The NBA's Problem Is Economics, Not Basketball
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- The ref’s dictate the outcomes of the games more than the players themselves do. I’m of the opinion that when there’s a significant mismatch between two teams (let’s say one team’s stars are injured, or the other team is just simply vastly superior on offense or defense), the ref’s take it upon themselves (perhaps on the league’s orders) to help “even the playing field”, which means calling fouls on one side that they won’t call on the other side, confusing and bewildering everyone including both team’s coaches, the players, the commentators, and the fans watching. This keeps the gambling system better engaged, since predictable one-sided blowouts don’t make for lots of gambling revenue.
- Most of the big name stars are constantly injured, which doesn’t help sell seats/get people to tune in.
- Personality is prohibited. This highly sanitized product is pretty lame to watch. If a player just delivers a nasty dunk and then even so much as looks at the guy they just dunked on, that’s a foul. Players can’t even trash talk each other without the ref’s making it a huge deal and giving them both fouls. That is part of the essence of highly competitive basketball. Imagine giving Michael Jordan or 75% of the players in his era endless fouls simply for the most basic taunting. It would quickly become an unwatchable product that embarrasses all participants, and the players would retreat into their personality shells. People want to see shit talking, they want to see passion, they want to see anger/comedy. It’s exciting. It goes viral. This is not rocket science, NBA.
- region-restricted games are hilarious (awful)
- it’s overpriced
- outside of Inside the NBA with Shaq, Kenny, Chuck, and Ernie, the other show hosts are pretty devoid of personality, and they very rarely have something interesting to say, so there’s no point in watching them.
- I don’t know much about the AAU circuit, but I have heard many folks say that it hasn’t been good for the league. Am curious to learn more there
Aside from the league and refs, a major issue here is simply lack of personality. Players today are just carbon copies of each other. They all do that lame shoulder flex with their arms down (which looks dumb to begin with) and intentionally try to step over the defenders. Either that or the played out three pointer celebrations. Like, come on. Get a personality!
This is a stark contrast from personalities in the 80s and 90s who either treated dunks as business as usual, which is fine in my mind, or had stylistic celebrations.
Have any players of today even heard of Shawn Kemp? https://youtu.be/HQeMhYJe5JA. None of his celebrations were even insulting. They were just stylistic flairs. Not to mention that his, Jordan's, Dominique Wilkins', etc. dunks were far more stylistic than in today's game.
I blame today's NBA on the players as much as the league and organizations. They're just plain boring, from their personalities to play style. It's like just watching pickup games. There's no tension, no style, no personalities, no "must win" attitudes.
If you want personality and style, you've got to let the players play, be emotional, and sometimes be assholes.
> the players would retreat into their personality shells.
These players want to express themselves more, but they’re afraid of punishments from the refs (rightfully so) or the league. It’s gotten pretty bad. Here’s some super quick examples:
- Jayson Tatum gets a tech for clapping because he was frustrated at himself: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=te6l2n2OjH8
- Lu Dort gets a tech for holding up a three sign: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jVowvZFlRR8
In a somewhat Pavlovian response to the ref’s, players are committed to self-censorship; verbally, as well as physically
This is the kind of mockery to professional sports and player expression that I'm talking about. It's rampant.
Or are worried about getting injured, leading to "load management."
On the other hand we get players like Draymond Green getting away with yelling at refs and trying to injure other players like nothing happened.
If the nba inserted a 3 years in college mandatory rule, it would solve a lot of their issues. Players would be much more recognizable. More competitive and ready to compete on day 1 instead of year 4.
It would also take away most of the power AAU coaches, trainers and rankers currently have.
Also, crypto and gambling ads annoy as well.
Um Larry bird never went the free agent route. He always played for the Celtics who drafted him. He's one person who doesn't fit your narrative.
Nothing on my small list of examples was done on VC cash in a few months. And my list was not exhaustive (indicated by “just to name a few”), I’m leaving it up to you to name today’s impactful tech. You don’t think any foundational technology development is happening in the world today? Why? I disagree. Let’s add quantum, smartphones, CRISPR, 3d printing and bitcoin to the list. What is your criteria or metric for declaring information theory above AI? AI is building on theories of intelligence and thought and latent information content in ways Shannon never thought of. We don’t know which of today’s papers will have the most lasting impression yet, let’s revisit this question in the year 2070. I simply pointed out that places to do good research like Shannon was doing are far more common now than when he was doing it.
Anyway, I don’t think it’s true that the average FAANG employee leaves in 1 year. Some people do job-hop looking for more pay or faster advancement, but everyone knows hopping too fast or too often is a red flag on a resume. I work in a big well known tech company amongst hundreds of career researchers, academics, and excellent developers, and your narrative doesn’t fit them at all. I’m aware of lots of other companies with similar situations.
Probably the biggest thing that’s happened between now and Shannon’s day is that corporate research pays so well and there’s so much of it now that researchers are flocking to corporate jobs and leaving academia. That isn’t necessarily a problem in terms of innovation, it might be a good thing on the whole, but it might be a problem for the university ecosystem.
