I like your writing about any topic that interests you, even ones I don't follow (like sports). I saw this yesterday, and I thought of you. It's more on your beat, I realize:
"Everywhere around us we see the signs: depression, burnout, hyperactivity, anxiety, self-harm. Sometimes the disorders get classified as medical syndromes with impressive acronyms...
"In other cases—a suicide or fatal breakdown, for example—things have gone too far for even medical intervention. All the acronyms in the world won’t help you then. But in every instance, something similar can be seen: the victims are at war with themselves.
"That’s misleading, Byung-Chul Han would say. They only seem to be the instigators of their problems, which are coming from the burdens of a society overdosing on positivity and self-directed achievement. You can’t solve a problem when it’s caused by the very methods you use to solve problems."
What really, really ruined basketball for me is the double standard. 5% of the league gets to travel. An offensive charge isn't an offensive charge. Mike Bibby gets called for fouling Kobe's elbow with his face.
It's crazy. Is there any other professional sport with such a blatant double standard? if the refs tried to pull this crap in the NFL the fan base would go ballistic. At most they protect QB's, as a class, once in a while.
This was highly relevant to my interests. I'm a lifelong Celtics fan, and I do find the current moneyball approach to the way the game has evolved interesting, if not quite as much fun as NBA basketball used to be, especially around the usage of three point shots.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would bring Wilt Chamberlain back from the grave, and watch him average 65 ppg as hapless big men, who are now all outside shooters, struggle in vain to stop him within 10 feet of the basket.
"things you can't question is the league's current quality of play or the quality of players in the league right now..."
I'm kinda confused by that paragraph. Everything I see about the NBA: Shaq and Barkley, Simmons, Reddit comments, youtube videos all make the point you made in that question. That seems to be the strong majority viewpoint, as far as I can tell. I also don't see the taboo against talking about Zion's weight, that's all I ever hear about it him.
And this is the way I like it. I can still watch the playoff games I want. The league has great skill right now, arguable the best it's ever been. Having the NHL have the most money or the biggest ratings is not something I think about. Having McDavid relatively anonymous might be a feature and not a bug.
Great interview! When Ethan started HoS, some people accused him of becoming one of those anti-woke Substackers who just wants to gripe about social justice infecting sports and media. He could have gone that direction, but hasn’t at all. He’s just writing about sports and culture without constraints.
I subscribed in the early days mostly to help him out (because it’s stupid brave to quit your job in this industry, and I’m a sucker for writers who take risks). However I’ve enjoyed the interviews with Freddie and others in media, and I like learning about what is going on in sports from Ethan’s perspective.
> It’s a sad facet of this industry that there’s always someone willing to step up and replace you for nothing…Just find some college kid who’s willing to cut the legs out from under a professional.
This is true of most media but especially in sports, where fans love to write about their favorite teams. Any team with a decent fan base has bloggers who write recaps and commentary—and unlike the newspaper writers they’re free to swear and post GIFs and have fun with it. And like Ethan said, countless kids would be happy to cover a sports team for a news site as unpaid “interns” or for peanuts.
I often think about this problem. Writing is fun, and the majority of people who enjoy writing will never make money—so what can you tell them? Don’t share your blog and essays and fiction because someone else is trying to do it for money? That’s obviously not fair. Anyone should be free to create and share their work. But it means we’ll never solve the problem of free and cheap content flooding the internet.
I was kinda turned off by the first article I saw there, which was this bizarre rant about Nike commercials not being manly enough (dude, women spend a lot more on clothes). I'll look into subbing if its gotten better.
See I didn't find that bizarre at all; the whole point is that Nike's craven exploitation of social justice rhetoric doesn't work for social justice or as advertising. It's Nike! They're an evil company.
This made me think of the post from yesterday. One of our biggest turn of the century campus activist causes was against Nike. I will never not see them as evil.
There's a little bit of anti-woke stuff in Ethan's articles, but not a lot. And when it does come up, it's thoughtful. I mean, who can deny that the NBA drove away a lot of fans with its 2020 bubble shit show? The Social Justice jerseys especially. Pointing that out made Twitter-addicted writers so, so mad, but it's impossible not to notice.
Yes, he covers the annoying woke stuff, but it's not one of those Substacks that just gripes about identity politics every day. He writes about a variety of sports and media topics, and the social justice trend is just one of them.
