Awards and unanswerable questions from the first Fresh Prince basketball episode
Let’s highlight the greatest moments and ask some impossible questions about the basketball scenes from the iconic Season 1 episode, “Courting Disaster.”
For the past few months, revisiting old basketball games has been a common occurrence.
On March 11, the NBA suspended its season. The following day, the NCAA cancelled both the men’s and women’s 2020 tournaments. A few weeks later, the WNBA announced that the start of its season would be postponed.
The NBA, WNBA and CEBL (Canada!) will all either begin or resume their seasons in the final week of July. In the meantime, though, the only televised basketball in North America is The Basketball Tournament. Many fans have turned to old games for entertainment, with anything from last year’s playoff games to “The Last Dance,” a 10-part documentary series about Michael Jordan’s famous 1990s Chicago Bulls teams.
Today, however, we turn to a different set of famous basketball games from the ’90s. On Nov. 12, 1990 — exactly seven months before Jordan’s Bulls won their first title, oddly enough— The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air aired the 11th episode of its first season, titled “Courting Disaster.”
Since everyone only seems to remember the infamous (and perfect) moment that caps off the episode, let’s just get it out of the way right now.
That’s Carlton Banks, noted Republican, with just about the worst half-court shot — non-Michael Scott division — ever attempted.
We don’t need to rehash this scene too much. A quick recap of the episode leading up to it:
- Will joins the Bel-Air Academy basketball team and immediately becomes a superstar.
- Carlton, who was already on the team, becomes envious of his cousin’s success and how proud it makes Carlton’s father (Will’s uncle Phil).
- With time winding down and Bel-Air Academy down by two points, Carlton rips the ball out of the hands of Will, his own teammate.
- How does that work out for Carlton? See the GIF above.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s start by handing out some awards, then ask some unanswerable questions pertaining to this episode.
Awards
Most Valuable Player: Will Smith
This one is obvious. The first time we see Will playing basketball, he’s just shooting around with his friend Jazz after the team’s practice. Will’s talent is so obvious that Coach Herb Smiley offers Will his car if he’ll play for the team. (This is played off as a joke, but…high school athletes receiving free cars as bribes isn’t unprecedented. More on this later.)
There are two Bel-Air Academy basketball games in this episode; the team scores 64 points in the first game and 59 in the second one, and Will scores every basket that’s shown on screen.
We’re not going to dive into the per-36-minutes and per-possession stats here. Judging by the way Will ignores an entire lineup of open teammates to go coast-to-coast for a layup, it’s pretty clear that he wasn’t passing much. Given what we saw from the team in practice, where they couldn’t make a layup to save their lives, who could blame him?
Let’s assume that Will’s teammates stumble into some open layups and free throws (a pretty generous assumption, to be sure). Even then, Will probably scores around 50 points in each of the two games. He’s unquestionably the MVP, with no other candidates in contention.
Funniest Team Member: Coach Smiley
Smiley just provides endless joy in this episode. Whether he’s addressing the crowd before a game or lecturing his team in practice, Smiley’s sarcastic quips are always perfectly timed. For example, when the headmaster asks Will and Jazz to play for the team, Jazz points out that he doesn’t even go to their school. Smiley’s response: “I’m willing to look past that if you are.”
As mentioned above, Smiley offers his car to Will, which is funny regardless of whether he was being serious. It’s especially great, though, because it perfectly captures the way coaches and recruiters treat young star athletes in North America. Watching this in 2020, a well-versed NBA fan might instantly think of the famous LeBron James Hummer scandal. That wasn’t the first example of a high-ranked prospect receiving gifts in high school, but 13 years after the episode, it essentially fulfilled the exact joke made here.
(The scene is also vaguely reminiscent of Professor McGonagall, another overly competitive fictional teacher, blatantly violating the school Quidditch rules by buying Harry Potter an elite broomstick in his first year at Hogwarts. Just saying.)
Nothing in this episode is better than Smiley’s brilliant basketball tactics, which leads us to…
Best Scene: ‘Pass it to Will’
In between the two games that are shown in this episode, Coach Smiley holds one more practice. Some of the things that happen there:
- A player named Cartwell shows up late; Smiley tells him he’ll have to run 10 laps.
- Will shows up late; Smiley tells him it’s OK because he should save his energy for the game, anyway.
