I opened up the LA Times yesterday and breezed past this article on the sports page. Because I don’t know the first thing about sports. With just a cursory glance, I assumed that this picture was from a classic game from the 70s. I took a closer look and discovered that this is actually from Monday night’s game. It’s a little more obvious that this is a new photo when you see it in this context, but in the paper, the colors were a little bit washed out and Lamar Odom (on the left) was cropped in half.

There’s something really comforting about seeing athletes with badass afros and hippie beards. Through the 90s, it seemed like every athlete had exactly the same boring shaved-head and conservative style. Maybe it was the Michael Jordan influence. He had a sort of militaristic, highly-disciplined attitude that seemed to be adopted by everyone else in the game. I mean, there was Dennis Rodman, but he’d pretty much be an anomaly in any decade.