NBA 2019/20: Return of the Big 3?

[Hot Pepsi]

However, I think a work stoppage driven not by self interest or greed (billionaires fighting with millionaires over money) but by the desire to effect genuine lasting, societal change would actually be welcomed by many people in America. I think we have reached a tipping point where enough people are fed up that they are willing to forego their creature comforts for the greater good. They are prepared to sacrifice turning on their TV and watching basketball for a few months for the prospect of a brighter future.

That’s a nice idea, but I still don’t see how just not playing basketball accomplishes any of that. Very, very few people are going to somehow look at the time and resources they were putting into the NBA and redirect it into changing society. Most people will just be frustrated and watch Top Chef or whatever the hell gives them the energy to keep going.*

And while that’s not ideal, I can empathize. Most people, regardless of race, are going through a lot of their own shit right now and after a long day trying hold onto a job and keep their lives together, we’d much rather watch something meaningless yet enjoyable like basketball or Australian Rules Football or old movies than get another earnest lecture on everything that’s wrong with society.

That’s not ideal, obviously, but I think it’s where we are. That doesn’t mean we have to wait for the pandemic to end before we can make any progress and if some people have the time and energy to go out and tear down some statues of slaveowners, knock yourself out. But most of the real work is going to take years and years with lots of ups and downs and lawsuits and local elections and all that tedious essential shit. What the NBA does or doesn’t do in the next few months won’t matter much in the long run.





Where I live, and in Pennsylvania in general, the NBA probably isn’t even in the top five sporting entities that people really care about.

The NFL, college football, the NHL, college basketball, baseball, and in some places, high school and college wrestling, matter more than the NBA. Pittsburgh doesn’t have an NBA team - and probably never will - and the 76ers haven’t really mattered in a long time. There seems to be a lot more passion for Villanova and high school hoops in Philly than the Sixers and you don’t see many Sixers stickers on cars in, for example, Lancaster, whereas even some of the Amish follow the Eagles.

It’s definitely growing and doing lots of things right, but it has a long way to go before it has the widespread appeal of the NFL or what MLB had 40 years ago. As far as I can tell, the NBA matters in the big cities that have the teams that are usually good plus New York and the big stars are household names, but outside of OTF, I personally know only one person who really cares about it. He’s from LA.



* Or maybe I’m projecting. I don’t watch Top Chef, but I have been watching a lot of nonsense lately just to stay sane.

[Hot Pepsi]

The NBA doesn’t matter now as much as the heavyweight champion mattered then. There are just so many more sports, so much more media and so much more noise.

Besides, Ali wasn’t just making speeches. He was going to jail for what he believed. If LeBron James was going to jail for the cause, that would be a comparable story.

But, thankfully, he doesn’t have to do that, so he - and every other player - will have a lot more microphones in his face day to day if he’s playing than if he isn’t.

What does Kyrie Irving imagine NBA players are going to be doing all day that would do more for the cause than playing basketball? Does he think huge audiences are going to tune in to listen to LeBron give Castroesque four hour speeches about it every day? As it is, it seems like the media is losing interest. Another speech or even another demo isn’t going to move the needle much right now.

If they didn’t play just to make a statement, it would just create a lot of ill will with the owners and sponsors that would cost them in the long run and cost everyone involved an opportunity to gain fans around the world during a fairly slow period in the international sporting calendar (no Olympics. No Euros. Possibly no baseball.) NBA fans seem to think that basketball is universally beloved, but it is not.

These canned no-fan events that hockey and basketball are putting on aren’t very appealing to me right now, especially if it means those sports play in the summer from hereafter. But a huge audience tuned in to watch football players play golf. So real sports have a chance to attract eyeballs like never before. They should use that to make people a bit less sad about the pandemic, to raise money for charity and keep the BLM message in front of people.

[Hot Pepsi]

NBA only have the platform they do because they are NBA players. So they need to keep playing for that to matter.

If they want to become professional activists, they need to quit basketball. It’s a full-time, long-term commitment.

Basketball is not a distraction from dealing with social issues if they don’t want it to be.

It’s a way to deliver their message. I imagine the NBA would gladly donate some ad space to the NAACP or College Fund or whatever during this odd tournament. That would probably reach a lot more people than making a speech to a bunch of protestors in the street somewhere.*

And/or, they can donate the money they make from the tournament.

Not that isn’t valuable, but they’ve already done that and that sort of thing starts to have diminishing returns.

