NBA Media and 'very online fans' obsession with seeming incredibly progressive about everything has now made them intent on insisting positions don't exist in the NBA.
The 'NBA is positionless' mantra has been mentioned for years even though it's basically untrue. There are some players who can now play a couple of positions (guard and point guard, power forward and center, small forward and power forward), sliding up and down based on matchups. But all this does is reinforce that positions actually do exist. We know what a point guard is, what a center is, what a shooting guard is, and on most good teams it's pretty clear.
Whether it's because they're afraid of seeming wrong, too traditional, or some other reason, there is now a movement that Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid *must* both be on the first All-NBA team even though the team has one center position, and they're both very clearly centers. They're more versatile than centers in the past, but centers none the less.
There is a call that the All-NBA teams just be a ranked top 15 players, even though that causes a number of other issues. For some reason, NFL media has no problem putting a QB on the second All-Pro team, and they still have a clear distinction between effectively similar positions on the offensive line. They don't cry to make the second best left tackle in the NFL "guard eligible."
This also reeks of fixing a problem that only exists momentarily, much like the call to present the playoffs as a 1-16 tournament rather than separating by conference, simply because the West happened to be better at the time.
There also seems to be some sort of issue that the media presents that their votes affect salaries because of the All-NBA teams. This sort of ignores that the way they cover the players has always in some way affected salaries, whether it's MVP or All-Star votes, or even certain storylines that they promote that make players seem more valuable.
I wish this was shorter. All I'm trying to say is that it's ok if Nikola Jokic is second team All-NBA. He'll live.
The NBA isn't positionless - PGs and Cs still exist - but what really is the difference between SGs, SFs and stretch PFs? They're all "wings" really. Perhaps we should change the nomenclature to: point guards, wings, and paintsmen (encompassing Cs and traditional PFs)?
Players like Jokic and Draymond are legit point guards (at least on offense) I think a lot of confusion lies in players playing distinctly different positions on offense or defense or in different actions. Green plays PG on offense while Curry plays 2 at least as often as Curry plays the 1 (it feels like).
Not sure how the NFL CBA works (so could be speaking out of my ass) but I think this comes down to the weight of the super-max and contract eligibility being determined by these teams being a burden on media members.
Plus, moving to something closer to the top 15 list would inject a dose of certainty and quell one of the NBA's most dependable attention pullers -- the debates on who are the best players.
Also, media members (especially those who fashion themselves as "historians of the game") know how reductive and un-nuanced they can be in their retrospectives. In the moment, they know Jokic is an all-timer even if he has to be (hypothetically) 2nd team, but 10 years after he's retired when these people are constructing some all-time list, they know that they will have forgotten the reason they had to 2nd team him and will hold it against him while elevating some player from another era who didn't face as much positional competition.
Not exactly a hot-take, but podcasts have largely replaced long-form written pieces. Hence why I gather you and others on Substack (like Taibbi) offer both the written piece and the narrated piece. I personally am grateful to you for your commitment to long-form writing with so many rich links and resources you provide in them. I always think of how Bill Simmons retired from writing, and while his podcast is great, his long form pieces are greatly missed by me. Thanks for filling that void for me, Ethan Strauss.
Having said that, I'm curious to know what your numbers are with respect to your articles; IE - What percentage of people have listened to your latest piece on Mark Cuban compared to those who have read it?
Great question, JJ. I've been surprised by how many of my customers listen rather than read the text. Typically, about a third of subscribers listen to the narrated pieces (or at least download them). I usually offer the narrations behind a paywall because narrations don't tend to go viral like text can. So, it's ideal as a bonus for subscribers, I think. Doing the narrations keeps about a third of my customers happy and that's good enough reason for me to keep doing them.
There are some confounding variables here, btw. For instance, the Cuban post as of now has 5% as many downloads as page views. But a page view on an email newsletter seems to be a less active choice than a paywall download. Or it can be. Also, nobody other than subscribers can hear a post, but it's possible for an email to be forwarded elsewhere. And the narration came out a day after the text article. Given all these factors, I try to simplify my view. I just look at the situation as, "One third of my customers download these, so I'll keep doing them."
I’m the exact opposite: I can’t listen to someone reading something without completely tuning out. Narrative podcasts, bedtime stories, church Gospel readings, all of it. 0% information retention. So I appreciate that you still write.
Yep, I'm the same way with Brett Easton Ellis being the exception to that rule. I really love the 45 minute monologues with which he starts his podcasts.
I have really appreciated the narrations. I probably listen to about 80% of the posts vs. reading. Although, the times I tend to read vs. listen are when it's a more time-sensitive topic relating and/or when it's the topic for an upcoming Callin episode, and I'm not sure the narration will get dropped ahead of that.