Writing about the NBA and NOT writing about the woke stuff is dishonest. I like that Ethan, as you says, goes there when needed. Similar to Freddie, I'd be put off if that was the bulk of what they do but I'd be even more out off if they pretended it could never be discussed. Wish more people had that approach.
Yep, it’s like that Onion article: “Find The Thing You're Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life“
I accept this reality, but it’s so hard when you have a full-time job and young child(ren). Any time spent on writing means less time for family, self-care, and the household tasks that have been piling up.
When people tell women 'You can have it all" they are lying. But they're also lying if they tell men the same thing. The trick I think is to go about your choices with your eyes open and, consequently, no regrets.
1) Gronk does lame commercials for Navy Federal Credit Union. #gonavy
2) who are the pelicans
3) I've enjoyed the All or Nothing series and Drive to Survive because it's fun to get to know the athletes and makes me care more. Perhaps that's gauche and I should just like sports for sports sake. But as you say, we need stars/celebrity and that's a great way to do it.
Loved this. I could spend hours just on the thoughts it spurred. Two quick ones:
1) The NBA has ALWAYS had a problem translating interest into viewers. Mike was the most iconic American athlete since at least Ali but probably The Babe. Look at the TV ratings he drew. They were good... for the NBA. Baseball, aka the least popular sport ever according to the cool kids, spent the 90s feeding Jordan his lunch in viewers. The gap between his Finals and a NFL game are laughable. LeBron may be famous but, like the Kardashians are. Again, dead baseball still usually draws in more viewers. LeBron's peak moment (Game 7 2016) was 3/4 what Game 7 of that year's World Series drew. And obviously LeBron is far less of a ratings draw than pretty much any NFL game. There's some reason that transcends the current moment that leads people to not want to watch NBA games.
2) Until about my sophomore year of college (when I pushed all in on "communist revolutionary") my dream was to be a sports writer. Freddie nailed it with the death of the local newspapers and its effect on sports media. There's probably five times as many people covering Philadelphia teams as there were in the 90s. But the quality gap is massive. The tone has changed, the general written skill has changed. I used to read game reports even for games I watched because of the way a Jayson Stark or Ray Didinger could write. Most of the pros do not have that anymore. There's also a weird obsequiousness that I never saw back then. Sure, you could tell when a guy was covering for a player or coach he liked. But even at a place like The Athletic these former bloggers feel like fans who think they work for the team. It's embarrassing and off-putting. But we went from having a thriving and competitive newspaper industry with well paying jobs for professionals to whatever news hellscape this is now, so this is what we get.
What lost my interest as a fan was that any time a game is close in the last few minutes, everything slows to a crawl and is full of intentional fouls, timeouts, and commercials. Things may have changed for the better but at the time it was a complete momentum and interest killer for me.
Exactly my experience. What makes it worse, most of the time the game comes down to the last two minutes. If you just wait and start watching with five minutes to go in the fourth quarter, you'll basically see what matters in the game. The rest is just filler.
I’m a Warriors fan, so I’m obviously pretty happy with the modern basketball era. Somehow I manage to be an anomaly, who mostly stopped watching NFL about a decade ago but still follows the NBA and MLB pretty avidly, which seems to be the opposite of what everyone else is doing. I think, like many many aspects of our culture, the internet has really changed fandom. Football seems to be the only sport left for the casual watcher. Basketball and baseball seem increasingly to be only for very serious fans, insular, unwelcoming, overwhelming for the newbie. I’m old enough that I don’t care, I’m fine being someone who doesn’t have everyone’s stats memorized, who knows my guys and the major players on other teams, but other than that just turns on all the Dubs games and has them on in the kitchen while I cook dinner, or listens to the Giants on the radio when I garden, and gets really happy when they win. I’ve been a fan of these teams for 25 years but I find even causal comments sections like this intimidating because no one just seems to be watching for fun anymore, but rather to show off their mastery of the discipline of basketball viewership. I don’t know how these sports could possibly attract new viewers this way. Other than the Super Bowl Party, do people even get together to watch sports at home anymore? That’s how I got into them in the first place. The fun of a group of my parents’ friends over to watch a game, or a fight, which turned into watching games with my boyfriend and college friends at home or at a bar. How does one get into a sport as a teenager now?
I really don’t know any teenagers who are into sports enough to watch them. Maybe they go to a local game with their dad once a year. I was just having this convo with my husband— how do sports even continue if kids have so little interest?
