Daryl Morey was first associated with the term “small ball” back in the late 2010s, when the Houston Rockets teams he supervised as general manager ran unusually small lineups, led by James Harden.
Also around 2018, while still in Houston, Morey supervised the first production of Small Ball, an original stage musical about basketball, featuring characters named “Michael Jordan,” “Phil Jackson,” “Bird” and “Magic,” as well as an “analytics expert” character.
After a workshop two years ago, Small Ball has a full-on production at the Philadelphia Theatre Company, just a couple of miles north on Broad Street from where Morey currently works as the president of basketball operations for the Philadelphia 76ers. Morey recently took time out of his NBA draft prep schedule to premiere the show on Wednesday; I caught it the following night.
Morey is something of a renaissance man, who helped bring about the revolution of analytics in basketball and cofounded the Sloan Sports Conference at MIT. He’s a chess enthusiast, and had Michael Lewis write a book about him. He once ran afoul of China with a tweet supporting freedom for Hong Kong, and is also, it appears, a longtime musical theater fan.
Credited as having “commissioned and co-produced” Small Ball, Morey is almost certainly the first active NBA lead executive to produce a professional musical theater production, much less one as odd and surreal as this one.
Authored by playwright Mickle Maher, Small Ball’s inspirations are many, from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to Pippin and other musical theater touchstones; Morey has also said the show was at least partially inspired by former NBA star Stephon Marbury’s late-career sojourn to China. So for that, perhaps the Chinese might forgive him.
Small Ball’s Insane Plot
The plot of Small Ball doesn’t sound real, but I’ll give it a shot, as does the play itself, with a opening scene that lays on a massive amount of exposition.
It begins with the conceit that the human race has discovered that Lilliput, the island of tiny people from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, actually exists, as do all other mythical lands in fiction.
Naturally, this land of six-inch people has decided to compete in international basketball, and for help, they’ve brought in Michael Jordan. No, not the real MJ, but rather a different American basketball player whose name happens to be Michael Jordan.
They’re natural underdogs, mostly because MJ (and presumably all the opposing players/creatures) are normal-sized and the rest of the players are six inches tall. The first scene, and a couple of subsequent ones, are set in postgame press conferences.
Also, they play four-on-five, since the Lilliputans don’t believe in the number 5. And the teammates develop resentment that Jordan won’t pass them the ball — something that actually happened with the real Michael Jordan — but this time he has a good excuse, since they’re not physically able to hold or shoot the ball. (Jordan is played in the Philly production by Jordan Dobson, who played the conducting student who was taught by Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein, and later is seen dancing with him, in the closing scenes of Cooper’s 2023 movie Maestro.)
The show is somewhat half-hearted when it comes to showing the height differences, sometimes representing them in shadows behind a curtain, and sometimes having the characters wear puppets. And that’s before a subplot comes up related to human/Lilliputian sexual intercourse.
The coach, meanwhile, has adopted the moniker “Coach Phil Jackson,” while giving two other players on the team the names “Magic” and “Bird.” A scheming assistant coach is named “Pippen,” a duel homage to Scottie and the musical Pippin.
There’s a lot more going on, too – Jordan misses his sick mother, while “Coach Jackson”’s wife, the one who holds the Morey-like job of supervising analytics, is considering leaving both the team and him.
It’s a very strange piece of theater, one that I could tell left a lot of audience members somewhat baffled. It is, to mix sports metaphors, a big, big swing. I’m not entirely sure it connected, but I’m glad something so bizarre was even attempted.
Small Ball runs through June 29 at the Philadelphia Theatre Company.
