​Are there any great basketball-centered films? I’ll share how I wandered into this summertime distraction and why the sport isn’t often celebrated with the same grand romanticism as baseball. Baseball has its enduring classics—Field of Dreams, The Natural, Bull Durham, and Pride of the Yankees—beloved in their own ways. When it comes to my favorite sport, two titles come to mind, and neither is Space Jam. Hoop Dreams isn’t just excellent basketball cinema; it stands as one of the finest documentaries ever made about any subject. If you’re a hoops enthusiast and haven’t seen it, you owe it to yourself to watch. Then there’s Hoosiers. Miracle on Ice didn’t bolt the picket fence to free Bobby Plump, but Coach Norman Dale’s scrappy band of underdogs did their part. I even know someone at the gym who sports a Hickory High T-shirt—some days I feel I must acquire one as well.
Now, about how I stumbled into this lighthearted summer topic: I saw the headline of a recent article, which I ultimately read, about the making of the 1990s film Blue Chips. Instantly I began wondering why I hadn’t liked it more. Up until recently, I hadn’t given much thought to it since leaving the movie theater. The article on thethathletic.com offers some intriguing behind-the-scenes anecdotes—Bobby Knight’s involvement, and how Shaquille O’Neal decided he wanted Orlando to draft Penny Hardaway. Intrigued, and with a bit of time to spare between World Cup games, I decided to revisit Blue Chips by renting it on Amazon Prime.
It’s not a good film. At times it’s absurd, often nonsensical, and only faintly realistic. It veers toward sentimentality that feels unearned. You have Nick Nolte portraying the by-the-books coach of Western University, a program with national titles and UCLA-colored pride, though their Dolphins are in decline. His character verges on breaking the rules to recruit three hot-shot players, pressured by a domineering booster and a morally ambiguous alum played with broad strokes by J.T. Walsh. The plot features a literal bag-man scene—handing over keys to a car, cash, and a house deed for McRae’s mother. The roster is a mosaic of caricatures: Ricky Roe (Matt Nover, a former Hoosier) from French Lick; Butch McRae from Chicago’s Chi-Town; Neon Boudeaux (Shaquille O’Neal) from Algiers, Louisiana, portrayed as a backwater Bayou town when it sits just across the Mississippi from the French Quarter. The film leans on ethical tension and Nolte’s struggle, as he finally yields to paying for the trio’s recruitment, driven by an overbearing booster. The money exchanges, the keys, the house—moments that feel heavy-handed rather than earned.
And there’s the sense that the filmmakers themselves are more enamored with basketball lore than with storytelling. There are cameos and in-jokes—Jim Boeheim, Jerry Tarkanian, and a nod to a recruiting-knowledge figure that feels like SEO bait—that jarred me and pulled me out of the film’s pretend reality. In short, Blue Chips doesn’t land as a convincing or cohesive portrayal of college hoops. If you’re seeking a thoughtful, well-crafted basketball movie, you’ll find richer fare in Hoop Dreams and Hoosiers, and even in the documentary dimensions of films that explore the sport’s culture and chaos without getting lost in heavy-handed melodrama.