I remember being in high school and I was by no means a big sports fan but I’d sit around with friends and watch the Celtics because… it was on, and some of my friends were really into it.
I wonder if we have so many entertainment offerings. Maybe it’s always easier to find something on Netflix.
Right, my kids watch with me sometimes but they aren’t going to keep doing something they only have mild interest in if their peers aren’t into it too. Not that it matters. It’s ok for the world and culture to change; of course their adolescence and young adulthood will be filled with different cultural markers and rituals than mine was. That’s as it should be. But it’s not good news for the industry of sport.
Sports have also been so slow to change how they're viewed. Barely anyone under 30 pays for cable, and even if you do you're screwed if your team is outside your home market.
Exactly! We pay for a huge online package of various channels (like cable without the actual "cable") just so my husband can watch all the college football his heart desires. But paying for a cable-like service seems really old-fashioned; younger people absolutely don't watch stuff that way -- neither do we -- we have 200 channels that we never look at -- it's all for the live sports. A friend told me there was an ESPN package (akin to paying for Netflix, or Disney+, where you just buy some ESPN channels) but we looked into that and it left out a lot of stuff... Sports have to make sure they're still relevant.
I am a sixty-one year old NBA fan...but certainly not as big a one as I was twenty or even ten years ago. Of course the league has a lot of tremendous players who would be great in any era. But I find the actual games boring. Ol' Hater Charles Barkley exaggerates when he says the games are nothing but 3-point contests now...but he doesn't exaggerate by much. Ringer podcasters see all kinds of subtleties and strategies that the average fan doesn't, but I'm that average fan and to me it looks like most teams play the same way most of the time, and the individual players are far more homogenous in the way they play than I've ever seen (and I fell in love with the sport, as so many did, in the Magic-Bird 80's). A great player like Dennis Rodman couldn't even get on the court today because he couldn't spread the floor. I don't want to go back to the lane-clogging days of Rileyball, but there has to be some way to find a medium and the league hasn't done it.
As far as the Social Justice Effect goes, look, players and coaches have just as much of a right to their political opinions as anyone else, and just as much right to express them. But I will also say this - for all the rest of us, watching sports is an escape from all the daily shit we have to deal with out in the world, and when watching a basketball game becomes just one more serving of shit, one more finger pointed at our personal and collective failures, then it loses its utility; if sports aren't a break from guilt and chaos and helplessness and real-world strife, then they aren't ANYTHING, and people will find something else to do with their time. If I hired a contractor to redo my kitchen and every morning when he showed up he spent the first half hour going on and on about his personal political/social peeves (and slipped in another lecture every time he took a ten minute break) it wouldn't be long before I found another contractor - even if I agreed with his opinions. That's what it felt like during the Bubble Year and I suspect that's when they lost a lot of people.
There's also the Chinese Communist Party, and its actual, current human rights abuses, which the NBA stars profit from but mostly fail to condemn. Which is fine, being silent, but no longer fine when they loudly claim some moral leadership against real but lesser problems in the USA. Complain about all immorality, or none, but don't expect to be treated as morally superior with selective complaints about lesser problems.
God yes. Every time LeBron straps on on his Serious Social Justice Face and begins trying to educate viewers about Oppression someone should ask him about the Uighurs. Which is another thing that irks the hell out of me about sports journalism--the extent to which stars get a free pass from answering hard questions.
I quit watching sports because, for the most part, I got tired of the social justice messaging being sent by leagues with disproportionate amounts of spousal abusers telling me that I'm racist.
I also kinda blame them for Trump's loss since they were hocking registration and clearly most players hated Trump. I know so many people on here hate Trump, and I understand why, but there's no way the situation we're in now with Joe Biden is any better. It is much, much worse, at least for Ukraine.
Same. All of these wokey young sportswriters claim it is impossible to take "politics" out of sports. But what they really mean is, they insist on injecting woke politics into it. If Kaepernick had been taking a knee to protest abortion they would have been saying the exact opposite things about him as what they did say. I did enjoy watching them squirm, however, when Kyrie Irving did his heel turn.
You blame Trump’s loss on sports? That’s honestly a new one to me, especially given the NBA has lost half its viewership in the past decade and was at an all time low in 2020, it’s amazing that they could have that much sway. The fact that that’s what it took for trump to lose (to BIDEN!) doesn’t make Trump look all that great.
