The Breaks of the Game
David Halberstam spent a season shadowing the Portland Trail Blazers just three years after their improbable 1977 championship, when Bill Walton had walked out and the roster was fraying. He uses the team as a window into a league grappling with rising salaries, cocaine, television money, and the racial politics that shaped every roster decision. Halberstam moves between coaches, general managers, agents, and rank and file players like Kermit Washington and Bob Gross, treating each life as a lens on labor and ambition. The book is less about box scores than about the business becoming what it is today. Many writers still call it the best basketball book ever written.
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What you might want to know about The Breaks of the Game
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A Pulitzer winner embeds with the 1979-80 Portland Trail Blazers to chart the moment the NBA changed forever.
Simmons has called it the greatest basketball book ever written, citing it constantly on The Ringer and in The Book of Basketball as the model for how to write about the NBA as a business, a workplace, and a culture.
No. Halberstam gives you every player and executive in full, and the themes of money, race, and burnout translate cleanly to today's league.
The Breaks of the Game was written by David Halberstam, published in 1981 by Hyperion.
The Breaks of the Game is 384 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Breaks of the Game takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
The Breaks of the Game is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.