The game lacks the variety that once made it so interesting. For instance, the pass-first point guard and the back-to-the-basket center have gone the way of the dinosaur.
Would the present-day NBA have any use for Isiah Thomas or Patrick Ewing? The evolution of the game has deleted entire classes of players.
The issues run deeper than the nerds. For a while, analytics made the game more visually pleasing and more enjoyable to watch, but then too much of a good thing seems to have pushed us past a point of equilibrium.
Every sport struggles or has struggled with this, but the NBA is clearly at an inflection point. The question: Is Adam Silver the right guy to fix it? Maybe he needs his own Theo Epstein.
Considering that Joel Embiid and Nicola Jokic won 4 straight MVPs and finished 1-2 in 3 consecutive years....yes there would be "a place" for Patrick Ewing.
Isiah Thomas? Yes teams are very much looking for perimeter players who can score, penetrate, and find open teammates. He would shoot more 3s obviously, but he is close to the archetype of a modern lead guard.
If people don't like the NBA, that's fine. But to justify they say such weird and inaccurate things. Like I dont watch baseball and college basketball anymore because I just dont have time to watch everything. But with the NBA people just come up with these crazy reasons that don't make any sense.
I agree with you. However, with few exceptions, there are way less post ups per game, even when a team has a great big like Jokic. I miss watching post ups and bad mid range shots but also understand why they are gone from the game. I think one thing you can do to bring back the post man and make more bigs more valuable on offense is to shrink the key. I think it was widened to combat guys like Chamberlain. Let them post up deeper without it being 3 in the key. The only thing left I like about college basketball is sometimes you still get to see a dominant big post up 4-5 times in a row and see his array of post moves. And do so without flopping.
I agree with most of this, but a missing piece is that games are just not properly officiated. Players exploit gray areas (the Harden example) but also blatantly break straightforward rules on a nightly basis and get away with it. If a guy doesn’t inbound the ball in time, that’s against the rules. If it doesn’t get whistled, that’s not taking advantage of loopholes; it’s the refs not doing their jobs. I understand the reluctance - it’s a star-driven league, and whistling a superstar for a travel or a lane violation or some other small thing makes him look like a dumbass, which hurts his brand image. It doesn’t have to be that way - even though both leagues are rife with preferential calls, I still think there’s a big difference between the NBA and NFL when it comes to brutal technicalities being enforced. At least once during football season we’ll see a walkoff touchdown called back because the player dropped the ball before crossing the goal line. When’s the last time you saw a breakaway dunk get waved off because Giannis took four steps after the dribble? That shit would NEVER happen. Well… maybe it should, Mr. Silver. If even the non-subjective calls get deliberately botched, it just feeds another layer of distrust and exasperation on an increasingly loosey-goosey product.
I think the issue is maybe that when guys got foul calls in the past, it felt and looked like a foul. Also, we just have worse attention spans. Nobody is trying to watch free throws. I wish they would change the rule to make it where you have 1 free throw to make 2/3. Combine free throws with the fact that it takes forever to do reviews and we have these long tv timeouts, don’t be surprised when people decide to watch something else. The NBA is just generally not a great entertainment in today’s world
Because unlike the 1980s, players constantly flop like never before to get the free throws. Players driving to the lane, hooking the defenders arm, flailing, and then throwing up a shot that they have no intention of going to in to get a foul call is not fun to watch. So when people see that, they say, "too many fouls are called" even if there are less free throws today than in the past.
Also, maybe am I wrong, but free throws are down when you adjust pace, but in terms of raw totals, free throw number are up. So people are seeing more free throws shot overall.
I side more with Wos on this one. I mentioned this in a previous comment, that NBA media loves to tell you how smart they are. I initially thought it was because they wanted to be seen in the Zach Lowe light, but I realized it's the opposite.
They don't want to be seen as Skip Bayless or Stephen A. Smith.
