Today’s focus will be professional basketball, where last weekend’s All-Star Game was a delight, and the league itself is kind of a mess at the moment. To the latter point, I’ll begin with a recent email from a Greatest of All Talk listener named Brian:
Dearest GOATs:
I have a confession to make: I’ve barely listened to the pod this season. When I do, I usually end up skipping ahead to the end where you discuss Formula One or college football or Legos or national parks. I’ve been listening to you two talk hoops for over a decade, since the start of Open Floor, and I’ve been missing it. But — and here’s the hard truth — I just don’t care about the NBA anymore. I want to care, but I’ve been drifting for a while. First from my hometown Wizards, and then from my bandwagon Warriors fandom, and now I find myself with basically no emotional connection to any player or team in the league. It’s a downward cycle — I care less, so I watch less, so I know less, so I care less… I want it to stop. I love hoops! High-level basketball that I’m emotionally invested in is my favorite sports fan experience.
Brian’s note strikes a familiar chord, and it’s the sort of sentiment that should cause real alarm at the NBA league office. Even among an anomalous sample—the sorts of hardcore sickos who pay to listen to 4 hours of basketball discussion, every week, all year long—the league is losing its hold on the audience.
Our podcast receives emails like that on-and-off throughout the year, and indeed, Brian wasn’t even the only struggling NBA fan who wrote to us last week. Here was Aaron, a few days later:
[T]he truth is that I have been feeling increasingly alienated from the league I once loved. Over the past three years Greatest of All Talk had gradually become my only weekly contact with pro-basketball. I just don’t enjoy watching the games the way I used to. It began to feel like a chore not a treat. The style of play (pace and space/no defense), along with the constant stoppages had become major barriers. I get more pleasure from watching 90’s-2010’s highlights, and while I understand this probably says a lot about me as a middle-aged dad, there is just a basic aesthetic quality of the game that I found more dramatic and entertaining 10+ years ago before the constant drive and kick three pointers reshaped everything.
I’ve also found the culture of NBA business to be totally alienating. I hate the way the league is managed, I hate the gambling partnerships, I hate the obscene focus on revenue at the expense of the beautiful sport, and I hate that by and large the players don’t seem to care as much as they used to. Why would they? They’re all insanely rich, constantly cycling between teams, and in a completely different social class than their core fans.
That’s where we are. And that sort of sour mood was the backdrop for All-Star Weekend in Los Angeles, where Steph Curry, Luka Doncic, Giannis Anetokounmpo and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander were injured (among others), All-Star Saturday night was held at 2 p.m. local time in a half-empty stadium, the most memorable dunk contest highlight was an anonymous role player appearing to concuss himself, Jaylen Brown was publicly feuding with the Beverley Hills Police Department, Kevin Durant was exposed in another burner account scandal, and the entire sports media seemed to be arguing about tanking and/or firing Commissioner Adam Silver. By Sunday afternoon I’d texted my co-host, Ben Golliver, and told him that the league’s only goal for its perennially depraved All-Star Game should be to avoid any viral moments that are so depressing that Silver would have to be fired this week.
But then something crazy happened.
The game was… pretty good?
Arguably great?
Certainly not the embarrassment we’d become accustomed to. For me, last Sunday afternoon was a welcome reminder that professional basketball can still work quite well.
For anyone who missed it: All-Stars in L.A. were split into three teams—one “world” team full of international players, one American team full of younger players, and one American team full of older players like LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and Kawhi Leonard. The teams played three, 12-minute-long “mini games” to determine who would play in the championship game. Because each game was confined to a 12-minute quarter, the format was a clever hedge against the risk of playing one, long game where one team gets hot from three and renders the ensuing two hours a formality.