If you released written articles and audio articles at the same time (following in the footsteps of newsletter GOAT Ben Thompson), I suspect the audio versions would perform even better - and a third of your happy paying customers would be even happier and more committed!!!
Tara VanderVeer's statement about how it's disappointing that after 50 years of Title 9 women's basketball still doesn't have the resources of men's basketball was interesting. To me the amount of resources and coverage women's basketball gets---when noone cares about it---is a huge success story of Title 9. Mark Davis bought a WNBA team for a couple million. That's like buying a couple Jamba Juices.
I'm not going to argue the resources point - commercial decisions are for the profit-focussed - but your assertion that "no-one cares about [women's basketball]" is simply wrong. I must admit that I thought a women's Australian Football league would fail, but it has been a huge success. Turns out that half the population who were completely forgotten in the sporting realm actually like seeing themselves play, whodathunkit? Not all "success" is measured in $$$$.
It also seems shortsighted to compare NCAA Men's tourney (first held in 1939) to Women's (first held in 1982) without at least weighting to age of the respective tournaments
With every season the NBA regular seems pretty meaningless. Draymond first coined the concept of “16 game players”. I think I may become a 16 game fan in regard to my League Pass subscription. The Stars (i.e the roughly top 10 players) with each year show decreasing care about playoff seeding. This is sad, because I do agree that there is an insane amount of talent in the league right now but without meaningful game, the NBA on most nights just becomes a skill display - the large majority of which I can be across via YouTube packages, as well as informed nba podcasts. I doubt I’m the only one feeling this way about the regular season. The nba regular season feels sad
Absolutely! There are too many games, diluting the meaning of each, especially when you add in all the resting. If the season was 58 games - home and away against every other team - every game would have more meaning, there'd be no btbs or 4 game weeks, and players would not need to be rested. Decrease quantity and increase quality. But the team owners will resist it at every turn.
I agree with nearly everything you said. But even if you reduced to season to 58 games (somehow), do you think KD would really be more likely play and try for 58 games? I feel like the stars don’t care if they’re the 7th seed.
I think Ethan+Spike may have mentioned it at the time but, that recent “Ben might play” showdown between Nets v Sixers was one of those rare windows into what regular season rivalries and hyped games felt like.
I really think they would, for a number of reasons - every game would have more significance to the standings; they wouldn't have b2bs which are very tough on them; they'd generally have more rest during the season; most of the players live to play and only sit when injured or their team's metrics say they are in a danger zone. KD might not play all 58, but I'd be surprised if he played fewer than 53-55 (injuries aside).
And yeah, I watched that game and it felt like the playoffs. A lot more games would have that kind of intensity if teams didn't have to play so many meaningless games that just drain their energy.
I feel the same way. Every once in a while there is an intense regular season game with everyone playing like Brooklyn / Milwaukee from the other night and I feel sad that all the games aren’t that good.
Could ratcheting up the pace of the game have made the NBA game less comprehensible and ergo less watchable to the average fan?
Not a college basketball fan, but got sucked into the hype that was the UNC-Duke game (no regrets!). Even though I didn't know any of the players or team styles, there was a simplicity to the game that went beyond its intensity and stakes for me. Banchero had a throwback quality to his game with his deliberate moves in the paint. And Caleb Love approached the game like a duelist would. Even the UNC center, despite lacking grace, was an endearing grafter. A friend of mine, who is not a sports fan, remarked that he was actually able to follow the contests within the contest. He'd been to a hockey game earlier in the week and noted that the average regular season NBA game feels more like an NHL game to him than a college basketball game -- there are clearly patterns and an intelligence to the game but they're moving too fast for the untrained eye to grasp and follow which leads to it all looking like a chaotic pinball machine at times.
Reminds me of Amin remarking on a podcast once (I paraphrase, perhaps inaccurately) that fans have been conditioned to think basketball is inherently graspable (which spawns the entire debate and opinion industry around it) whereas they're resigned to football (grid-iron) being beyond them and accept it as a communal viewing experience. He added that at the level of keen-observers the sophistication of NBA tactics is approaching football.
Yes, MJ and the 90s were as you (and many others here including myself) have contended a blip in our media culture with how our attentions could be directed at scale in a uniquely centralized, focused manner. However, stylistically, the deliberately slow-paced, mano-a-mano, almost gladiatorial aspect of iso-heavy basketball also made the NBA inherantly graspable (lent itself more easily to human tendency to narrativize around individuals too) and the divergence between the opinions of the casuals and the sophisticates was minimal. A counter-point in favor of pace from the 80s basketball fan would be the Showtime Lakers. I'd contend the sort of pace we speak of there vs today's pace and space are qualitatively different. The 80s Lakers were forced to be more stylistically diverse to accommodate Kareem and the engine was a sui-generis pass-first talent (and media phenomenon) in Magic. Today's pace is driven more by an attempt to imitate the Warriors. The Warriors were also quite diverse in terms of shot-distribution and are also centered around a singular shooter in Curry. The issue is: it's easier for pretenders to fool themselves into thinking they can mimic (or practice their way into) and reproduce the effects of good shooting, yet no one is going to think they can emulate basketball savant IQ and passing vision.