Skip and Stephen A. are known for saying wild things that lack substance. Because of that most other media members overcompensate by siding with the nerds, to distance themselves from the hot takers
I don't blame only the nerds in a vacuum, but I do blame the media for always siding with them. Just because a strategy supports someone's selfish interests does not mean it should blindly be respected by those on the outside.
Using tanking as an example, we know tanking is "bad," but there are times when neutral fans understand it:
- Pacers this year with Haliburton out for the season
- Tanking during a quick rebuild
So the issue is not actually tanking, it's both the nerds defaulting to tank without trying anything else -- which is what the league should try to solve -- and some members of the media blindly supporting and giving a pass to tanking that makes a mockery of the sport:
- Supporting teams like the Wizards who (prior to the deadline) had no vision whatsoever, and just tanking until they get lucky in the draft
- The Jazz pulling all of their good players in the 4th of a close game.
What's next, teams forfeiting games?
Why even play the game and put your players at risk for injury? Just forfeit the game, take the loss, and go 0-82 so that you can have the highest possible odds for a top draft pick.
Teams would rightfully get called out for that, even though the incentive, math, and analytics say that's the smart thing to do. But it doesn't have to be that extreme in order to call teams out.
That's where Wos and I are at. Like 100% call out the league, but we have to have some standards for teams as well. We can't give them a pass just because they are "incentivized" to behave this way.
In the NFL 2K days there was an unstoppable fake punt play that my little brother would run on 1st Down...(nice anecedote)
It IS the nerds fault though. Even now they love this game and see nothing wrong with it.
That brilliant Steph Curry Olympic finish was legendary BECAUSE there was a risk to taking those lower percentage shots. We knew he could make them. We knew what it meant if he missed. He wasn't going to be rewarded for flopping or bailed out by international refs.
He accepted the risk and took the ball on a team of Hall of Famers. The risk/reward aspect of basketball is crucial to the viewing experience
They’re both right: the stats nerds are autists who want to be proven to be superior to other people when their theories are proven correct, the media people are extremely status insecure and want to be superior to other people for any reason, and Silver is an example of the MBAization of everything, trying to exploit any marginal efficiencies he can find to juice growth and present better numbers in the short term, without any serious thought of how that can negativity effect the product that he’s ostensibly supposed to be selling. Hence, it’s the devilish cycle of stats nerds finding a “glitch”, media jumping on the poptimism bandwagon and browbeating anyone critical of the league or the players, and Silver leveraging projected international growth numbers and personal media rivalries to get monster tv deal and drive up team valuations, despite large declines in viewership and attendance for the actual on-court product.
Success has many fathers, but ruination somehow has more.
As I glance over sports news, I’ve read a lot of purported reasons for what has ruined the NBA. Let’s see - too many “inventory” games, uncritical media coverage, too much pace, a lack of physicality, too much spacing, load management, “one-and-done” college players, no team defense, tanking, the Lakers, poor officiating, the “Apron,” a weak and ineffectual Commissioner, Steve Ballmer and billionaire owners, the absence of postseason logos on the courts, Doris Burke, an uninspiring TV theme song, strip club marketing collaborations, and disparagement of Kobe’s legacy…
…to name but a few.
It’s exhausting to keep track of. But what about the most popular theory regarding those so-called “nerds” and all the NBA three-point shooting? Is there something to the idea that optimization has somehow ruined the aesthetics of the game?
The nerds certainly think so. Their overly defensive push-back from the increasing criticism is palpable…as is their sanctimonious self-serving portrayal of themselves as saviors of the unwashed masses from the fires of ignorance and inefficiency before their arrival. “I mean three IS more than two…right?” …as they awkwardly chuckle to themselves. The nerds need better PR.
But what about those countervailing forces of optimization and aesthetics?