The condensed round robin games probably sound stupid if you didn’t watch, but they mimicked pickup basketball, and coupled with a USA vs. the World (and Young Guys vs. Old Guys) format that seemed to spark real pride and even some defense, it all worked great. There were several game winners (Scottie Barnes, who knew!), Anthony Edwards was a deserving MVP, Kawhi Leonard went ballistic, and Victor Wembanyama was valiant in two heartbreaking losses for the World team. The final game was a blowout as the older American team ran out of gas and the young guys got hot, but by that point I’d been having a great time for two hours and didn’t care.
I mention all that up front not because I’m convinced the NBA has solved the All-Star Game—we’ll see what happens in Phoenix next year—but merely as evidence that it pays to put thought and care into structural shifts that improve the product. Silver said last weekend that “everything is on the table” to address tanking this offseason, and I would note that (1) I solved tanking for him last week, and (2) tanking is only a small part of the league’s current problem. What the NBA needs is closer to a full reset in the modern era. Its problems are structural and cultural. And the first decent All-Star Game of the decade provides a useful keystone to understanding how any of these issues can be addressed.
What To Do With the Other 2,500 Games
How do we keep the talent invested? What can we do to avoid worst case scenarios from an entertainment standpoint? How can we get fans paying attention? These are structural questions that any successful entertainment business should be asking, and the result last weekend was a Sunday afternoon with better pacing, more drama, and fewer All-Star complaints than the league has seen all decade. The next miracle will be if the league can do that for the rest of its games, too.
Returning to one of the emails at the top, Aaron wrote, “I just don’t enjoy watching the games the way I used to. It began to feel like a chore not a treat. The style of play (pace and space/no defense), along with the constant stoppages had become major barriers.”
I fully identify with that sentiment. The league makes it hard. Games are too long, stoppages are incessant, and the modern style is aesthetically boring and evidently so physically taxing that none of the stars can stay healthy for six months straight. Given that state of affairs, I would be remiss if I didn’t offer some structural fixes of my own.
So, looking past All-Star and at the other, roughly 2,500 games the NBA plays every year, here are 10 changes the league should make tomorrow:
- Eliminate replay reviews. Remove them from the regular season entirely, and from all but a handful of playoff circumstances. It’s fine if randomness and human error are part of the sport, and as an entertainment product, replay reviews often murder the most exciting moments basketball has.
- Eliminate intentional fouling at the end of games. See above. Any team that’s fouled in the final two minutes has the option of taking the ball out of bounds. Boom: you’ve fixed it.
- Eliminate tanking. Again, the solution here is not rocket science.
- Allow and encourage refs to call team technical fouls related to individual player behavior. This would introduce competitive penalties that curb incessant, alienating ref complaints and flopping—from Luka, Ant, Jokic, Draymond, and others—without ejecting superstars from games.
- Eliminate the corner three. Sports were better when everyone was dumber and everything was less optimized. Corner threes make defense quasi-impossible and offenses painfully predictable, and—because they force defenders to cover a lot more ground than they used to—probably lead to more injuries. This change would cut down on blowouts, too.
- Every made basket should be reset with a ref. Slow games down a bit. This, too, gives defenses more of a level playing field and probably helps curb injuries.
- Restore the officiating the league had for the second half of last season. Halfway through last year, refs dramatically reduced the number of fouls called. I didn’t talk to a single fan who didn’t love it. For some reason, that initiative appears to have been abandoned this season.
- Eliminate alternate courts and alternate jerseys. Give teams one court and three jerseys. This is about brand integrity and quality control. The current, five-jersey set-up a) erodes the primary brands the league’s trying to sell, while b) making teams unrecognizable on a night to night basis.
- Eliminate the play-in tournament. The teams suck, the product sucks, it does nothing for the regular season, and it diminishes the spectacle of the first playoff weekend. Enough.
- As soon as possible, nuke the most recent collective bargaining agreement. Silver and the league pushed for a structural framework that systematically breaks up the best and most marketable teams the league has, leads to crazy amounts of year-to-year roster turnover, and makes it less satisfying for fans to follow the league.