A friend and I recently left local news organizations in a small town in Paducah, KY (<30k population). The people in town love to point out the missteps of the understaffed local paper and tv news org but I believe strongly those same people will romanticize the days when they had one, and lament their dissolution. My lukewarm take: whatever comes after the death of local media will be a hell of a lot worse than what we have today.
The next World Cup will be held in Qatar this winter because FIFA officials were bribed. Thousands of workers labored under slave conditions to build stadiums in the hot desert. However, the biggest issue for progressive sports media is that Qatari officials will ban the rainbow flag. Literally shaking and clutching my pearls. We need to keep wrongthink politics out of sports, but goodthink politics are fine!
The "max" contract in the NBA is the cause of a ton of the league's problems. Because an empty stat, best player on a bad team player like Beal gets mostly the same amount of money as a guy who can drag a team to the playoffs on their own like Giannis, you end up with
1. Too much roster flexibility for moving around guys like KD/Harden/etc
2. No way to keep guys satisfied other then giving them more control
which leads to too much player movement, which leads to all the issues where people don't feel a kinship for the team.
The age structure of maxes is all wrong too - Lowe discussed this on his pod the other day. It should peak during the player's prime and decline thereafter, but as he said, no union would ever agree to declining salary with longer tenure. It's a difficult one.
Hey Ethan, continuing on your NBA locker room talk do you feel there an effort to hide sometimes the alpha, and dare I say “toxic masculinity” traits these players have? I compare when an NFL player is mic’d up on gameday you get much more of the raw emotion of the player in many of them, with many bleeps usually. NBA it’s just a guy calling out screens for two minutes lol. Also has this lack of access curbed much of the reporting on some of the salacious stories we’d get every now and then? I first remember Steve Nash, Tony Parker & Brent Barry, Delonte West & Lebron, Paul George & Roy Hibbert etc. These kind of things couldn’t have just gone away, but you don’t even get any rumors of these things anymore.
Don't hate the term, hate the people mis-using it. It is a highly appropriate term when media or politicians cherry-pick or stoke outrage just to appeal specifically to their base.
When it's all said and done, LeBron James and Michael Jordan will stand so close in terms of career accomplishments and overall domination of the sport. However, whereas no one did more to increase the popularity of the sport than Jordan, no one has had a greater impact on the decrease in the NBA's popularity over the last decade than LeBron. Key LeBron contributions:
1.) Free Agency, Player Agency
Part of Jordan's appeal was the grueling half decade of trying to overcome better teams even as his individual star shined. He struggled to break through, eventually overcoming a physical, big-man centric league. LeBron from 2007-2010 was a force of domination not seen since prime Jordan. But as he flamed out year after year against physical opponents, he decided to collude to create a superteam. At first it looked like LeBron might pay the price but he got the last laugh. He's now won three titles with three different teams, using star movement and influence over organizations to construct short term solutions to get RINGZZZ. He validated this approach to breaking through and now he has copycats. It hurts the league overall to have front offices and fanbases held hostage to this level of player empowerment. And to fans of the game, it feels cheap.
2.) Chill Mode
LeBron more than any player since Shaq (and he shares a lot of similarities to Shaq on this list) rendered the regular season a waste of time. In 2009, four teams finished with at least 59 wins. Since that time, no regular season has had more than two 59+ game winners. Part of this was due to a sense of urgency seeking home court advantage. LeBron and the Cavs lost to the eventual champion 2008 Celtics, in which the home team won every game of the series. Observers noted this and the other examples of heavy home court advantage in 2008 and it created a sense of urgency during the 2009 regular season. Fast forward to 2017, where the Cavs finished with the 5th best SRS in the Eastern conference and still brute-forced their way back to the finals. In that 2017 season, LeBron basically ceded the defensive side of the court, conserving energy. He led the NBA in points and played in all 82 games, and the Cavs ranked 29th in the NBA in defensive efficiency. LeBron and the Cavs brutally (and I mean brutally) swept the Raptors, who boasted the 2nd best SRS that season. (This directly led to the rent-a-Kawhi kalculus.). In 2015, LeBron started moping on the court, decided abruptly to take 2 weeks off, and the Cavs took the eventual champion Warriors to 6 games despite missing Love and Irving. In other words, LeBron has vindicated the practice of treating the regular season as, at times, meaningless. When good teams feel they only need make the playoffs in order to have championship aspirations, (and bad teams feel they need to drop in the standings to secure draft odds), you end up with a lot of regular season games that feel completely foreign from the intensity of playoff games. Regardless of how it really happened, no one ever watched Michael Jordan and thought he was conserving himself for some future endeavor.