Sports is to a significant degree artistry. The world is filled with stories of artists struggling in pursuit of perfection and producing great works that are flawed in some way. I had an image burned into my memory decades ago from reading about Tom Petty despondent and sobbing outside Studio City because producer Jimmy Iovine after 150+ takes would not allow him to rework his seminal “Refugee” to perfection. Iovine said it was “good enough” and they didn’t have enough studio time to continue reworking it.
Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench would later say, “Studio A was a tough room for Tom.” After the passage of time, Petty would acknowledge that “Refugee” just somehow worked despite his inability to achieve perfection.
Stories such as this have a common thread where greatness is forced upon an artist through constraints that mute their self-destructive tendencies to want perfection. While we tell ourselves we want perfection through optimization, we soon realize that these efforts at some point become counterproductive. They eventually destroy the humanity of the work, rendering it overdone, homogenized, empty, and aesthetically less pleasing and enjoyable than in its more “raw” state. Optimization, taken to extremes, destroys the subtle beauty of human artistic expression that we treasure precisely because of its imperfections.
Great art in any form, including sports, is ultimately about surprise. If we are not surprised by art, we are quickly bored with it. We fondly remember so many sports moments because they surprised us at the time and somehow still do. Each was unexpected and often the result of some perceived failure or breakdown e.g., Lorenzo Charles’ put-back of Dereck Whittenburg’s errant shot in 1983 for NC State’s championship or the Stanford Band flooding the field against Cal too early four months before.
These moments are important to us because they varied from our expectations – not lowered them by optimizing around them. These moments remind us of how unpredictable and exciting humans can be.
It is this surprise from unpredictability – variability – that teams and their armies of analysts now seek to wrestle to the ground and vanquish. Not from ill intentions or motives, but because they believe this is what we want - what we are demanding. More points…more victories…more trophies. At any cost.
Adding to the confusion, we constantly contradict ourselves regarding optimization in sports. We excitedly talk about how our team is now “using advanced analytics” to win more games and spit out arcane statistical acronyms we don’t fully understand – to only then complain that what we are seeing isn’t entertaining.
Take the recent NBA tanking complaints. I hear people howling that tanking is destroying the integrity and moral fabric of the NBA and rendering the regular season a charade…only to immediately then hear that the Wizards are “so smart” for doing so. So, you can understand the nerds’ confusion. What we say out loud isn’t what we really want or need.
But there is something to seeing a missed free throw, an errant brush stroke in a painting, or hearing an imperfect drum fill on a favorite song to remind us that this was created by other human beings…with all their imperfections, hopes, and intentions. It reminds us that we are a part of that imperfect human experience and what makes us human too.
There is beauty in imperfections - something valuable, vital, and exciting from experiencing something that is unexpectedly less than perfect. The Japanese refer to this as “wabi-sabi” or finding beauty in imperfection and incompleteness by appreciating the authentic in lieu of the perfect.
So too with sports. But we first need to admit that we are conflicted. We worship the algorithm, but don’t want to live with it or have a beer with it. We prefer our imperfect friends and families instead.
Optimization as currently personified in the analytics class seeks to minimize the imperfections in sports along with their surprises and variable elements - and replace them with ruthless mechanized strategies and execution to reduce the risks to the outcome. Optimization works best for industrial applications…far less so for artistic efforts because there is a sizeable cost to be paid. Optimization seeks to eliminate surprise and in so doing, it exchanges aesthetic beauty and entertainment for better outcomes.
Predictability - not surprise - is the altar at which the nerds worship and from there, their efforts take artists and athletes and turn them essentially into the equivalent of lathe operators on an assembly line. More valuable according to a spreadsheet perhaps, but not interesting to watch.
So, there exists a stark difference between optimization and aesthetics that we need to appreciate and internalize as fans. Optimization can make many elements of our lives better and more efficient. Yet, it can go too far in art and sports for which we need a Jimmy Iovine to help us find balance. It is imperfections, and all the variability and surprise they create that makes life and sports interesting.
So, have the “nerds” hurt the aesthetics of basketball by destroying its variability and accompanying surprises? The answer is almost certainly “yes.” However, it’s important to remember that they have done so only because we asked them to.
