Chicago Sun-Times

How about a new kind of madness?

Check out our bracket of 64 basketball movies and see how your picks compare with ours

- RICHARD ROEPER rroeper@suntimes.com @richardero­eper

When it comes to basketball, the 1990s had it all. The greatest run ever. The MVP of all time. The most impressive run anyone has seen, before or since.

No, I’m not talking about the Michael Jordan Bulls. I’m talking about basketball movies.

What a time for hoops flicks! From ‘‘White Men Can’t Jump’’ in the early 1990s to ‘‘He Got Game’’ near the end of the decade, there were a half-dozen good-to-great basketball movies — and I’m not even including ‘‘Space Jam’’ or ‘‘Air Bud’’ on that All-Star team.

The 1980s gave us exactly two memorable b-ball films: ‘‘Teen Wolf’’ and ‘‘Hoosiers.’’ The 1990s gave us the aforementi­oned two classics, plus ‘‘Heaven Is a Playground,’’ ‘‘Hoop Dreams,’’ ‘‘Blue Chips,’’ ‘‘The Basketball Diaries,’’ ‘‘Above the Rim’’ and ‘‘Forget Paris.’’

We even had Whoopi Goldberg as a rabid Knicks fan-turned-head coach of the team (‘‘Eddie’’) and Dan Aykroyd and Daniel Stern as diehard Celtics fan who kidnap the star shooting guard (Damon Wayans) of the Jazz (‘‘Celtic Pride’’) IN THE SAME YEAR (1996).

Like every other major sporting

event, March Madness has been canceled this year. Right around this time, we would have been lamenting the busting of our brackets while sharing in the excitement of the inevitable shocking upsets, cardiac-jolting finishes and star-making performanc­es.

I’ve been rewatching some of the best basketball documentar­ies of all time (the 2010s are far and away the best decade for hoops docs, thanks largely to the ESPN factory), and that got me thinking: What’s the greatest basketball movie of all time, fiction or non-fiction?

Some 64 movies later, here’s my bracket. ✶

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