Are you surprised if it added a couple hundred thousand anti-Trump voters to the rolls, if not more? You don't think the daily messaging by the NBA and near weekly by NFL changed anything?
btw I'm not blaming the loss on sports, I'm saying the constant messaging from leagues, teams and players helped contribute to the increase in voter rolls for Biden.
I think the media in general is anti trump, including sports media, but no I don’t think sports had any impact in actually moving the needle from Trump to Biden.
'Sports fans had to sit through a bunch of left-leaning preaching when they were trying to watch sports and that was *bad for Republicans*' is not a very credible narrative to me.
Seems to me that a lot of NBA writers consider themselves as part of the NBA product, not independent voices. So it's not surprising that they are defensive about criticism of it. But it makes sense that if the NBA is your only beat and all of your time is spent thinking, talking and writing about it you are more invested, and protective, than a pre-internet scribe who covers a range of sports topics. If you listen to NBA podcasts you'll regularly hear national NBA writers talk of being, e.g., "concerned" about this team's direction or "optimistic" about how these two guys will play together. I think that language gives something away.
This comment should get so much attention. Sports journalism in general has seen a massive (and I believe bad) swing towards being league PR. In fact that is a large part I find Ethan's writing so essential.
Interesting stuff. I read a fair amount of NBA coverage and had no idea the ratings decline was that monumental and long term. I wish you'd gotten into what might be driving that.
Ten years ago, I think the consensus (or at least, the elite consensus) was that the NBA would have overtaken the NFL in popularity by now. Adam Silver was sharp and connected; Roger Goodell was a a dissembling fool. The NBA had young smart owners; the NFL had old white guys. The NBA had charismatic stars like LeBron, Steph Curry, and Durant; the NFL had the likes of Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, who were under helmets. Past NFL stars were shells of their former selves due to concussions; old NBA players were showing up at events looking as sharp as when they were playing. The NFL was "American" football, and limited in its reach; the NBA was attracting talent from all over the world. We were all witnessing the decline of Major League Baseball, so we know that nothing lasts forever.
And, today, the idea that the NBA will surpass the NFL in popularity is probably and order of magnitude less likely than it was then. It is nearly impossible to imagine a couple days of the NBA capturing the public's attention the way this past weekend of the NFL playoffs did.
And I'm not sure why, exactly. But I do think the NFL understands that it is in the entertainment business, and the NBA doesn't always do that. And, maybe the NFL got lucky that analytics-inspired strategies (pass-heavy offenses, going for it on 4th down, athletic QBs) are more entertaining than analytics-inspired basketball strategies (the 2017 Houston Rockets).
As is probably unsurprising for a subscriber to this newsletter, I despise empty signaling. All being an NFL fan means is that you like football.
What's painful for me about the NBA isn't so much being confronted with opinions I may not agree with, but the suspicion that everyone is towing the company line. There's a difference between Jamal Murray putting the names of victims of police violence on his shoes, and every player putting a vapid slogan on the back of his shirt. Aaron Rodgers (and, for that matter, Kyrie Irving) may be wrong about vaccines, but I'm pretty sure they're saying what they mean. When an announcer praises some player's work in social justice, I'm not so sure.
And "eat your vegetables" has never been successful strategy for a sport. It didn't work for soccer when they were telling us we needed to embrace it because the world did, and the various ways the WNBA has pushed that haven't worked, either. There's a whiff of that in NBA boosterism that repels me.
In the US, the NFL's dominance is clear, and fans like me are to blame for it. But is the NFL superior from a global perspective? I can't imagine there are nearly as many NFL fans outside of the US as there are NBA. But I honestly have no idea.
This is the thing people always say but I wonder how much of this is anecdotal and how much is wishcasting. "They play basketball overseas the NBA must be popular there."
I was working on something about the respective popularities of sports and it lead me to believe that NBA popularity is mostly bullshit pushed by the league. And the league is VERY popular among the type of people who populate what now passes for media (nerdy white guys in Brooklyn & DC). I just don't see the evidence for it. So unless someone can give actual support for it, I think the safest belief is:
Domestically the NBA is less popular than the NFL but more popular than the NHL
Internationally basketball is popular and the NBA is less popular than the Premier League but probably not unpopular.
I believe a lot of the NBA's alleged overseas popularity is based on the China thing which Ethan has brilliantly written about.