NBA coverage - first take brain, inside the nba rot, and unlimited stats and information have ruined the ability of fans to discuss the nba. seems there are 2 types of nba fans: box score-highlight fans and watch the game fans, and rarely do they agree.
There are the “I follow the nba through twitter fans” and “I consume the nba through podcast fans.” There’s a ton of overlap and they all lie about watching games.
I think you’re all worried about the wrong problem: The optimization that’s killing sports is at the rec level for kids, where we can’t just let them go play outside and put together a game of their own. Now it has to be “organized”, which leads to it becoming suburbanized, even in cities. God forbid your seven year-old isn’t at the same level as the others. You want to “bring back bullying”? I can assure you it hasn’t gone away, and it’s killing me as a parent.
I’ll try to keep this to baseball because that’s what I know best. First, a show of hands: How many of you read Rob Neyer or rec.sport.baseball in the ‘90s? Both of you will remember how unbelievably hostile the media and teams were towards simple ideas like “it’s good to take a walk” or “bunting the leadoff runner over in the first inning is very bad”, so if some of us wanted to take a victory lap, I don’t think it’s that hard to understand.
But nerds in baseball have been pretty level-headed and epistemically humble. Scouting has mostly been respected (Moneyball, the book and movie, was a mixed blessing), as exemplified by Dayn Perry’s like about beer and tacos (why not have both?). Neyer thought there was no way catchers could have a lot of influence on a game, but further research and new pitch f/x data showed how pitch framing can tilt a game.
In that vein, people like Joe Sheehan (get him on the show!) have been pointing out the death of singles and increase in strikeouts for almost 10 years now. Yes, the nerds started the Three True Outcomes revolution, *and* they understand the macro ramifications!
And it’s not like the things us statheads were pointing out were secrets: Branch Rickey; Earl Weaver; Davey Johnson. All of them knew these simple ideas and used them to great effect. You think *they* ruined baseball? Are we supposed to ignore their wisdom?
The other thing that sneering at nerds doesn’t address is that athletes are bigger, stronger, quicker, and better trained than ever. For baseball, the arms race between #9 hitters being able to take pitchers deep on a middle-middle pitch and…well arms had caused singles to dry up: You’re not getting multi-sequence events against 99 with movement, so you have to go for the bomb. That won’t improve until velocity decreases: You need a deader ball thrown from further back. The shift is not the problem, and if you’d stop shouting at nerds maybe we could work on this together.
Can we talk about how the nerds think they are cool? I think that’s the bigger issue. One thing I like about Nate Duncan’s nerdy basketball podcast is they own it, make fun of their nerd basketball fandom. (Even though I know Nate has some jock in him). Too many nerdy NBA pods spend way too much time laughing at their own jokes. I imagine there are all these Reddit nerds on the other end laughing with them. The internet made it where all nerds can find a pocket of the internet where they are cool. #bring back bullying
In the name of optimization, Curry allowing the Warriors to sign Durant was exponentially more harmful to competitive balance than what Harden was doing. In directing Silver’s focus toward preventing a reoccurrence of that immediate imbalance he lost sight of the more subtle gameplay issues.
The game lacks the variety that once made it so interesting. For instance, the pass-first point guard and the back-to-the-basket center have gone the way of the dinosaur.
Would the present-day NBA have any use for Isiah Thomas or Patrick Ewing? The evolution of the game has deleted entire classes of players.
The issues run deeper than the nerds. For a while, analytics made the game more visually pleasing and more enjoyable to watch, but then too much of a good thing seems to have pushed us past a point of equilibrium.
Every sport struggles or has struggled with this, but the NBA is clearly at an inflection point. The question: Is Adam Silver the right guy to fix it? Maybe he needs his own Theo Epstein.
The fact that Rob Manfred(!!) is objectively better than Adam Silver at policing the quality of his sport should make us all take a step back.