3.) Friends Zone
We can name a lot of MJ's enemies and rivals. Right from the moment LeBron entered the league he declared that Carmelo Anthony was his best friend. Then, D Wade was his best friend. Chris Paul was his best friend. (He's got a lot of "best friends"). The best rivalry of the early LeBron era was LeBron v Kobe, and we hardly ever got to witness meaningful games between them. Now that so many athletes are represented by Clutch sports, which many assume to simply be an extension of LeBron's reach, it sometimes feels more like LeBron is a lead of a fraternity than a player hell bent on vanquishing his foes. The NBA (like all sports) benefits from rivalries, real or contrived. With the exception of a short stint where he seemed to take it personally that Steph Curry wasn't willing to wait in line before being crowned the new king of the league, LeBron seems to have no appetite for rivalries. He could have had great rivalries with Draymond Green and Kevin Durant. Now he takes vacations with those guys.
4.) LeBron the Shapeshifting Headcase
Fair to say Michael Jordan never had aspirations to become a global cultural icon, until he was the greatest basketball player the world had ever seen. LeBron declared his intention to be a global icon from the very start. Throughout the years, LeBron has sought cultural relevance in so many places, has changed his persona, his mechanics, his messages, and it has combined to be a giant distraction from an otherwise cosmically-overwhelming career. A short list of LeBronisms: he can't decide whether his Jersey number should be 23 or 6. He boldly stated that the league should retire 23 out of respect for Jordan. Then he unretired it to wear it for the Cavs in 2015. Now he's back to 6. He has changed his free throw routine more often that his jersey number. He passed up the final shot twice during the end of the 2012 ALL STAR game, to stunned looks from notorious chuckers Kobe and Melo. Once, during a game he publicly yelled at his own Mom to "sit your ass down", but also declared that players don't ever disrespect women in the (privacy of the) locker room. He refused to sign a letter presented to him by teammate Ira Newble, which condemned China's involvement in the Darfur genocide, and opined that Daryl Morey was misinformed on China v Hong Kong. But as he saw the fawning admiration of Kaepernick and probably hung out too much with D Wade's activist wife, he decided to go all in on left wing social justice. Now he tweets threats to Columbus Police Officers who used lethal force to save someone's life. He wore a Yankees Cap to an Indians game, until he decided to become the Indians #1 fan in 2016, ensuring he'd be shown on TV during every playoff and World Series game. He grew up a Cowboys fan in NEO because he always rooted for front running teams and never any of Cleveland's three professional sports teams. (Now he's a Browns fan). As Ethan pointed out, early in LeBron's career he had some fun-loving, likable advertising campaigns. Now he's too serious. He keeps taking on personas. He was (at times) the fun-loving, handshake generating, pass with the game on the line supernova during Cavs 1.0. He started a national conversation on whether or not Phil Jackson's "posse" comment was racist (Maverick Carter since weighed in that it wasn't racist). He embraced the villain role during the Heatles tour, and he's been all over the place ever since. All of these things have made LeBron an unlikeable icon of the sport. Jordan's single minded desire to be the most dominant basketball player captured an era and endures to this day, while LeBron has distracted us from his greatness.
Is the Americanization of Formula 1 a good development? F1 announced their new race in Las Vegas last week, a logical next step in catering to America’s growing interest (we’re now at Austin, Miami, Vegas). I’ve seen European pushback couched in jealousy—not necessarily envy—of their perceived “Americanization” of the sport, arguing: F1 will abandon historical races for more lucrative American cities/audiences, transforming their “sport” into an American “product,” rule changes, and similar concerns. I’m not fully convinced there are intrinsic, enduring European principals being compromised (other than geographic convenience/historical interest/stereotype—see Talladega Nights’ Jean Girard portrayal), especially in a sport that relies so heavily on corporate investment—that quality seems truly American. I think this European culture v. American commoditization tension through the F1 lens has been under-covered, although it is still developing
About a half hour ago, Red Star Belgrade players were booed in Lithuania for refusing to hold up the “Stop the War” sign that’s been part of the Euroleague pregame routine since Russia invaded Ukraine. Would be very interested to hear from NBA Serbs where they stand on the situation.
NBA Media and 'very online fans' obsession with seeming incredibly progressive about everything has now made them intent on insisting positions don't exist in the NBA.
The 'NBA is positionless' mantra has been mentioned for years even though it's basically untrue. There are some players who can now play a couple of positions (guard and point guard, power forward and center, small forward and power forward), sliding up and down based on matchups. But all this does is reinforce that positions actually do exist. We know what a point guard is, what a center is, what a shooting guard is, and on most good teams it's pretty clear.