I'm happy to be proved wrong on this (I'm a League Pass subscriber!) but I just can't find the evidence.
I think that's reasonable. Anecdotally, I grew up in Eastern Europe, and can tell you that the 90s NBA was a lot more popular in my very small neck of the woods than the NFL. But again, Michael Jordan is probably distorting this..
Thanks for this, it was fascinating. I'd really enjoy more interviews by you on these sorts of off-your-usual-beat topics.
Q&A is gonna be a semi regular feature, if I can get people who are willing to associate with me
I like your writing about any topic that interests you, even ones I don't follow (like sports). I saw this yesterday, and I thought of you. It's more on your beat, I realize:
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/multitasking-isnt-progressits-what
"Everywhere around us we see the signs: depression, burnout, hyperactivity, anxiety, self-harm. Sometimes the disorders get classified as medical syndromes with impressive acronyms...
"In other cases—a suicide or fatal breakdown, for example—things have gone too far for even medical intervention. All the acronyms in the world won’t help you then. But in every instance, something similar can be seen: the victims are at war with themselves.
"That’s misleading, Byung-Chul Han would say. They only seem to be the instigators of their problems, which are coming from the burdens of a society overdosing on positivity and self-directed achievement. You can’t solve a problem when it’s caused by the very methods you use to solve problems."
"Multitasking Isn't Progress—It's What Wild Animals Do for Survival" is one hell of an amazing title.
What really, really ruined basketball for me is the double standard. 5% of the league gets to travel. An offensive charge isn't an offensive charge. Mike Bibby gets called for fouling Kobe's elbow with his face.
It's crazy. Is there any other professional sport with such a blatant double standard? if the refs tried to pull this crap in the NFL the fan base would go ballistic. At most they protect QB's, as a class, once in a while.
It happens in the NFL. Look how many times teams get flagged for BS late hits on Tom Brady. Yes I’m a bitter Jets fan why do you ask?
This was highly relevant to my interests. I'm a lifelong Celtics fan, and I do find the current moneyball approach to the way the game has evolved interesting, if not quite as much fun as NBA basketball used to be, especially around the usage of three point shots.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would bring Wilt Chamberlain back from the grave, and watch him average 65 ppg as hapless big men, who are now all outside shooters, struggle in vain to stop him within 10 feet of the basket.
Ah, dare to dream.
"things you can't question is the league's current quality of play or the quality of players in the league right now..."
I'm kinda confused by that paragraph. Everything I see about the NBA: Shaq and Barkley, Simmons, Reddit comments, youtube videos all make the point you made in that question. That seems to be the strong majority viewpoint, as far as I can tell. I also don't see the taboo against talking about Zion's weight, that's all I ever hear about it him.
You're not on NBA Twitter, I take it
For better or worse, my brain worms come from Reddit, not Twitter.
It's GOODHART'S law (spelling was wrong - Charles Goodhart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
sorry
Not a criticism! I'm just being annoyingly pedantic.
At least it's not the NHL. I bet Connor McDavid could walk around any major US city unrecognized by the vast majority of people.
And this is the way I like it. I can still watch the playoff games I want. The league has great skill right now, arguable the best it's ever been. Having the NHL have the most money or the biggest ratings is not something I think about. Having McDavid relatively anonymous might be a feature and not a bug.
Great interview! When Ethan started HoS, some people accused him of becoming one of those anti-woke Substackers who just wants to gripe about social justice infecting sports and media. He could have gone that direction, but hasn’t at all. He’s just writing about sports and culture without constraints.
I subscribed in the early days mostly to help him out (because it’s stupid brave to quit your job in this industry, and I’m a sucker for writers who take risks). However I’ve enjoyed the interviews with Freddie and others in media, and I like learning about what is going on in sports from Ethan’s perspective.
> It’s a sad facet of this industry that there’s always someone willing to step up and replace you for nothing…Just find some college kid who’s willing to cut the legs out from under a professional.
This is true of most media but especially in sports, where fans love to write about their favorite teams. Any team with a decent fan base has bloggers who write recaps and commentary—and unlike the newspaper writers they’re free to swear and post GIFs and have fun with it. And like Ethan said, countless kids would be happy to cover a sports team for a news site as unpaid “interns” or for peanuts.