Considering that Joel Embiid and Nicola Jokic won 4 straight MVPs and finished 1-2 in 3 consecutive years....yes there would be "a place" for Patrick Ewing.
Isiah Thomas? Yes teams are very much looking for perimeter players who can score, penetrate, and find open teammates. He would shoot more 3s obviously, but he is close to the archetype of a modern lead guard.
If people don't like the NBA, that's fine. But to justify they say such weird and inaccurate things. Like I dont watch baseball and college basketball anymore because I just dont have time to watch everything. But with the NBA people just come up with these crazy reasons that don't make any sense.
I agree with you. However, with few exceptions, there are way less post ups per game, even when a team has a great big like Jokic. I miss watching post ups and bad mid range shots but also understand why they are gone from the game. I think one thing you can do to bring back the post man and make more bigs more valuable on offense is to shrink the key. I think it was widened to combat guys like Chamberlain. Let them post up deeper without it being 3 in the key. The only thing left I like about college basketball is sometimes you still get to see a dominant big post up 4-5 times in a row and see his array of post moves. And do so without flopping.
70s basketball changed in the 80s which changed in the 90s which changed in the 2000s which changed in the 10s which changed in the 20s
every decade provided different styles and stars. very curious when the "so interesting" era of basketball existed?
I agree with most of this, but a missing piece is that games are just not properly officiated. Players exploit gray areas (the Harden example) but also blatantly break straightforward rules on a nightly basis and get away with it. If a guy doesn’t inbound the ball in time, that’s against the rules. If it doesn’t get whistled, that’s not taking advantage of loopholes; it’s the refs not doing their jobs. I understand the reluctance - it’s a star-driven league, and whistling a superstar for a travel or a lane violation or some other small thing makes him look like a dumbass, which hurts his brand image. It doesn’t have to be that way - even though both leagues are rife with preferential calls, I still think there’s a big difference between the NBA and NFL when it comes to brutal technicalities being enforced. At least once during football season we’ll see a walkoff touchdown called back because the player dropped the ball before crossing the goal line. When’s the last time you saw a breakaway dunk get waved off because Giannis took four steps after the dribble? That shit would NEVER happen. Well… maybe it should, Mr. Silver. If even the non-subjective calls get deliberately botched, it just feeds another layer of distrust and exasperation on an increasingly loosey-goosey product.
tough for me to support knowing the NBA calls less fouls and shoots less free throws than ever before
how do you account for NBA teams shooting less free throws/game in recent years if what you said is true?
I think the issue is maybe that when guys got foul calls in the past, it felt and looked like a foul. Also, we just have worse attention spans. Nobody is trying to watch free throws. I wish they would change the rule to make it where you have 1 free throw to make 2/3. Combine free throws with the fact that it takes forever to do reviews and we have these long tv timeouts, don’t be surprised when people decide to watch something else. The NBA is just generally not a great entertainment in today’s world
the narrative around nba ft's is one of the most inaccurate narratives in professional sports history
how can the lowest amount of fta and fouls called since 1980 (modern day) be a big problem for so many?
Because unlike the 1980s, players constantly flop like never before to get the free throws. Players driving to the lane, hooking the defenders arm, flailing, and then throwing up a shot that they have no intention of going to in to get a foul call is not fun to watch. So when people see that, they say, "too many fouls are called" even if there are less free throws today than in the past.
you are asking me to believe you and others would prefer a league where players shoot ft's when the defender sneezes. i'll never believe that
Also, maybe am I wrong, but free throws are down when you adjust pace, but in terms of raw totals, free throw number are up. So people are seeing more free throws shot overall.
Make Traveling Great Again
I side more with Wos on this one. I mentioned this in a previous comment, that NBA media loves to tell you how smart they are. I initially thought it was because they wanted to be seen in the Zach Lowe light, but I realized it's the opposite.
They don't want to be seen as Skip Bayless or Stephen A. Smith.