(Not like my dad and I didn't love the epic rivalry the Celtics had with the Lakers in the late 1980s)
On the other hand I love going to men's or women's basketball games at my Uni where you can usually buy a general admission ticket and sit in the front row.
It ain't cheating if you ain't caught.
Honesty is losing in the game of life.
There is a lot of spiciness in soccer where you see a player on your team get a red card and then your team works extra hard down a man for 60 minutes for a draw and then find out the other team has a player who specializes in giving out red cards.
We should train ML to make the foul calls in real-time.
Then get rid of the strict rulebook definition of what a foul is. Have the fans vote on past plays, what should be a defensive/offensive/no foul. Then train the LLM based on the opinions and let it make the foul calls.
There are the L2M reports that detail all the mistakes they make in the end of the game and way too often they’re game altering.
Then there’s the inconsistent approach to the rules. They’ll suddenly decide they want to push a rule, call every tiny infraction on it, then 10 games later it’s like the refs collectively forgot the rule exists at all.
It all makes for an extremely frustrating experience for the players and the fans.
This has always bugged me across all sports. For instance in baseball, while it's gotten a lot better over the years, the inequality of how strike zones were applied was annoying.
Being +1017 in FTA differential when the next closest is +358 isn't explained by whatever crap you're selling
Is it wildly inconceivable that the refs propped up the Hornets for a couple of years? No. Does the only quantitative evidence presented in this thread suggest the refs are propping up a below average Lakers team? Yeah.
The guy has always led with his conclusion before even looking at the evidence, since a long time, right through his Marginal Revolution blog years.
The hypothesis of the author has been true for many years in several soccer leagues. The most famous example being Spain's La Liga, which has been dominated by 2 superteams in the last 2 decades.
Meanwhile, attendance and viewership during this period has dragged noticeably, and in fact, there's constant expert opinion advocating to end the superteam "experiment".
When faced with prospects of two different kinds of boring, Goldsberry points out that the NBA could either make its courts several feet wider to at least diminish the statistical make-percentage advantage of those 3's -- but that this would mess up arena seating arrangements -- or could outright allow teams to draw their own 3-point lines like the local variation in baseball and soccer [2] fields.
Basketball requires control of space and pace, but as athleticism has increasingly been optimized, there's just not enough space there to force interesting trade-offs on every play. So it forces less interesting ones.
[1] https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/26633540/the-nba-obsesse...
[2] https://www.thisisamericansoccer.com/why-are-soccer-fields-d...
All the most popular superstars in the past were hyper-athletic guys who consistently got into the paint and made dazzling shots even against stalwart defenders.
Outside shooters have always been role players until the arrival of Steph Curry. Now half the league plays like wannabe Curry and fans are getting tired of watching their teams miss dozens of 3 pointers every game.
They do that already. They leave the corner shooter open when the ball is on the other side of the paint in order to clog up the middle. When the offence makes a sequence of passes to find the open guy in the corner then they close out to take away the corner 3.
For NBA’s survival 3-pt line needs to be moved at least 6 feet back if not more. Can’t have fucking centers chucking 3’s at 45% clip. The best of the best need to shoot less than 30% from 3’s in order for NBA to change to a more interesting game again. And of course season needs to be cut to no more than 60 games
Is there actually any substance to the narrative? Not in this article. Like most written in this vein, there isn't even an attempt at quantifying support for the story.
So why is this bad? It’s really boring basketball! Watching teams shoot and miss a bit less than 2/3 of their shots with very little the other team’s defence can do about it is not fun to watch!
All of the athleticism and skill of the most famous stars in the NBA’s past has focused on basketball skills: dribbling, crossovers, driving the ball to the basket, making layups and dunks, changing hands mid shot to avoid a block, making turn around jumpers and hook shots, floaters. The one exception to that is Steph Curry who is best known as a shooter but who is frankly a pretty boring player to watch.
The article would of benefitted from comparing the FIBA products, Euroleague and NBA. A lot of comments in this post are different under FIBA rules like longer 3pt lines, no defensive 3 seconds, less timeouts etc. However none make more money or have a viewership more than the NBA.
The flow of the game is crucial but has economic tradeoffs. If the NBA wants a slice of the global pie then i think it may need to adjust some of the rules that benefit the economics in the short term.
unlikeable players - Moses Malone wasn’t nice, but without getting into culture war, it’s different know.
athleticism has beaten the rules. Shrink the rim 2” and force the game back into the paint. (And while you’re at it, make soccer goals bigger.)
I believe in the US, due to TV revenue, the Professional Orgs want playoffs to occur between Nationwide popular teams to maximize TV revenue. So they they want to avoid having 2 teams in the finals that will not generate nationwide ratings.
I have not watched any pro sports for decades. But going back, in basketball the 2 teams that generated huge ratings and buzz a long time ago were LA and Boston. I do not know what the "magic" teams combinations are now, but I am would not be surprised if the refs subtilely try to get the "popular" team to win.