Some NBA Related Frustrations
On play, budget sheets, and discourse
I like the NBA.
Not in the way that I suppose most fans do, where they pick a team and fervently follow each game. I sprung for League Pass, ostensibly to follow my Philadelphia 76ers, but on balance probably watched as many Nets and Blazers games this year for reasons that are pretty hard to articulate.
But I watch a lot of it. I listen to podcasts. I read more-or-less everything The Ringer writes about the league. And I pore over the spreadsheets it creates because, unfortunately, that’s the kind of person I am.
In the afterglow of the wonderful and exciting Thunder/Spurs series, I find myself extremely angry and disappointed at the direction of the league. And as a wise man once said, don’t tweet about it, blog about it, so I wanted to take the time to get these thoughts on paper.
A QUICK ASIDE ABOUT DISCOURSE.
I do not want this to be the focus, but I do want to quickly acknowledge that, more so than any other league, the information ecosystem of the NBA is completely, inescapably horrible. The lion’s share of the blame goes directly towards its biggest rights holders, namely ESPN/Disney. But there’s more than plenty to go around amongst its takesmiths, and, especially, its fans.
Never have I ever seen a sport where people overreact to one game more wildly than the NBA. With the potential exception of the New York media’s fascination with Aaron Judge’s postseason “struggles,” it’s impossible to imagine any other sport reacting to an all-pro having one bad game (which makes up exactly 1% of the season by the way) the way the NBA discourse has reacted to Chet Holmgren’s game seven stinker. Two weeks ago, Chet was a 24-year old third team all-pro, defensive player of the year runner up, and one of the three best U-25 bigs in the game. Today he’s…in trade machine screeds that aren’t even possible to pull off?
Copy and paste the above paragraph for Jalen Duren, Shai Gilgeous Alexander, Austin Reaves, Donovan Mitchell, Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, or any of about 5-10 other players this postseason who, after having an off-night, had their entire body of work questioned.
The Nerds won the battle of baseball discourse, and now you have to be math literate to not look like a complete boob. It wasn’t always pretty, but its emerged with an incredibly informed discourse.
The NFL playoffs are a one-and-done format so you don’t have the same dredging of bullshit. The discourse is better for it.
The NBA discourse is a nightmare and will continue to be until its media/fans/everyone else understands the concept of sample size and isn’t finding new excuses to flip out.
ON HOW THE GAME IS PLAYED.
There is a very simple concept that game designers, consciously or unconsciously, try to follow when building a game: the thing that is the most fun should be the thing that is most important to the game you are playing.
Games where sweaty, annoying, grindy tactics are the optimal way to play basically always suck.
To take an extremely simple board game as an example, the most satisfying part of Settlers of Catan is getting resources. The optimal way to play (assuming you’re playing normal humans) is to spam cities that grant you two resources every time your number is rolled. That’s fun!
I would assume that for most people, the most exciting thing about basketball is seeing someone throw a ball into the hoop. Perhaps a vanishingly small percentage of people prefer to watch people try to stop opposing players from putting the ball into the hoop. But it’s not many.
I think the most exciting brand of basketball the NBA ever put together were the peak Warriors vs Lebron Cavs playoff battles of the late 2010s. The numbers, to a certain extent, bear that out with the 2017 Warriors scoring the most points per game in finals history and the Cavs scoring a whopping 137 in their lone win of the series that year.
An explosive leap forward in offensive strategy that wildly outpaced defensive innovation coupled with freedom of movement changes in the rule book allowed the generation’s most talented offensive players the space to create unbelievably free-flowing, exciting action.
The NBA has made the decision to go away from that as much as possible, especially in its playoffs.
To watch a modern NBA playoff game is to watch two teams foul each other on every possession while the officials decide which 40 plays at random will earn a whistle. The “foul baiting” that people abhor isn’t happening because the referees are especially likely to blow their whistle. It’s because they’re so unlikely to blow their whistle. Of the 80 NBA playoffs ranked by free throw attempts to field goal attempts, this year’s season, where grifting became public enemy number one, was…62nd. 2025 was 70th.
I don’t think people want to see Lu Dort fling himself to the ground when trying to run over a screen, but maybe the reason why he does it is because the NBA has decided that illegal screens are not real, except on the .5 plays a game where they are, and your best bet to try to force the screener to follow the rules is to simulate a car crash. Look at the rulebook for illegal screens and then watch an NBA game and see if you can find literally one solitary screen that is actually textbook legal. You cannot do it. I promise.