Skip and Stephen A. are known for saying wild things that lack substance. Because of that most other media members overcompensate by siding with the nerds, to distance themselves from the hot takers
The nerds to not have the ability to add rules to regulate the issue. Silver does.
I don't blame only the nerds in a vacuum, but I do blame the media for always siding with them. Just because a strategy supports someone's selfish interests does not mean it should blindly be respected by those on the outside.
Using tanking as an example, we know tanking is "bad," but there are times when neutral fans understand it:
- Pacers this year with Haliburton out for the season
- Tanking during a quick rebuild
So the issue is not actually tanking, it's both the nerds defaulting to tank without trying anything else -- which is what the league should try to solve -- and some members of the media blindly supporting and giving a pass to tanking that makes a mockery of the sport:
- Supporting teams like the Wizards who (prior to the deadline) had no vision whatsoever, and just tanking until they get lucky in the draft
- The Jazz pulling all of their good players in the 4th of a close game.
What's next, teams forfeiting games?
Why even play the game and put your players at risk for injury? Just forfeit the game, take the loss, and go 0-82 so that you can have the highest possible odds for a top draft pick.
Teams would rightfully get called out for that, even though the incentive, math, and analytics say that's the smart thing to do. But it doesn't have to be that extreme in order to call teams out.
That's where Wos and I are at. Like 100% call out the league, but we have to have some standards for teams as well. We can't give them a pass just because they are "incentivized" to behave this way.
In the NFL 2K days there was an unstoppable fake punt play that my little brother would run on 1st Down...(nice anecedote)
It IS the nerds fault though. Even now they love this game and see nothing wrong with it.
That brilliant Steph Curry Olympic finish was legendary BECAUSE there was a risk to taking those lower percentage shots. We knew he could make them. We knew what it meant if he missed. He wasn't going to be rewarded for flopping or bailed out by international refs.
He accepted the risk and took the ball on a team of Hall of Famers. The risk/reward aspect of basketball is crucial to the viewing experience
3/4 Steph 3's came with a 6 point USA lead and the other with a 3 point lead. Tough to accept shots are risky with a multiple possession lead.
Three point shots with a 6 point lead aligns much more with nerds than old school basketball.
They’re both right: the stats nerds are autists who want to be proven to be superior to other people when their theories are proven correct, the media people are extremely status insecure and want to be superior to other people for any reason, and Silver is an example of the MBAization of everything, trying to exploit any marginal efficiencies he can find to juice growth and present better numbers in the short term, without any serious thought of how that can negativity effect the product that he’s ostensibly supposed to be selling. Hence, it’s the devilish cycle of stats nerds finding a “glitch”, media jumping on the poptimism bandwagon and browbeating anyone critical of the league or the players, and Silver leveraging projected international growth numbers and personal media rivalries to get monster tv deal and drive up team valuations, despite large declines in viewership and attendance for the actual on-court product.
All of this is true in business, politics, education, and every other aspect of our society as well.
Success has many fathers, but ruination somehow has more.
As I glance over sports news, I’ve read a lot of purported reasons for what has ruined the NBA. Let’s see - too many “inventory” games, uncritical media coverage, too much pace, a lack of physicality, too much spacing, load management, “one-and-done” college players, no team defense, tanking, the Lakers, poor officiating, the “Apron,” a weak and ineffectual Commissioner, Steve Ballmer and billionaire owners, the absence of postseason logos on the courts, Doris Burke, an uninspiring TV theme song, strip club marketing collaborations, and disparagement of Kobe’s legacy…
…to name but a few.
It’s exhausting to keep track of. But what about the most popular theory regarding those so-called “nerds” and all the NBA three-point shooting? Is there something to the idea that optimization has somehow ruined the aesthetics of the game?