I often think about this problem. Writing is fun, and the majority of people who enjoy writing will never make money—so what can you tell them? Don’t share your blog and essays and fiction because someone else is trying to do it for money? That’s obviously not fair. Anyone should be free to create and share their work. But it means we’ll never solve the problem of free and cheap content flooding the internet.
I was kinda turned off by the first article I saw there, which was this bizarre rant about Nike commercials not being manly enough (dude, women spend a lot more on clothes). I'll look into subbing if its gotten better.
See I didn't find that bizarre at all; the whole point is that Nike's craven exploitation of social justice rhetoric doesn't work for social justice or as advertising. It's Nike! They're an evil company.
This made me think of the post from yesterday. One of our biggest turn of the century campus activist causes was against Nike. I will never not see them as evil.
There's a little bit of anti-woke stuff in Ethan's articles, but not a lot. And when it does come up, it's thoughtful. I mean, who can deny that the NBA drove away a lot of fans with its 2020 bubble shit show? The Social Justice jerseys especially. Pointing that out made Twitter-addicted writers so, so mad, but it's impossible not to notice.
Yes, he covers the annoying woke stuff, but it's not one of those Substacks that just gripes about identity politics every day. He writes about a variety of sports and media topics, and the social justice trend is just one of them.
Writing about the NBA and NOT writing about the woke stuff is dishonest. I like that Ethan, as you says, goes there when needed. Similar to Freddie, I'd be put off if that was the bulk of what they do but I'd be even more out off if they pretended it could never be discussed. Wish more people had that approach.
You can sell insurance for a living and pursue your passion in your spare time like Charles Ives. Or Tom Clancy.
Yep, it’s like that Onion article: “Find The Thing You're Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life“
I accept this reality, but it’s so hard when you have a full-time job and young child(ren). Any time spent on writing means less time for family, self-care, and the household tasks that have been piling up.
When people tell women 'You can have it all" they are lying. But they're also lying if they tell men the same thing. The trick I think is to go about your choices with your eyes open and, consequently, no regrets.
People ask me “where do you find time to do xyz?” and my answer is always “my house is pretty messy.”
1) Gronk does lame commercials for Navy Federal Credit Union. #gonavy
2) who are the pelicans
3) I've enjoyed the All or Nothing series and Drive to Survive because it's fun to get to know the athletes and makes me care more. Perhaps that's gauche and I should just like sports for sports sake. But as you say, we need stars/celebrity and that's a great way to do it.
Ha!! Between this and yesterday’s mixup with 49ers/KC you can see how effective The Sports have been marketing to me.
USAA must have an insane advertising budget. I hear their commercials on the TV and radio all the time.
Loved this. I could spend hours just on the thoughts it spurred. Two quick ones:
1) The NBA has ALWAYS had a problem translating interest into viewers. Mike was the most iconic American athlete since at least Ali but probably The Babe. Look at the TV ratings he drew. They were good... for the NBA. Baseball, aka the least popular sport ever according to the cool kids, spent the 90s feeding Jordan his lunch in viewers. The gap between his Finals and a NFL game are laughable. LeBron may be famous but, like the Kardashians are. Again, dead baseball still usually draws in more viewers. LeBron's peak moment (Game 7 2016) was 3/4 what Game 7 of that year's World Series drew. And obviously LeBron is far less of a ratings draw than pretty much any NFL game. There's some reason that transcends the current moment that leads people to not want to watch NBA games.
2) Until about my sophomore year of college (when I pushed all in on "communist revolutionary") my dream was to be a sports writer. Freddie nailed it with the death of the local newspapers and its effect on sports media. There's probably five times as many people covering Philadelphia teams as there were in the 90s. But the quality gap is massive. The tone has changed, the general written skill has changed. I used to read game reports even for games I watched because of the way a Jayson Stark or Ray Didinger could write. Most of the pros do not have that anymore. There's also a weird obsequiousness that I never saw back then. Sure, you could tell when a guy was covering for a player or coach he liked. But even at a place like The Athletic these former bloggers feel like fans who think they work for the team. It's embarrassing and off-putting. But we went from having a thriving and competitive newspaper industry with well paying jobs for professionals to whatever news hellscape this is now, so this is what we get.
What lost my interest as a fan was that any time a game is close in the last few minutes, everything slows to a crawl and is full of intentional fouls, timeouts, and commercials. Things may have changed for the better but at the time it was a complete momentum and interest killer for me.
That's why hockey is better. The empty net is a great ending.
