Drawing primarily from critical pedagogy, decoloniality, and relevant research on "home," we offer critical perspectives on how these areas of inquiry work in dialectical ways to inform our researcher/scholarly positionalities. Largely situated within autoethnographic methods, we link this work to basketball, and as players of the game, we bring in notions of desire, politics, and emancipatory visions of play as we make connections to research from a critical orientation. We conclude with the idea of Torn Nets as a poetic metaphor for imaging through the opportunities to engage in critical research that engages the incomplete and contradictory visuals, games, and courts within academia.