The nerds certainly think so. Their overly defensive push-back from the increasing criticism is palpable…as is their sanctimonious self-serving portrayal of themselves as saviors of the unwashed masses from the fires of ignorance and inefficiency before their arrival. “I mean three IS more than two…right?” …as they awkwardly chuckle to themselves. The nerds need better PR.
But what about those countervailing forces of optimization and aesthetics?
Sports is to a significant degree artistry. The world is filled with stories of artists struggling in pursuit of perfection and producing great works that are flawed in some way. I had an image burned into my memory decades ago from reading about Tom Petty despondent and sobbing outside Studio City because producer Jimmy Iovine after 150+ takes would not allow him to rework his seminal “Refugee” to perfection. Iovine said it was “good enough” and they didn’t have enough studio time to continue reworking it.
Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench would later say, “Studio A was a tough room for Tom.” After the passage of time, Petty would acknowledge that “Refugee” just somehow worked despite his inability to achieve perfection.
Stories such as this have a common thread where greatness is forced upon an artist through constraints that mute their self-destructive tendencies to want perfection. While we tell ourselves we want perfection through optimization, we soon realize that these efforts at some point become counterproductive. They eventually destroy the humanity of the work, rendering it overdone, homogenized, empty, and aesthetically less pleasing and enjoyable than in its more “raw” state. Optimization, taken to extremes, destroys the subtle beauty of human artistic expression that we treasure precisely because of its imperfections.
Great art in any form, including sports, is ultimately about surprise. If we are not surprised by art, we are quickly bored with it. We fondly remember so many sports moments because they surprised us at the time and somehow still do. Each was unexpected and often the result of some perceived failure or breakdown e.g., Lorenzo Charles’ put-back of Dereck Whittenburg’s errant shot in 1983 for NC State’s championship or the Stanford Band flooding the field against Cal too early four months before.
These moments are important to us because they varied from our expectations – not lowered them by optimizing around them. These moments remind us of how unpredictable and exciting humans can be.
It is this surprise from unpredictability – variability – that teams and their armies of analysts now seek to wrestle to the ground and vanquish. Not from ill intentions or motives, but because they believe this is what we want - what we are demanding. More points…more victories…more trophies. At any cost.
Adding to the confusion, we constantly contradict ourselves regarding optimization in sports. We excitedly talk about how our team is now “using advanced analytics” to win more games and spit out arcane statistical acronyms we don’t fully understand – to only then complain that what we are seeing isn’t entertaining.
Take the recent NBA tanking complaints. I hear people howling that tanking is destroying the integrity and moral fabric of the NBA and rendering the regular season a charade…only to immediately then hear that the Wizards are “so smart” for doing so. So, you can understand the nerds’ confusion. What we say out loud isn’t what we really want or need.
But there is something to seeing a missed free throw, an errant brush stroke in a painting, or hearing an imperfect drum fill on a favorite song to remind us that this was created by other human beings…with all their imperfections, hopes, and intentions. It reminds us that we are a part of that imperfect human experience and what makes us human too.
There is beauty in imperfections - something valuable, vital, and exciting from experiencing something that is unexpectedly less than perfect. The Japanese refer to this as “wabi-sabi” or finding beauty in imperfection and incompleteness by appreciating the authentic in lieu of the perfect.
So too with sports. But we first need to admit that we are conflicted. We worship the algorithm, but don’t want to live with it or have a beer with it. We prefer our imperfect friends and families instead.
Optimization as currently personified in the analytics class seeks to minimize the imperfections in sports along with their surprises and variable elements - and replace them with ruthless mechanized strategies and execution to reduce the risks to the outcome. Optimization works best for industrial applications…far less so for artistic efforts because there is a sizeable cost to be paid. Optimization seeks to eliminate surprise and in so doing, it exchanges aesthetic beauty and entertainment for better outcomes.
Predictability - not surprise - is the altar at which the nerds worship and from there, their efforts take artists and athletes and turn them essentially into the equivalent of lathe operators on an assembly line. More valuable according to a spreadsheet perhaps, but not interesting to watch.