[ursus arctos]

The "one and done" model was never stable and was always subject to destructive "disruption" from an alternative that was able to combine the requisite amounts of money, cultural familiarity, exposure and competition. Australia and New Zealand did that first and the G League is significantly better placed than they are, in large part because it has the same primary "television partner" as the NCAA.

Pretty much all of the schools that embraced one and done have basketball traditions (even Memphis lost a final to Bill Walton and UCLA when they were Memphis State). The sport isn't going to disappear at those places, though it will have to become less of a coach/agent/shoe company driven simulacrum of the cesspit that is AAU basketball.

[Hot Pepsi]

That happens all the time in hockey. In fact, it's not that uncommon for guys to leave in the middle of the season to sign a pro or juniors contract. And baseball players are drafted in June, long after they've "committed" to a college team, which can create some problems for college teams.*

But basketball rosters are so small that one player coming or not coming makes a bigger difference, so it would make sense to tell high school players that they have to decide on the G-league around the same time NCAA NLIs are signed. But it appears that the NBA does not really care how their rules make life difficult for college coaches.

* It's created some issues for college football teams too. Zach Lee, for example, was going to play baseball and football for LSU and was on the football practice field when his agent called to say that they'd reached a deal for him to get a $5.25m bonus from the Dodgers. He's been a huge bust.

[Incandenza]

I was being tongue-in-cheek with my comment, but the way Nix handled this annoys me. Jalen Green never committed to any school and it seemed clear that he was likely going to either go to Australia/New Zealand like LaMelo ball or something else other than college. Nix committed long ago, and now UCLA isn't able to recruit someone to take his place on the team next year. I suppose a commitment is as valuable as the paper it's printed on so a player backing out was always possible, but it still feels like they got played. Hopefully no other players change their minds after they commit.

[Hot Pepsi]

It’s better for the players and maybe for the game in general if the players who don’t really want to be in college don’t have to pretend to want to be there.

It might make college basketball more like college hockey or baseball. A top player doesn’t have to go to college to make it to the top pro league in those sports, and yet many of the best pros in those sports do go to college. I’m not sure what the number is in baseball but now about a third of the NHL played in the NCAA.

Not all the players who go to the G League will make the NBA, but presumably they’ll make some good money. If they decide they want to go to college later, they can still do that just like any other adult and they’ll probably be more motivated and have more time to focus on their studies than if they had gone as an 18-year-old basketball player just doing it as a stepping stone to the NBA.

The G league is already a higher class of basketball than college basketball and yet it doesn’t draw nearly as well as college basketball. Moving a handful of top NBA prospects from college to the NBA will shift that, but only slightly. Most of the appeal of college sports has nothing to with the caliber of the talent. That’s why college football continues to make a ton of money while no second tier pro league can survive.

Most of the top prospects go to college programs that have huge established fanbases like UCLA or Duke that are going to continue to thrive regardless because their fans like the whole experience and they’ll still get the best of the next tier of talent.

This will make it harder for a lesser program to suddenly strike gold by getting one amazing recruit, because there won’t be as many players of that caliber available to colleges. But how many lottery picks come out of a mid-majors or lesser big conference teams? It seems to happen in women’s basketball more often, though I may be forgetting somebody.

[Incandenza]

I didn't think that was going to be a big problem, but now Daishen Nix has decommitted from UCLA to go to the G-League pipeline, so fuck this.

[Cesar Rodriguez]

So, this Jalen Green thing has been interesting to say the least......

It was hailed by the talking heads as groundbreaking which it kinda is but also at the same time Kobe, Lebron, KG, Tmac were all drafted straight out of high school, its not exactly unprecedented for kids to skip college. In fact it kind of tickled me a bit to hear them talk in revered tones about how progressive the NBA is on this issue when it was them who instituted the minimum age requirement back in 2005 in the first place. In fact, for what its worth Stern actually wanted to make the minimum age 20.

As to the implications well, I think that is very intriguing. A lot of NBA fans were enjoying Jalen sticking it to the man but their shaudenfraude seemed a little unwarranted. There are only 150 people on an NBA court at any given time, treble that number to account for benchwarmers and rotation players and thats still less than 500 people plying their trade in the NBA. Point is there is not an unlimited number of jobs and if kids all opt to go the G league route whats the plan b for kids who don't make it and wash out of that system at age 22/23? Would it have behooved them to go to college and pursue a degree?

The other thing is does this have the effect of shrinking basketball? Is it the end of basketball schools and the beginning of the end of March Madness? Wichita St, Gonzaga, SC, Louisville & Kentucky have all had deep runs into the postseason in the past decade. They are all schools from states without an NBA team. Do people in those locales still care for basketball when they have no local rooting interest? Who is actually going to watch the league? What is the selling point to the fans to start paying attention to it?

