I've kinda stopped watching NBA ball since the Knicks have sucked. So it's been a while. I'll still watch a good college matchup and of course March Madness. Don't the NBA playoffs start after Easter and run to July 4th?
It sure feels that way. I think the league has grown rather stale. All of the advanced analytics have sucked the style differences out of the game. 38% of all field goal attempts are 3s this season. The last time the Knicks were any good (c2000), it was <17%. Offenses are too predictable now. High movement to get a 3 or attack the rim. Teams also understand the value of rest because the season is too long. There isn’t much suspense in the playoff hunt or even earlier playoff series because the better team in basketball will win a 7 game series with more consistency than MLB or NHL. They haven’t figured out how to market teams in addition to stars. And the max player contract has artificially reinforced this. A top 20ish guy has the same max as a top 2-3 guy. Get rid of that ceiling and true top 5 guys will get an extra 15 million and lose some of their supporting cast. These issues were known 10-15 years ago, but Stern kicked the proverbial can down the road for Silver to deal with. Widen the court to take away the short corner 3s. Push the arc back to 25-26 feet to force teams to add post up and mid range offenses. Shorten the season a bit and maybe the initial playoff series as well to give guys rest and make the games more of an event rather than something your team does 4 nights a week. Maybe add a mid season cup format tourney. Possibly with a euroleague partnership. Get rid of the all star game. When a losing team can score 180 pts and a single guy can hit 50, the game has become a video game. All of these things are suddenly on the table now because the league refused to grapple with these issues for so long. The league has lost cultural relevance in the last 20 years. And not in the way that nearly everything has in the age of on demand entertainment. The first 15 years he had a great hand he played in a mediocre way, which net made it a great period. The last 15 years, he had a mediocre hand he played the same mediocre way, so the league got mediocre results.
That's been a problem for a long, long time. Games have been hyped on "see Magic Johnson and his High flying Lakers take on Larry Bird and those other guys wearing green" and so on for as long as I can remember.
@Chicago76 I’m not sure how to measure cultural relevance...but I can’t imagine a measurement that has the NBA’s relevance going down between now and 2000. The NBA is like the NFL in that it has national fans and national stories. As a result, its cultural relevance is greater than its popularity. Baseball is obviously more popular, but each team is its own story, so ESPN can’t find a way to talk about baseball on the national level. And that’s why baseball is less culturally relevant.
I tend to think of cultural relevance as the proportion of a population that interacts with a given product. Part of the issue is always going to be that we have so many choices today. No television show today is going to draw viewers the way programs did with a MASH, Dallas, Seinfield, Cosby, Friends. There is no equivalent of a Rubik's Cube, Sesame Street, putting baseball cards in your bike spokes, listening to the same albums, etc today. Avengers is smashing all sorts of domestic box office records, but they're going it because a) more people/bigger potential market and b) ticket prices are higher. A much greater proportion of the country saw Jaws when it was released. We have less of a shared monoculture. So to some degree domestically that impacts everything. But you can look at some stuff and wonder. Comparing NBA finals ratings from the last 4 years to the first 4 post Jordan, they're down. They were much worse in the mid-00s, but they're still down from where they were post-Jordan. Not as down as MLB, but more than the NHL and the NFL is actually up. So comparatively, they're doing worse than anything other than MLB. We can kind of back into assumptions on all-star voting engagement from 2000 to 2018, adjusting for changing domestic population, internet voting and international voters and see that domestic engagement is probably down. We can look at attendance vs. population and see that the normal Joe on the street is less likely to attend games. And we also know that 20 years ago, more people rated the NBA their number 1 pro sports league than MLB, but that reversed again. So the broader engagement is down. I think there's more NBA as lifestyle brand with fashion these days. And there's deeper engagement among hardcore fans with all of the media platforms, but it's pretty troubling when you're counting on cable to deliver your content in its primary form and younger people are cutting the cable cord. Silver has been worried about that one lately.
Actually I am old, so I am guessing Kookie died of old age at 101 rather than poor lifestyle choices.
Both gridiron & bball. I think college football rivalries are way better than pro. The NFC East 30 years ago was top notch but nothings matched it since IMO. I'm much more of a college bball fan compared to the NBA. The NBA regular season, besides a few prime matchups, is almost meaningless and the playoffs go on forever. March Madness is national in scope, is just a few weeks and has many exciting games and upsets.
" 77 Sunset STR-IP" (muted trumpet lick) "Kookie Kookie, lend me your comb?" But did ya know Jacqueline Beer (Suzanne) married Thor Heyerdahl? Connie Stevens was the second voice on "Lend Me Your Comb?" And Spike Jones covered it? Jack Webb bought into it and changed it all around, and the changes killed it? That there almost was a reboot in 1995?
Does bring to mind a question, though. Is/was not Kookie Byrnes possessed of about the absolute minimum consequence allowed to still be of consequence to anyone? I mean, he was kind of the Vanilla Ice of 1959...
The NFC East is better than the SEC. I was always kinda "rivalries, schmivalries" about cfb. Most of 'em are meaningless (to me) because of the way a champion is chosen. I do get bball. Agreed, again, on the Dance. I hear the "prefer cfb to the (highest level) NFL" a lot, considering where I live and the political "significance" of southern cfb.
Used to be. Back then you had LT, Simms, Harry Carson,Theismann, Riggo, Art Monk, Darrell Green, Dorsett, Randy White, Randall Cunningham, Reggie White, Harold Carmichael & St Louis had Roy Green (that was about it) to name some of the players who stood out. And every game they played against each other (besides the Cardinals) was an event. The division was as bad as it's ever been this year.
See, that kind of stuff is ridiculous... Sure the NFC east is crap--any division is if you can win it with a 9-7 record. But if any top college team could beat a bad NFL team, don'tcha think that every single starter on that team would make it in the NFL when the finish up in college? Sure, the top draftees do, but there are a ton of great players at the college level who do not make it in the NFL. It's like a second-division team being promoted. Some of them do well--usually because they add a couple of key, top players, but a lot of them don't, especially if they rely on the talent they had the previous promotion year.
Come on. It was better when I was watching and I'm sure it's better now. There are about 1600 men earning a check to don pads on Sunday.
College All Stars used to play the defending NFL champs and the college kids actually won some games. The game was contested annually — except for 1974, due to that year's NFL strike — and was played in July, August, or September. In the 42 College All-Star Games, the defending pro champions won 31, the All-Stars won nine, and two were ties, giving the collegians a .238 winning percentage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_College_All-Star_Game