That’s not an exhaustive list of changes the league should make (we should also bring back suits for coaches), and some of those proposals probably deserve a longer explanation (I may need a few years before I can write about the current CBA without lapsing into hate speech). For purposes of this post, though, the operative point is that the current product is not in a good place, but like the All-Star Game, there are plenty of simple fixes that might help cut down on injuries, improve the aesthetics, and make games less punishing for fans as they attempt to stay invested in a league they’ve loved their whole life.
Note that I haven’t suggested shortening the season here, which would require a commissioner to broker a compromise in which the teams and the players all agree to make less money in the short term in order to protect the long term viability of the product. I don’t think Adam Silver has the mettle to do it (see below), but it’s of course obvious to everyone that the central problem with the regular season is that it’s so long that everyone from players, to teams, to fans understands that the individual games don’t matter very much. One reason everyone is always trying to “fix” the league is because that’s a more interesting conversation than a regular season story that has run its course by mid-January yet continues until mid-April. And the problem for the league is that once you lose people for the first six months of year, you don’t always get them back once the playoffs arrive with real stakes.
Reducing the schedule from 82 games to 72 games, a popular suggestion, would not go far enough to alter those dynamics. Games still wouldn’t matter very much, and it would still be optimal from a competitive standpoint to rest stars during a 72-game season. The goal should be 60 games, where every team plays two-games per season against every other team (assuming the league expands to 32 teams as planned), teams play two games per week, and four or five extra wins really matter. That would enhance the draw of regular season games, make the year feel like less of a slog, and help insulate against waning interest that wasn’t a problem during this last round of TV negotiations but could very well bite the league next time, when streamers like Peacock or Amazon will take a harder look at whether NBA fans actually watch any of these games.
In any event, the length of the season is the most obvious structural problem facing the league, which is why it gets its own two paragraphs, but the league’s failure to shorten the season is at least understandable. The failure to address anything else on that list is increasingly indefensible.
The Culture Change and Who Leads It
Returning to this year’s All-Star Game as our blueprint for a brighter future, the other lesson in L.A. last weekend was that the NBA is still very much a players’ league. When the best players are charismatic, invested and playing well, structural problems tend to become secondary. It’s why it didn’t matter on Sunday that we were watching some jerry-rigged round robin format instead of an actual 48-minute game. “Exclamation-point plays, playing in a solid manner and sharing the ball with energy,” Victor Wembanyama said Saturday when asked about his plans for Sunday’s game. “If you share that energy, people feel like they have a responsibility to share it back to you.”
Sometimes it’s that simple. Wemby played defense and played with energy. His opponents were worried about getting shown up, so they played hard, too. “[Wembanyama] set the tone,” Anthony Edwards said after winning MVP, “and it was definitely competitive with all three teams. He set the tone, man. And it woke me up, for sure.”
Building on that progress in Phoenix next year will come down to commitment among the players, themselves. And to that end, I’d add that during last week’s national referendum on What’s Wrong With The NBA, there was lots of focus on Adam Silver, and not enough on LeBron James.
We can stick with All-Star here. Earlier this year I saw a wonderfully profane rant from Kevin Garnett, who was spot on when he identified LeBron as the culprit who was afraid of failure and set a different tone than his predecessors, making it cool to not try in the All-Star Game. LeBron also famously refused to participate in the dunk contest throughout his early years and prime, again because the risk of failure outweighed any expected benefits. His endorsement deals were signed. He was already the most famous player in the league. At an individual level, it was a rational business decision. It also completely failed to account for the benefits to fans when superstars are willing to try, risk embarrassment, and put on a show for the sake of the league.
Today, no stars compete in the dunk contest, and for most of the past 15 years, they haven’t competed in the All-Star Game, either. The vibe of the modern era was exemplified a few years ago when Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, in a fur coat, making 35 million dollars per yer, was asked about improving the All-Star Game and said, “Money talks.” In other words, put more money on the line and we’ll play hard.