Furthermore is this G league gonna be developing better players, better humans, more polished players, more marketable personalities?

[Flynnie]

MJ sounding like a human being was definitely the shock of the night. Shaq's M-E joke was a legitimate belly laugh, although only marginally tempered by my concern for the Logo looking befuddled. He's 81, I hope that doesn't mean he's losing it.

[Incandenza]

We hardly ever hear Jordan speak, so to see him go up there made it feel even more significant. Then he brought really the first laugh of the event with him joking about the Crying Jordan meme--we definitely don't really see Jordan laughing at himself. The only other Jordan speech I can recall is the Hall of Fame speech, which is notorious, this was almost a complete opposite of that and what we publicly know about him (who knew that he and Kobe were close at any point?), and really it was probably the first contemporary appearance that a lot of younger people would have had of it. I'm still floored by it.

[Incandenza]

The Kobe/Gigi memorial has been beautiful. Vanessa Bryant unbelievably eulogizing them both. And now Michael Jordan speaking.

[Incandenza]

What an entertaining All Star weekend. The even the three point contest had some excitement. The dunk contest was really good, and if I remember some stat correctly, Aaron Gordon now has the record of 50 point dunks, yet has never won a dunk contest. My one complaint was there were too many dunks where they jumped over people. It seems crazy to read that sentence, but I think they lose their magic when someone is jumping over someone on every attempt.

The rules for the all star game itself seemed confusing when they first rolled them out, but I think that was more because it was just presented as a list, when you were watching the game itself it made sense. I think the Elam ending will be here to stay in the All Star game. I know that Adam Silver has also rolled out the idea of a mid-season tournament, I'm wondering if they'd be willing to use an Elam ending for those games as well. Here's an interview with the guy himself:

https://slate.com/culture/2020/02/ni...star-game.html

[caja-dglh]

Zion really has the makings of the next wave of big-time (post LeBron)

[ursus arctos]

https://twitter.com/ringernba/status/1228516253372829699

[Incandenza]

FiveThirtyEight on Ja Morant:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...t-point-guard/

[Incandenza]

Runaway favorite for rookie of the year Ja Morant is trolling Steph Curry and I love it.

[URL]https://twitter.com/Rachel__Nichols/status/1224569224338653184[/URL]

[URL]https://twitter.com/JaMorant/status/1224710748233924608[/URL]

[ursus arctos]

Quite

And I thought that I had a problem

[Incandenza]

Thanks, those are really nice, but yeah, not spending that much on a hat.

[Flynnie]

The ballcap worn by a Laker fan on the previous page is Fear of God, which is a clothing line by Jerry Manuel (the ex-Mets coach)'s kid, Jerry Lorenzo. Jerry broke into the bigs with the Tigers, hence the Olde English...F.

They did some sick New Era hats in conjunction with a number of African-American All-Stars a few years ago. They're like $200 because FASHION!!! and because they were made in the US from wool to 1990s New Era standards rather than the current far less exacting specs, but they were cool. The event they debuted in was even cooler.








Dave Winfield rocks.

[ursus arctos]

I've never seen it executed anywhere near that well.

The more standard (though still rare) move is to bounce the ball hard off of the front rim in the hope that one of your teammates gets the rebound, not to try to get it back to yourself (which takes incredible precision).

For those who don't follow the sport closely, the ball has to hit the rim in order for it to be in play off a missed free throw. The shooter can't just fire it off the backboard (which would be much easier, given its size and the fact that it is a flat (rather than curved) surface.

[Hot Pepsi]

I don't think I've see that before.

[Incandenza]

[URL]https://twitter.com/SacramentoKings/status/1222002488179482624[/URL]

[Hot Pepsi]

I remember that - the upstaging part - and I wasn't even paying attention.

[Incandenza]

I didn't see that game but if I recall correctly that game was played on the same day as the Warriors were playing for their record 73rd regular season win. Typically Kobe completely upstaged them.

Haha, yes! Something that I got a laugh out of at the time--a game between two of the worst teams in the league (IIRC, the Lakers would have finished with the worst record if they had lost to the Jazz) upstaged the Warriors solidifying their status as the best regular season team in history.

I was not prepared for all of the shots of Vanessa and their girls during the game. ESPN also showed his speech afterwards, and I lost it when he spoke to them and Gianna blew him a kiss. Man...

Mike Tirico told a story I don't think many people ever knew about:

[URL]https://twitter.com/ringer/status/1221955558590140416[/URL]