Whether it's because they're afraid of seeming wrong, too traditional, or some other reason, there is now a movement that Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid *must* both be on the first All-NBA team even though the team has one center position, and they're both very clearly centers. They're more versatile than centers in the past, but centers none the less.
There is a call that the All-NBA teams just be a ranked top 15 players, even though that causes a number of other issues. For some reason, NFL media has no problem putting a QB on the second All-Pro team, and they still have a clear distinction between effectively similar positions on the offensive line. They don't cry to make the second best left tackle in the NFL "guard eligible."
This also reeks of fixing a problem that only exists momentarily, much like the call to present the playoffs as a 1-16 tournament rather than separating by conference, simply because the West happened to be better at the time.
There also seems to be some sort of issue that the media presents that their votes affect salaries because of the All-NBA teams. This sort of ignores that the way they cover the players has always in some way affected salaries, whether it's MVP or All-Star votes, or even certain storylines that they promote that make players seem more valuable.
I wish this was shorter. All I'm trying to say is that it's ok if Nikola Jokic is second team All-NBA. He'll live.
No need to be shorter. It's a great thought.
The NBA isn't positionless - PGs and Cs still exist - but what really is the difference between SGs, SFs and stretch PFs? They're all "wings" really. Perhaps we should change the nomenclature to: point guards, wings, and paintsmen (encompassing Cs and traditional PFs)?
Players like Jokic and Draymond are legit point guards (at least on offense) I think a lot of confusion lies in players playing distinctly different positions on offense or defense or in different actions. Green plays PG on offense while Curry plays 2 at least as often as Curry plays the 1 (it feels like).
Not sure how the NFL CBA works (so could be speaking out of my ass) but I think this comes down to the weight of the super-max and contract eligibility being determined by these teams being a burden on media members.
Plus, moving to something closer to the top 15 list would inject a dose of certainty and quell one of the NBA's most dependable attention pullers -- the debates on who are the best players.
Also, media members (especially those who fashion themselves as "historians of the game") know how reductive and un-nuanced they can be in their retrospectives. In the moment, they know Jokic is an all-timer even if he has to be (hypothetically) 2nd team, but 10 years after he's retired when these people are constructing some all-time list, they know that they will have forgotten the reason they had to 2nd team him and will hold it against him while elevating some player from another era who didn't face as much positional competition.
Not exactly a hot-take, but podcasts have largely replaced long-form written pieces. Hence why I gather you and others on Substack (like Taibbi) offer both the written piece and the narrated piece. I personally am grateful to you for your commitment to long-form writing with so many rich links and resources you provide in them. I always think of how Bill Simmons retired from writing, and while his podcast is great, his long form pieces are greatly missed by me. Thanks for filling that void for me, Ethan Strauss.
Having said that, I'm curious to know what your numbers are with respect to your articles; IE - What percentage of people have listened to your latest piece on Mark Cuban compared to those who have read it?
Great question, JJ. I've been surprised by how many of my customers listen rather than read the text. Typically, about a third of subscribers listen to the narrated pieces (or at least download them). I usually offer the narrations behind a paywall because narrations don't tend to go viral like text can. So, it's ideal as a bonus for subscribers, I think. Doing the narrations keeps about a third of my customers happy and that's good enough reason for me to keep doing them.
There are some confounding variables here, btw. For instance, the Cuban post as of now has 5% as many downloads as page views. But a page view on an email newsletter seems to be a less active choice than a paywall download. Or it can be. Also, nobody other than subscribers can hear a post, but it's possible for an email to be forwarded elsewhere. And the narration came out a day after the text article. Given all these factors, I try to simplify my view. I just look at the situation as, "One third of my customers download these, so I'll keep doing them."
Bear in mind that sometimes I'll read an article from my inbox without actually clicking on the site. I assume I'm not the only one
I’m the exact opposite: I can’t listen to someone reading something without completely tuning out. Narrative podcasts, bedtime stories, church Gospel readings, all of it. 0% information retention. So I appreciate that you still write.
Yep, I'm the same way with Brett Easton Ellis being the exception to that rule. I really love the 45 minute monologues with which he starts his podcasts.
I have really appreciated the narrations. I probably listen to about 80% of the posts vs. reading. Although, the times I tend to read vs. listen are when it's a more time-sensitive topic relating and/or when it's the topic for an upcoming Callin episode, and I'm not sure the narration will get dropped ahead of that.
If you released written articles and audio articles at the same time (following in the footsteps of newsletter GOAT Ben Thompson), I suspect the audio versions would perform even better - and a third of your happy paying customers would be even happier and more committed!!!
It’s not off the table. There are logistical hurdles, for reasons that are boring to get into. But I think I at least want to dabble with it if I can.
Tara VanderVeer's statement about how it's disappointing that after 50 years of Title 9 women's basketball still doesn't have the resources of men's basketball was interesting. To me the amount of resources and coverage women's basketball gets---when noone cares about it---is a huge success story of Title 9. Mark Davis bought a WNBA team for a couple million. That's like buying a couple Jamba Juices.