So, there exists a stark difference between optimization and aesthetics that we need to appreciate and internalize as fans. Optimization can make many elements of our lives better and more efficient. Yet, it can go too far in art and sports for which we need a Jimmy Iovine to help us find balance. It is imperfections, and all the variability and surprise they create that makes life and sports interesting.
So, have the “nerds” hurt the aesthetics of basketball by destroying its variability and accompanying surprises? The answer is almost certainly “yes.” However, it’s important to remember that they have done so only because we asked them to.
Thanks for another terrific piece.
What exactly is so bad with modern NBA? I know they jack up a ton of 3's and there is a lot of flopping, but is there more?
I think like what happened in the NFL, instant replay has absolutely ruined the flow of watching a game, that to me is the worst part.
NBA coverage - first take brain, inside the nba rot, and unlimited stats and information have ruined the ability of fans to discuss the nba. seems there are 2 types of nba fans: box score-highlight fans and watch the game fans, and rarely do they agree.
There are the “I follow the nba through twitter fans” and “I consume the nba through podcast fans.” There’s a ton of overlap and they all lie about watching games.
good call including nba podcasts
I think you’re all worried about the wrong problem: The optimization that’s killing sports is at the rec level for kids, where we can’t just let them go play outside and put together a game of their own. Now it has to be “organized”, which leads to it becoming suburbanized, even in cities. God forbid your seven year-old isn’t at the same level as the others. You want to “bring back bullying”? I can assure you it hasn’t gone away, and it’s killing me as a parent.
I’ll try to keep this to baseball because that’s what I know best. First, a show of hands: How many of you read Rob Neyer or rec.sport.baseball in the ‘90s? Both of you will remember how unbelievably hostile the media and teams were towards simple ideas like “it’s good to take a walk” or “bunting the leadoff runner over in the first inning is very bad”, so if some of us wanted to take a victory lap, I don’t think it’s that hard to understand.
But nerds in baseball have been pretty level-headed and epistemically humble. Scouting has mostly been respected (Moneyball, the book and movie, was a mixed blessing), as exemplified by Dayn Perry’s like about beer and tacos (why not have both?). Neyer thought there was no way catchers could have a lot of influence on a game, but further research and new pitch f/x data showed how pitch framing can tilt a game.
In that vein, people like Joe Sheehan (get him on the show!) have been pointing out the death of singles and increase in strikeouts for almost 10 years now. Yes, the nerds started the Three True Outcomes revolution, *and* they understand the macro ramifications!
And it’s not like the things us statheads were pointing out were secrets: Branch Rickey; Earl Weaver; Davey Johnson. All of them knew these simple ideas and used them to great effect. You think *they* ruined baseball? Are we supposed to ignore their wisdom?
The other thing that sneering at nerds doesn’t address is that athletes are bigger, stronger, quicker, and better trained than ever. For baseball, the arms race between #9 hitters being able to take pitchers deep on a middle-middle pitch and…well arms had caused singles to dry up: You’re not getting multi-sequence events against 99 with movement, so you have to go for the bomb. That won’t improve until velocity decreases: You need a deader ball thrown from further back. The shift is not the problem, and if you’d stop shouting at nerds maybe we could work on this together.
Can we talk about how the nerds think they are cool? I think that’s the bigger issue. One thing I like about Nate Duncan’s nerdy basketball podcast is they own it, make fun of their nerd basketball fandom. (Even though I know Nate has some jock in him). Too many nerdy NBA pods spend way too much time laughing at their own jokes. I imagine there are all these Reddit nerds on the other end laughing with them. The internet made it where all nerds can find a pocket of the internet where they are cool. #bring back bullying
In the name of optimization, Curry allowing the Warriors to sign Durant was exponentially more harmful to competitive balance than what Harden was doing. In directing Silver’s focus toward preventing a reoccurrence of that immediate imbalance he lost sight of the more subtle gameplay issues.