without the NBA, I’d take it. But you can see where that’s pure centrist fantasy.

Honestly, my goal these last 6 years is the same I have for the next 60: get what I can materially from what the money-driven society surrounding me has to offer, self-perfect as an artist whose singular goal is unrelenting criticism of the capitalist status quo, and minimize the moral damage done to my private life by having to operate in a system that probably isn’t designed to have me succeed in it.

JU: Political ice age and a sports ice age in Seattle. What’s happening now? A political and athletic thaw, and for you a personal Spring? What is your own state of game to game following? And what of the Thunder?

SS: We’ll see what happens: I’m a Laker fan and obviously the team is down this year. When the season starts I’ll enjoy a few of the swirling storylines: Kobe’s last couple of years, the ongoing soap opera of LeBron’s career, the increasingly interesting ways in which data is being used to play and understand the sport. Personally, over the next couple of years I’ll be working on some new films, getting an MBA, and making ways to get national exposure as a filmmaker and a writer. And literally none of that in any way has anything at all do with The Oklahoma City Thunder, ever.

JU: Who is going to win the NBA championship?

SS: Well statistically the Lakers have to be the odds-on favorite, since they have more rings than anyone else in the NBA’s modern era. That’s how it works, right? I mean, I wouldn’t mind seeing the Clippers win, because the league is more interesting to follow when institutional racism is at the forefront of the conversation surrounding it. So I’m picking them to come out of the west, and obviously they’ll meet the Cavs. Many are ready to crown Chicago, but we forget that even when the team’s current nucleus was at its absolute best in 2011, they still had no answer for LeBron in particular. Have to go with Cleveland in 6.