I'm not going to argue the resources point - commercial decisions are for the profit-focussed - but your assertion that "no-one cares about [women's basketball]" is simply wrong. I must admit that I thought a women's Australian Football league would fail, but it has been a huge success. Turns out that half the population who were completely forgotten in the sporting realm actually like seeing themselves play, whodathunkit? Not all "success" is measured in $$$$.
It also seems shortsighted to compare NCAA Men's tourney (first held in 1939) to Women's (first held in 1982) without at least weighting to age of the respective tournaments
With every season the NBA regular seems pretty meaningless. Draymond first coined the concept of “16 game players”. I think I may become a 16 game fan in regard to my League Pass subscription. The Stars (i.e the roughly top 10 players) with each year show decreasing care about playoff seeding. This is sad, because I do agree that there is an insane amount of talent in the league right now but without meaningful game, the NBA on most nights just becomes a skill display - the large majority of which I can be across via YouTube packages, as well as informed nba podcasts. I doubt I’m the only one feeling this way about the regular season. The nba regular season feels sad
Absolutely! There are too many games, diluting the meaning of each, especially when you add in all the resting. If the season was 58 games - home and away against every other team - every game would have more meaning, there'd be no btbs or 4 game weeks, and players would not need to be rested. Decrease quantity and increase quality. But the team owners will resist it at every turn.
I agree with nearly everything you said. But even if you reduced to season to 58 games (somehow), do you think KD would really be more likely play and try for 58 games? I feel like the stars don’t care if they’re the 7th seed.
I think Ethan+Spike may have mentioned it at the time but, that recent “Ben might play” showdown between Nets v Sixers was one of those rare windows into what regular season rivalries and hyped games felt like.
I really think they would, for a number of reasons - every game would have more significance to the standings; they wouldn't have b2bs which are very tough on them; they'd generally have more rest during the season; most of the players live to play and only sit when injured or their team's metrics say they are in a danger zone. KD might not play all 58, but I'd be surprised if he played fewer than 53-55 (injuries aside).
And yeah, I watched that game and it felt like the playoffs. A lot more games would have that kind of intensity if teams didn't have to play so many meaningless games that just drain their energy.
I feel the same way. Every once in a while there is an intense regular season game with everyone playing like Brooklyn / Milwaukee from the other night and I feel sad that all the games aren’t that good.
Could ratcheting up the pace of the game have made the NBA game less comprehensible and ergo less watchable to the average fan?
Not a college basketball fan, but got sucked into the hype that was the UNC-Duke game (no regrets!). Even though I didn't know any of the players or team styles, there was a simplicity to the game that went beyond its intensity and stakes for me. Banchero had a throwback quality to his game with his deliberate moves in the paint. And Caleb Love approached the game like a duelist would. Even the UNC center, despite lacking grace, was an endearing grafter. A friend of mine, who is not a sports fan, remarked that he was actually able to follow the contests within the contest. He'd been to a hockey game earlier in the week and noted that the average regular season NBA game feels more like an NHL game to him than a college basketball game -- there are clearly patterns and an intelligence to the game but they're moving too fast for the untrained eye to grasp and follow which leads to it all looking like a chaotic pinball machine at times.
Reminds me of Amin remarking on a podcast once (I paraphrase, perhaps inaccurately) that fans have been conditioned to think basketball is inherently graspable (which spawns the entire debate and opinion industry around it) whereas they're resigned to football (grid-iron) being beyond them and accept it as a communal viewing experience. He added that at the level of keen-observers the sophistication of NBA tactics is approaching football.
Yes, MJ and the 90s were as you (and many others here including myself) have contended a blip in our media culture with how our attentions could be directed at scale in a uniquely centralized, focused manner. However, stylistically, the deliberately slow-paced, mano-a-mano, almost gladiatorial aspect of iso-heavy basketball also made the NBA inherantly graspable (lent itself more easily to human tendency to narrativize around individuals too) and the divergence between the opinions of the casuals and the sophisticates was minimal. A counter-point in favor of pace from the 80s basketball fan would be the Showtime Lakers. I'd contend the sort of pace we speak of there vs today's pace and space are qualitatively different. The 80s Lakers were forced to be more stylistically diverse to accommodate Kareem and the engine was a sui-generis pass-first talent (and media phenomenon) in Magic. Today's pace is driven more by an attempt to imitate the Warriors. The Warriors were also quite diverse in terms of shot-distribution and are also centered around a singular shooter in Curry. The issue is: it's easier for pretenders to fool themselves into thinking they can mimic (or practice their way into) and reproduce the effects of good shooting, yet no one is going to think they can emulate basketball savant IQ and passing vision.
