Shot Clock: Journalist John McNamara was writing the definitive history of D.C. high school basketball, until a mass murderer walked into his newsroom.

• Author: Connolly, Matt

The Capital of Basketball: A History of DC Area High School Hoops

by John McNamara with Andrea Chamblee and David Elfin

Georgetown University Press, 336 pp.

In 1997, the late Abe Pollin, then owner of the Washington Bullets, changed his team's name to the Washington Wizards. The move away from "Bullets" followed a decade of high homicide rates in D.C., and in a later press release the team said Pollin dropped the name "to express his abhorrence of gun violence in our community." The Wizards became the only professional sports team in the Washington area to change names for fear of offending fans.

It would be easy to write the move off as politically correct overreach, or even a cynical cover to sell brand-new merchandise to a city that wasn't buying much Bullets gear. After all, what does a basketball team have to do with gun violence? Shouldn't sports be a place people go to escape politics and enjoy themselves?

Tell that to John McNamara--except you can't. A veteran D.C.-area sportswriter, McNamara was completing a definitive history of the region's storied high school basketball scene when, on June 18, 2018, he and four colleagues were killed by a gunman in their offices at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Maryland. In the year after the shooting, Andrea Chamblee, a government lawyer and McNamara's wife of 33 years, and his friend and fellow sportswriter David Elfin finished his book, The Capital of Basketball.

McNamara, who spent more than 30 years covering sports and other local news, understood something many columnists and fans can't seem to accept: Sports is politics. That's why a single tweet in support of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, sent by the general manager of the Houston Rockets, caused Chinese media to stop airing Rockets games and brought the NBA to a public-relations standstill. That's why quarterback Colin Kaepernick was out of an NFL job after spending a season kneeling during the national anthem to protest racism and police brutality. That's why the former sports blog Deadspin covered politics and culture as well as who won and lost--and why the entire editorial staff resigned en masse last October when a new owner ordered them to "stick to sports."

There's plenty of sports in The Capital of Basketball---McNamara must have gone through enough box scores and old press clippings to fill the now-defunct Uline Arena (home of the Washington Capitols, one of the NBA's charter members). The Washington area had an...