That sucks! And it wouldn’t be a big deal if this mindset were confined to All-Star Weekend, but it’s not. Even as NBA superstars make more money than any American athletes in history, there’s very little sense of shared responsibility to promote the league and its interests simply because it’s the right thing to do. And here, like in L.A. this year, the best players set the tone for everyone else.
Whenever LeBron retires, the first paragraph of every retrospective will note that no player in the history of the league understood his power better or wielded it more successfully. That’s true. The problem for the league was that he also provided cover for a generation of stars to ignore public sentiment altogether, clumsily replicating his power plays with less talent and less novelty. Think Kevin Durant, James Harden, Anthony Davis, Paul George, Carmelo Anthony, Kawhi Leonard, Kyrie Irving, Dwight Howard, Ben Simmons, Jimmy Butler, and probably a few other months-long sagas I’m forgetting. This just became how the league did its business.
The result was an era of self-interested decisions, increasingly exhausting melodrama, and superstars talking and behaving more like corporations than people. Also, because of the overheated response to LeBron’s decisions early in his career, pundits ultimately went the other direction, adopting a detached, almost abstract approach to discussing any of this. People like Adrian Wojnarowski went from writing scathing LeBron columns in 2011 to protecting their access 10 years later. And more than just protecting access, this was a Twitter problem: It was the fear of being accused of inciting a moral panic that left most media afraid to react at all as players pushed the envelope further and further, making a star-driven league less popular as its stars became less likable.
I’ll be curious to see how much longer those dynamics hold. LeBron and his mopey, mercurial generational peers are retiring soon. Sunday in L.A. provided an introduction to a younger generation that is both more fun and less self-conscious. Anthony Edwards and Victor Wembanyama are flat out superstars, while Cade Cunningham, Scottie Barnes, Cooper Flagg and a variety of younger stars (along with an outstanding draft class) provide real hope for the future.
For now, the league’s most recent generation of stars probably deserve more blame than they’ve gotten for the league’s journey to the margins of mainstream consciousness, and a new generation will be the central drivers of any trip back. It also occurs to me that there’s never been a collective reckoning among players or media that player empowerment is only good for the league if players not only share in the benefits of the NBA but also accept the responsibilities that come with being equal partners in an enterprise that’s worth at least $76 billion over the next decade. That means showing respect to media partners and fans, and upholding traditions that Kevin Garnett cared about and LeBron James didn’t.
It would also help if the league office were actively, sometimes angrily, delivering that message and cultivating that culture of shared responsibility.
The Adam Silver Problem
Two foundational moments for the modern NBA era came on July 8, 2010 and April 29, 2014. The first moment was LeBron’s Decision, which sparked national outrage that basketball media then spent the ensuing decade over-correcting for, afraid to criticize superstars, imposing no reputational cost for player behavior that became increasingly out of step with what most people want from star athletes. We went over that. The second was when Adam Silver banned Donald Sterling for life in what was widely seen as an exemplar of progressive politics in business, and which bought Silver immunity from scrutiny for most of the ensuing decade. Silver was understood as the antidote to Roger Goodell’s moral indifference and David Stern’s fire and brimstone approach, working with players, not against them.
Some of those Silver takes from the last decade have not aged well, including probably a few of my own. For almost 15 years, various aspects of the league have looked they’re run by a substitute teacher. Today, I would be lying to readers if I wrote this whole post without stating clearly that, yes, many of the league’s problems are solvable, and absolutely, the next generation of stars is promising, but the NBA will probably continue to flounder until owners find a way to move beyond Adam Silver.
“David Stern was loud, emotional, could be verbally abusive and was threatening,” Colin Cowherd said recently. “He was a daunting presence. He had no problem getting on the phone with a GM, a coach, or even a player and airing it out. He didn’t care what you thought of him.”