A friend and I recently left local news organizations in a small town in Paducah, KY (<30k population). The people in town love to point out the missteps of the understaffed local paper and tv news org but I believe strongly those same people will romanticize the days when they had one, and lament their dissolution. My lukewarm take: whatever comes after the death of local media will be a hell of a lot worse than what we have today.
The next World Cup will be held in Qatar this winter because FIFA officials were bribed. Thousands of workers labored under slave conditions to build stadiums in the hot desert. However, the biggest issue for progressive sports media is that Qatari officials will ban the rainbow flag. Literally shaking and clutching my pearls. We need to keep wrongthink politics out of sports, but goodthink politics are fine!
...not to mention the enormous death toll among those workers. It's a global shame.
How about we just criticise both issues?
Regardless, I'm looking forward to watching zero seconds of the WC. Hopefully it's a massive flop
The "max" contract in the NBA is the cause of a ton of the league's problems. Because an empty stat, best player on a bad team player like Beal gets mostly the same amount of money as a guy who can drag a team to the playoffs on their own like Giannis, you end up with
1. Too much roster flexibility for moving around guys like KD/Harden/etc
2. No way to keep guys satisfied other then giving them more control
which leads to too much player movement, which leads to all the issues where people don't feel a kinship for the team.
The age structure of maxes is all wrong too - Lowe discussed this on his pod the other day. It should peak during the player's prime and decline thereafter, but as he said, no union would ever agree to declining salary with longer tenure. It's a difficult one.
Hey Ethan, continuing on your NBA locker room talk do you feel there an effort to hide sometimes the alpha, and dare I say “toxic masculinity” traits these players have? I compare when an NFL player is mic’d up on gameday you get much more of the raw emotion of the player in many of them, with many bleeps usually. NBA it’s just a guy calling out screens for two minutes lol. Also has this lack of access curbed much of the reporting on some of the salacious stories we’d get every now and then? I first remember Steve Nash, Tony Parker & Brent Barry, Delonte West & Lebron, Paul George & Roy Hibbert etc. These kind of things couldn’t have just gone away, but you don’t even get any rumors of these things anymore.
I hate the term "dog whistle." Anything can be argued to be a dog whistle. It's just a way for people to put words in their opponents' mouths.
“Dog whistle” is the new “narrative.” Basically, a way for media midwits to preemptively stigmatize a perspective without really examining it
Don't hate the term, hate the people mis-using it. It is a highly appropriate term when media or politicians cherry-pick or stoke outrage just to appeal specifically to their base.
When it's all said and done, LeBron James and Michael Jordan will stand so close in terms of career accomplishments and overall domination of the sport. However, whereas no one did more to increase the popularity of the sport than Jordan, no one has had a greater impact on the decrease in the NBA's popularity over the last decade than LeBron. Key LeBron contributions:
1.) Free Agency, Player Agency
Part of Jordan's appeal was the grueling half decade of trying to overcome better teams even as his individual star shined. He struggled to break through, eventually overcoming a physical, big-man centric league. LeBron from 2007-2010 was a force of domination not seen since prime Jordan. But as he flamed out year after year against physical opponents, he decided to collude to create a superteam. At first it looked like LeBron might pay the price but he got the last laugh. He's now won three titles with three different teams, using star movement and influence over organizations to construct short term solutions to get RINGZZZ. He validated this approach to breaking through and now he has copycats. It hurts the league overall to have front offices and fanbases held hostage to this level of player empowerment. And to fans of the game, it feels cheap.
2.) Chill Mode
LeBron more than any player since Shaq (and he shares a lot of similarities to Shaq on this list) rendered the regular season a waste of time. In 2009, four teams finished with at least 59 wins. Since that time, no regular season has had more than two 59+ game winners. Part of this was due to a sense of urgency seeking home court advantage. LeBron and the Cavs lost to the eventual champion 2008 Celtics, in which the home team won every game of the series. Observers noted this and the other examples of heavy home court advantage in 2008 and it created a sense of urgency during the 2009 regular season. Fast forward to 2017, where the Cavs finished with the 5th best SRS in the Eastern conference and still brute-forced their way back to the finals. In that 2017 season, LeBron basically ceded the defensive side of the court, conserving energy. He led the NBA in points and played in all 82 games, and the Cavs ranked 29th in the NBA in defensive efficiency. LeBron and the Cavs brutally (and I mean brutally) swept the Raptors, who boasted the 2nd best SRS that season. (This directly led to the rent-a-Kawhi kalculus.). In 2015, LeBron started moping on the court, decided abruptly to take 2 weeks off, and the Cavs took the eventual champion Warriors to 6 games despite missing Love and Irving. In other words, LeBron has vindicated the practice of treating the regular season as, at times, meaningless. When good teams feel they only need make the playoffs in order to have championship aspirations, (and bad teams feel they need to drop in the standings to secure draft odds), you end up with a lot of regular season games that feel completely foreign from the intensity of playoff games. Regardless of how it really happened, no one ever watched Michael Jordan and thought he was conserving himself for some future endeavor.
