Author Shea Serrano embraces one of the toughest truths of NBA writing: There’s no simple way to write something new about Michael Jordan. Three decades after his reign in the NBA, there aren’t many fresh ways to frame the success and brilliance of the GOAT. It all has been said and done already . At any given time, Serrano noted he has at least three books about Jordan piled up on his desk, including “The Jordan Rules” by Sam Smith and “When Nothing Else Matters” by Michael Leahy. “Everything has been covered with this guy,” Serrano said. “You can’t just show up and be like, ‘Oh, what a maniacal competitor he was.’ That’s not additive. It’s not interesting.” But when he began working on his fifth book, “Expensive Basketball” — available now in hardcover through Grand Central Publishing — Serrano knew he couldn’t avoid writing about Jordan. PATRICK D. WITTY / CHICAGO TRIBUNEThe Chicago Bulls' Michael Jordan heads up court during a game at the United Center on Dec. 15, 1998. (Chicago Tribune) Serrano wanted to write a book about expensive basketball. The kind of basketball that is more valuable than a statistic or a scoresheet. The type that sticks with a fan for decades, that can be recounted on pure memory. And you can’t write a book about that kind of basketball without writing at length about Jordan — because Jordan played some of the most lavish, expensive basketball of all time. To find a new avenue to discuss Jordan, he turned to Mike Lynch, the executive director of data at Sports Reference who consistently helps Serrano with research projects. Serrano had become fascinated with the fact Jordan won 66% of his regular-season games and 66% of his playoff games. Those numbers were — definitely, obviously, inarguably — a coincidence. But that didn’t make them any less interesting. Serrano wanted to dig deeper, gathering every factoid related to the number 6 that he could find. The goofier, the better. Jordan won six Finals MVP trophies. He shot two of the most iconic shots of his career over players wearing the No. 3. Add that up and it’s another 6. The result is an entire chapter documenting every instance of the number 6 — and its divisors and dividends — in Jordan’s career. Is there a meaning to the repetition of this number? Is it all coincidence? Serrano didn’t need to interrogate either question. He just wanted to capture an oddity in the midst of the greatest basketball career of all time. This chapter ultimately became Serrano’s favorite in the book. It also took the most time and effort to research and write and perfect. And Serrano is confident about the chapter — confident that they will either love it more than any other part of the book or think it was the dumbest thing they ever read. “That’s always a good space to be in when you’re writing,” Serrano said. In many ways, this is the central ethos of Serrano’s writing in “Expensive Basketball.” He didn’t want to write a book about numbers. It’s easy to get stuck on the stats in modern basketball. But when Serrano thinks about the sport, the records and the advanced analytics are never the first thing that spring to his mind. And when he spoke to fellow basketball fans in preparation for writing his latest book, he found that his experience was mostly universal. “No story that I heard ever started with a number,” Serrano said. “It was always a feeling that they were talking about. Basketball fans are smarter than they’ve ever been. They have access to more information than they’ve ever had. So it’s not uncommon to have a normal, casual conversation with a basketball fan where they are referencing efficiency ratings or win shares. Advanced analytics have become a part of casual conversation.” But Serrano also didn’t want to push the facts of the sport to the side. He sees how a deepened understanding of statistics has allowed appreciation of the NBA to deepen beyond simple scoring numbers. And he believes it’s always a positive when fans get smarter about their favorite sport. Instead, Serrano wanted to write about basketball by asking and answering two key questions: Did you care? Why? “The book is not a refutation of stats,” Serrano said. “It’s an affirmation of feelings.” To Serrano, few players support this approach to consuming basketball more than Bulls legend Dennis Rodman. Dennis Rodman leaves the stage carrying on up-side-down NBA trophy at the Bulls' championship rally at Grant Park on June 16, 1998. (Chuck Berman/Chicago Tribune) Many old-school basketball fans believe Rodman exists in a different version of the sport. But Serrano disagrees. He feels that everything that made Rodman stand out in the ’90s — studying the ricochet of specific shots off the rim, tipping rebounds to himself — would only be amplified in the modern NBA. Serrano argues that Rodman, a Hall of Famer, could inform these instincts with advanced analytics that would only make him a smarter, sharper rebounder and defender. And fans would have a more comprehensive way to understand his strengths — for instance, Serrano compared him to Draymond Green as an example of a defensive specialist who has earned both respect and ire throughout the league. “I think Dennis Rodman would not only be able to play in today’s game, I think he would be an incredible weapon that people would appreciate certainly more than they did when he was actually doing it,” Serrano said. “He was intuiting all of that without any numbers. He just felt it. I can’t imagine how even more effective he would be with access to all of that information. … People would’ve loved him today. He would have been a cult figure amongst basketball nerds.” This book was a risk. That felt strange for Serrano to say at this point in his career — after three New York Times bestsellers, the launch of his own digital publishing company, the production of his sitcom series, “Primo.” But “Expensive Basketball” is a stretch for Serrano. When he sold the book in 2021 after finishing “Hip-Hop (and Other Things),” Serrano knew his publisher assumed he planned to follow the same format that launched his success over the last decade. Instead, Serrano envisioned a completely new look for “Expensive Basketball” with a sleeker design and a vertical shape that branched away from his traditional style. “You always have an idea of what you want a thing to feel like, to look like,” he said. “I wanted the book to look important. I wanted it to feel important. That comes down to — not just the writing itself, but also the overall presentation of it. So I had to convince the publisher to make the cover look a certain way and convince them to let me use a certain type of art on the inside. The book looks totally different than all of the other books that I’ve done to this point.” Four years later, Serrano is glad he took the leap. “Expensive Basketball” already hit the New York Times bestseller list and became the No. 1 book in indie bookshops for the first time in his career. And alongside this look, Serrano hopes the writing mirrors the basketball he loves the most — expensive, but well worth the price tag. ...read more read less