The NBA, desperately, needs to take the time to sit down, figure out what the most exciting part of their game is, and then figure out a set of rules and a method of enforcement that maximizes the importance of those parts of the game. If people want to watch a game where strength is more important than speed and agility, it should continue to allow perimeter defenders to chuck ballhandlers into the fourth row. If it wants to encourage more rim attacks, it should widen the lane to make it harder for rim protectors to lurk. If it wants to encourage more threes, it should make the court wider. If it wants fewer, change the arc. If it wants to curtail shooters seeking contact, it should enforce the rules about unnatural movements it already has in its rulebook, and its officials should call fouls when people commit them, not just when people react to them.
I don’t know what most people want. But I do know that the NBA currently doesn’t give a shit about whether the action it presents is what people want to see.
(Not included in this screed is the fact that the unique physical challenges of the NBA unrelated to its rule book have put a time bomb on every player’s Achilles, calf, and hamstring and the playoffs are more about who can stave off a crippling soft tissue injury the longest and less about who the best team is. This is also a serious problem, solvable only by shrinking the length of games or of the season.)
ON HOW THE GAME IS MANAGED.
On-court quibbles pale in comparison to the clusterfuck the NBA has created for itself in its team building rules.
Adam Silver might be the world’s foremost talent in “being unable to predict second order outcomes to rule changes.” Every change he has made has been, or will be, catastrophic to the league’s product, and the problems are only getting worse.
One of the great advantages the NBA had in decades past was its hot stove was genuinely hot. While baseball commissioners were busy colluding with each other to not pay free agents and while football seemingly never saw top players at premier positions switch teams in their prime, the NBA had incredible player movement.
Then Kevin Durant decided to join the Golden State Warriors, everyone flipped out, and the league built a free agency system focused on making it easier for teams to hold onto their talent.
But it was cool when LeBron James hit unrestricted free agency! It was really exciting when Kevin Durant ended up in Brooklyn! Shoot, even Jalen Brunson hitting the open market out of Dallas is something that is unfathomable in the current CBA. Deandre Jordan was held hostage at his house! Why wouldn’t you want more of that?
Besides, how many actually good, home-grown players left a team that was well-managed? Other than Durant, it really isn’t many. The new machinations to give teams financial advantages in retaining talent was a solution in search of a problem.
In “solving” the non-problem, not only did the hot stove freeze over, but the CBA made team building more about math and sacrifice than identifying and developing cohesive pieces.
All sports’ cap rules are byzantine and impossible for the normal fan to crack, but the NBA’s is especially opaque. For as crucial as Bird Rights are to understanding the league, what percent of NBA fans could even begin to explain what they are?
The era of the second apron, instituted to curb against the super teams everyone loved to hate (which was good for the league and, again, didn’t need to be fixed), has in effect forced good teams to stop being good on purpose. That’s the number one unforgiveable sin of league management.
The Boston Celtics were forced to slough off still-very-useful-players like Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis after winning a title. The Oklahoma City Thunder’s second and third best players are in their third year in the league and they will STILL have a fire sale of rotation players this summer to get under the apron. The San Antonio Spurs will soon be in the same exact spot when Keldon Johnson, Stephon Castle, and Dylan Harper are owed new contracts.
It is fucking insane to watch extremely talented teams tear themselves apart simply because the cap is so restrictive. There is no basketball fan on the planet who wants to see teams title windows slam shut because of budget sheets. If this Thunder/Spurs series was played 15 years ago, we’d all be stoked about how this was going to be part of our summers for at least the next 5 years. Now, we’ll be lucky to see it twice more.
No matter how well you draft, no matter how savvy your free agency moves on the margin, no matter how many good trades you make, you will still need to chop apart your team every 3-4 years strictly because the CBA is just that restrictive.
Oh, and the NBA in its infinite wisdom has also decided to make it harder to build your team through the draft by flattening the lottery odds and penalizing the worst three teams in the league.
We’re left with a system where you cannot make moves in free agency, you cannot build through the draft, and teams are less likely to trade than before. It seems to be designed to encourage mediocrity. At least you can afford to build a 41-41 team.
FIGURE OUT WHAT YOU WANT TO BE.
The NBA is blessed with so many natural advantages as a league. Its audience skews young, there’s a game on every day, it’s fast, you can follow it without watching every game, it has an exciting international group of young stars with personalities that range from GTA6 Main Character to French Terminator.
But, as a league, it cannot help itself from shooting itself directly in its own penis over, and over, and over again.
Over the past decade and change, the league has continued to make slapdash “fixes” that are duct tape solves to a sinking foundation. It continues to exacerbate the very problems it seeks to solve.
The NBA is not a league in crisis. It is a league that is being sorely mismanaged. It desperately, desperately needs to take the time to figure out why people like it. And once they figure that out, they need to figure out how to make those the things that run the league. Not overreaction to media moments. Not what its gambling partners decide are important.
It can’t be as hard as they’re making it look.