- Smiley says not to make an assumption “because you will be an ass, and the ump will shun you.” (Did anyone’s high school gym teacher not use the “assume” joke/acronym?)
- Smiley draws up several different passing plays, which all lead to the same endpoint: Someone passes to Will.
- Smiley gives Carlton 10 laps for not paying attention because Carlton suggested that a player who’s open near the basket should take a layup (rather than pass it to Will).
- Carlton points out that Will is sleeping through Smiley’s pep talk.
If we include Will’s dream, which is shown just after all that, this scene gets even better. Will dreams about himself playing one-on-one with then-NBA star Isiah Thomas in a commercial; we see Will repeatedly block Isiah’s shots and score on him. It’s always nice to see Isiah Thomas lose (even in a fictional dream from a fictional show).
Best Play: Will’s off the head, splitting the defence, dunk
In one of the earliest plays we see in Will’s first game with the team, he catches the ball at the top of the three-point arc. He pass-fakes over his defender, causing the defender to turn around completely, then bounces the ball off the back of the guy’s head. Will gets it back, dribbles the ball between his defender’s legs, goes right down the middle of the lane and dunks it with two hands.
There are some other great ones — a backwards jump shot, a three-pointer after getting a kiss on the cheek from a cheerleader, and an off-the-backboard alley-oop to himself. This one wins because it has everything: The dribble moves, the showboating, and the dunk to finish.
Best Play If It Wasn’t Completely Illegal: Will’s jump-ball into a midair catch-and-shoot three-pointer
At the start of Will’s first game, he wins the jump-ball by catching it in the air and, before landing on his feet, he shoots from half-court and makes the three-pointer.
Look, it’s illegal to catch the jump-ball — you have to tip it to a teammate — and it should’ve been a violation. But if you’re able to catch it, shoot in midair and score before you hit the ground, all within the first three seconds of your first game, maybe your shot deserves to count.*
*It still shouldn’t have counted.
Unanswerable Questions
Borrowing this concept from The Ringer’s “Rewatchables” podcast, here are some puzzling aspects of the episode that we have to question.
- Why is Bel-Air Academy’s court so small?
The three-point line is only about three feet in front of the half-court line, which means that this high school gym is tiny. That’s pretty strange, considering that this is a private school in Bel-Air, a famously rich area. It’s curious that the gym isn’t more like the one inside Drake’s mansion.
In the episode, the school’s headmaster says that an alumnus is thinking about donating money for a new gym, but he wants to see how good the team is. You could make a case that there hasn’t been a need for a gym because the Bel-Air kids suck so much at basketball, but still, in real life, a private school in Bel-Air would have a bigger and better gym no matter how bad the team is.
2. Why doesn’t Will go on to play college basketball?
This is one of the most inexplicable parts of the show’s entire run. Will plays for the high school team and proves to be an incredible prospect. His 50-ish points per game (that we estimated earlier) would be the best in the country for a high school player today, and probably ever. (It’s closer than you’d expect, but not very close.)
In an episode from Season 2, a college basketball scout even comes to watch one of Will’s games, where he again plays well. He’s clearly one of the best basketball prospects in his graduating year.
You’d think that Will would receive a basketball scholarship to the (fictional) University of Los Angeles, which he and Carlton attend throughout the latter half of the show. Strangely, the basketball-related plots disappear from Fresh Prince after Will finishes high school.
3. How long did it take for Coach Smiley to give up on teaching his players how to make a layup?
The first basketball scene of the episode shows Carlton and the rest of the team warming up in practice with some simple layup lines. As a team, they miss at least six straight layups, and those are only the ones shown on screen. We’re not just talking about misses — these guys are dashing the ball off the backboard, the bottom of the rim, one even flies backwards in the air.
After a while, Coach Smiley blows his whistle to get their attention.
“All right, men,” he says. “Another brilliant warm-up. Frankly, I think there’s been way too much emphasis over the years on putting the ball actually through the hoop.”
He’s clearly worn out, resigned to making sarcastic comments like that one after however long he’s been coaching this hopeless team.
So, that begs the question: When did Coach Smiley finally give up? Did he see them at tryouts and immediately realize the team was a lost cause? Or did he try for a while but eventually start mailing it in, like every New York Knicks head coach of the past two decades?
It’s anyone’s guess.