That’s correct. Silver’s taken good care of his reputation since the Sterling decision, but what the NBA has really missed over the last decade is a commissioner who’s not afraid to be a public villain. Whether that means kneecapping teams for tanking or resting players, or going after superstars demanding trades, complaining incessantly on the court or embarrassing the league at All-Star Weekend, Stern would not have gone down without a loud, public fight on any of these issues. He would use every tool at his disposal to get what he wanted, regardless of how unpopular it was. The threat of that retribution was a useful deterrent to excess on all sides.
Silver, by contrast, abhors confrontation. It’s why shortening the regular season will probably never even be broached on his watch. Instead, we’ll have a generation of in-season tournaments and play-in games. Meanwhile, ESPN’s coverage of the league was a problem for a full decade without the NBA intervening. The league never raised public questions about the apparent conflict of interest underlying LeBron’s relationship to Klutch Sports, and likewise largely left it up to teams to figure out how to discipline players making trade demands and refusing to perform their contracts. Last year, when officiating was reformed midway through the season, Silver tapped Joe Dumars to address the changes and seemed to have instructed his executives to deny that anything changed. Three years ago, when Terry Rozier was investigated for gambling, the league said nothing, didn’t tell the Heat that Rozier was under investigation when they traded for him, and still hasn’t compensated Miami. Most infamously, Silver’s aversion to conflict allowed the Players’ Association to refuse cap smoothing when the league signed its last TV deal, creating the conditions for Kevin Durant to join the Warriors, poisoning the second half of the league’s last decade, and creating a groundswell of resentment that led to 2023’s disastrous CBA.
Stern, in addition to his caustic tendencies, was also a basketball fan. It’s not just that he had the gravitas to keep counterparties in line; Stern understood his product and why fans loved the game, and would have literally thrown himself in front of a bus before allowing Kevin Durant to join the Warriors and wreck the NBA’s best rivalry since Bird and Magic in the 1980s. There’s likewise no way on earth Stern would have pushed for a collective bargaining agreement that makes it impossible to keep the league’s best teams together and guarantees that playoff teams will turn over 30% of their rotation every year.
Stern is the most successful commissioner the NBA has ever known, of course, but I would feel guiltier about holding Silver to that standard if he hadn’t been compared favorably to Stern for the first 10 years of his tenure. Part of any successful attempt at addressing the league’s issues going forward will require a clearer understanding of its institutional failures to date. Silver, to be fair, has done a really nice job successfully navigating the modern rights landscape and securing massive TV deals that have made everyone rich. But he lacks a feel for what the game needs and aspects of the league’s health that can’t be measured. To that end, I’d argue the better question about Silver’s tenure is not how much the NBA’s rights fees grew on his watch, but how much more successful the NBA might have been if the commissioner had been paying attention to his core product—games people watch, stars people like. Alongside those TV deals, ratings have cratered from where they were 15 years ago, and no one at the league office in Manhattan seems to have noticed that actually sitting down and watching a basketball game has become quite a chore these days.
At his state of the league press conference on Saturday, before the All-Star Game I loved on Sunday, Silver said that he’s excited about the future of hyper-personalized telecasts with artificial intelligence. This came during the commissioner’s opening statement, and was kind of a wonderful microcosm of his whole deal. Silver is missing the big things, while not necessarily nailing the little things, either. His enthusiastic AI digression misunderstood the implications of the technology at issue—live, un-personalized, shared experiences will be what could be an invaluable point of differentiation for the NBA in an era of hyper-personalized AI content—before ending with a vision of live, AI-assisted shopping that could be offered during games.
That moment was not encouraging, but also not surprising. Silver talks and acts like a corporate consultant. He’s not a villain. He’s well-meaning, affable, and fluent in technocratic and progressive sloganeering, qualities that for many years prevented him from being criticized at all.
Even in the most generous reading, though: Silver is an optimizer. He’s not an inventor, or in the NBA’s case, a re-inventor. He’s also not much of a leader, which is precisely what a business needs when it’s gotten a little bit lost and has to find its way back.
Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. We’ll publish once a week, on Fridays. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email, click here.