​In its early days, basketball was not a sport for the faint of heart. Fights were commonplace, fans lobbed produce onto the court, and sometimes, much like in baseball, kept the Spalding as a souvenir when it bounded into the crowd.  In those days, when the rules still stated that the player who got to an out-of-bounds ball first would retain possession, the ensuing result was lots of diving into the spectators and other slowdowns in play.
 
Hence, a solution was necessary. Enter: a cage.
 
The first instance of a caged basketball game occurred in Trenton, N.J. in 1896, In the following decades, cages would become ubiquitous, and the term “cagers” synonymous with basketball players. The rough-and-tumble era of cagers, in which professionals often returned home to their wives and girlfriends with serious rope burns, endeared basketball in the hearts and minds of many Americans.
 
With baseball as the national pastime and football on the rise, basketball bade its time, slowly growing in sophistication and breadth. With cages largely phased out in the 1930’s, jump shots and dribbling skills (courtesy of CCNY’s Nat Holman) were phased in.
 
But basketball didn’t lose its “cager” mentality. Even as the NBA matured, punches were not infrequently thrown. In the 1970’s, Kareem Abdul Jabbar infamously broke his hand (and Kent Benson’s jaw) with a vicious sucker punch, and Kermit Washington nearly ended Rudy Tomjanovich’s life with an appalling swing.
 
It was at that point, however, that the NBA, at a nadir in popularity and suffering from public image issues relating to drug use and fighting, sought to scrub the “cager” mentality from the minds of its players.
 
That leads us to the present day, where flopping is king and the slightest bit of contact on the perimeter results in a hand check foul. Oh, do I yearn for the days of  cager-like toughness.  With every Marcus Smart flail and James Harden flop, the memory of the cagers becomes evermore distant.
 
While the NBA did right to rid itself of fighting, its subsequent sanitization of all displays of ferocity (like staredowns, for example) has rid the game of one of its initial essential elements: toughness.
 
It is a true shame. Long live the cagers.