3.) Friends Zone
We can name a lot of MJ's enemies and rivals. Right from the moment LeBron entered the league he declared that Carmelo Anthony was his best friend. Then, D Wade was his best friend. Chris Paul was his best friend. (He's got a lot of "best friends"). The best rivalry of the early LeBron era was LeBron v Kobe, and we hardly ever got to witness meaningful games between them. Now that so many athletes are represented by Clutch sports, which many assume to simply be an extension of LeBron's reach, it sometimes feels more like LeBron is a lead of a fraternity than a player hell bent on vanquishing his foes. The NBA (like all sports) benefits from rivalries, real or contrived. With the exception of a short stint where he seemed to take it personally that Steph Curry wasn't willing to wait in line before being crowned the new king of the league, LeBron seems to have no appetite for rivalries. He could have had great rivalries with Draymond Green and Kevin Durant. Now he takes vacations with those guys.
4.) LeBron the Shapeshifting Headcase
Fair to say Michael Jordan never had aspirations to become a global cultural icon, until he was the greatest basketball player the world had ever seen. LeBron declared his intention to be a global icon from the very start. Throughout the years, LeBron has sought cultural relevance in so many places, has changed his persona, his mechanics, his messages, and it has combined to be a giant distraction from an otherwise cosmically-overwhelming career. A short list of LeBronisms: he can't decide whether his Jersey number should be 23 or 6. He boldly stated that the league should retire 23 out of respect for Jordan. Then he unretired it to wear it for the Cavs in 2015. Now he's back to 6. He has changed his free throw routine more often that his jersey number. He passed up the final shot twice during the end of the 2012 ALL STAR game, to stunned looks from notorious chuckers Kobe and Melo. Once, during a game he publicly yelled at his own Mom to "sit your ass down", but also declared that players don't ever disrespect women in the (privacy of the) locker room. He refused to sign a letter presented to him by teammate Ira Newble, which condemned China's involvement in the Darfur genocide, and opined that Daryl Morey was misinformed on China v Hong Kong. But as he saw the fawning admiration of Kaepernick and probably hung out too much with D Wade's activist wife, he decided to go all in on left wing social justice. Now he tweets threats to Columbus Police Officers who used lethal force to save someone's life. He wore a Yankees Cap to an Indians game, until he decided to become the Indians #1 fan in 2016, ensuring he'd be shown on TV during every playoff and World Series game. He grew up a Cowboys fan in NEO because he always rooted for front running teams and never any of Cleveland's three professional sports teams. (Now he's a Browns fan). As Ethan pointed out, early in LeBron's career he had some fun-loving, likable advertising campaigns. Now he's too serious. He keeps taking on personas. He was (at times) the fun-loving, handshake generating, pass with the game on the line supernova during Cavs 1.0. He started a national conversation on whether or not Phil Jackson's "posse" comment was racist (Maverick Carter since weighed in that it wasn't racist). He embraced the villain role during the Heatles tour, and he's been all over the place ever since. All of these things have made LeBron an unlikeable icon of the sport. Jordan's single minded desire to be the most dominant basketball player captured an era and endures to this day, while LeBron has distracted us from his greatness.
Is the Americanization of Formula 1 a good development? F1 announced their new race in Las Vegas last week, a logical next step in catering to America’s growing interest (we’re now at Austin, Miami, Vegas). I’ve seen European pushback couched in jealousy—not necessarily envy—of their perceived “Americanization” of the sport, arguing: F1 will abandon historical races for more lucrative American cities/audiences, transforming their “sport” into an American “product,” rule changes, and similar concerns. I’m not fully convinced there are intrinsic, enduring European principals being compromised (other than geographic convenience/historical interest/stereotype—see Talladega Nights’ Jean Girard portrayal), especially in a sport that relies so heavily on corporate investment—that quality seems truly American. I think this European culture v. American commoditization tension through the F1 lens has been under-covered, although it is still developing
https://twitter.com/urbodo/status/1510648918270488582?s=21&t=sSLiqY6DvDirvamHrbWHyg
https://twitter.com/urbodo/status/1510654448430985220?s=21&t=E8vnPAouHch0e65NApuN1g
About a half hour ago, Red Star Belgrade players were booed in Lithuania for refusing to hold up the “Stop the War” sign that’s been part of the Euroleague pregame routine since Russia invaded Ukraine. Would be very interested to hear from NBA Serbs where they stand on the situation.
All NBA teams are hurting basketball because of the insufferable talk about who should be on what “team”
Nah, this is normal fan discourse. People argue who should be on all star teams, gold glove awards, silver sluggers, all pro teams. It’s fine.