Exactly my experience. What makes it worse, most of the time the game comes down to the last two minutes. If you just wait and start watching with five minutes to go in the fourth quarter, you'll basically see what matters in the game. The rest is just filler.
I’m a Warriors fan, so I’m obviously pretty happy with the modern basketball era. Somehow I manage to be an anomaly, who mostly stopped watching NFL about a decade ago but still follows the NBA and MLB pretty avidly, which seems to be the opposite of what everyone else is doing. I think, like many many aspects of our culture, the internet has really changed fandom. Football seems to be the only sport left for the casual watcher. Basketball and baseball seem increasingly to be only for very serious fans, insular, unwelcoming, overwhelming for the newbie. I’m old enough that I don’t care, I’m fine being someone who doesn’t have everyone’s stats memorized, who knows my guys and the major players on other teams, but other than that just turns on all the Dubs games and has them on in the kitchen while I cook dinner, or listens to the Giants on the radio when I garden, and gets really happy when they win. I’ve been a fan of these teams for 25 years but I find even causal comments sections like this intimidating because no one just seems to be watching for fun anymore, but rather to show off their mastery of the discipline of basketball viewership. I don’t know how these sports could possibly attract new viewers this way. Other than the Super Bowl Party, do people even get together to watch sports at home anymore? That’s how I got into them in the first place. The fun of a group of my parents’ friends over to watch a game, or a fight, which turned into watching games with my boyfriend and college friends at home or at a bar. How does one get into a sport as a teenager now?
I really don’t know any teenagers who are into sports enough to watch them. Maybe they go to a local game with their dad once a year. I was just having this convo with my husband— how do sports even continue if kids have so little interest?
I remember being in high school and I was by no means a big sports fan but I’d sit around with friends and watch the Celtics because… it was on, and some of my friends were really into it.
I wonder if we have so many entertainment offerings. Maybe it’s always easier to find something on Netflix.
Right, my kids watch with me sometimes but they aren’t going to keep doing something they only have mild interest in if their peers aren’t into it too. Not that it matters. It’s ok for the world and culture to change; of course their adolescence and young adulthood will be filled with different cultural markers and rituals than mine was. That’s as it should be. But it’s not good news for the industry of sport.
Sports have also been so slow to change how they're viewed. Barely anyone under 30 pays for cable, and even if you do you're screwed if your team is outside your home market.
Exactly! We pay for a huge online package of various channels (like cable without the actual "cable") just so my husband can watch all the college football his heart desires. But paying for a cable-like service seems really old-fashioned; younger people absolutely don't watch stuff that way -- neither do we -- we have 200 channels that we never look at -- it's all for the live sports. A friend told me there was an ESPN package (akin to paying for Netflix, or Disney+, where you just buy some ESPN channels) but we looked into that and it left out a lot of stuff... Sports have to make sure they're still relevant.
I am a sixty-one year old NBA fan...but certainly not as big a one as I was twenty or even ten years ago. Of course the league has a lot of tremendous players who would be great in any era. But I find the actual games boring. Ol' Hater Charles Barkley exaggerates when he says the games are nothing but 3-point contests now...but he doesn't exaggerate by much. Ringer podcasters see all kinds of subtleties and strategies that the average fan doesn't, but I'm that average fan and to me it looks like most teams play the same way most of the time, and the individual players are far more homogenous in the way they play than I've ever seen (and I fell in love with the sport, as so many did, in the Magic-Bird 80's). A great player like Dennis Rodman couldn't even get on the court today because he couldn't spread the floor. I don't want to go back to the lane-clogging days of Rileyball, but there has to be some way to find a medium and the league hasn't done it.
As far as the Social Justice Effect goes, look, players and coaches have just as much of a right to their political opinions as anyone else, and just as much right to express them. But I will also say this - for all the rest of us, watching sports is an escape from all the daily shit we have to deal with out in the world, and when watching a basketball game becomes just one more serving of shit, one more finger pointed at our personal and collective failures, then it loses its utility; if sports aren't a break from guilt and chaos and helplessness and real-world strife, then they aren't ANYTHING, and people will find something else to do with their time. If I hired a contractor to redo my kitchen and every morning when he showed up he spent the first half hour going on and on about his personal political/social peeves (and slipped in another lecture every time he took a ten minute break) it wouldn't be long before I found another contractor - even if I agreed with his opinions. That's what it felt like during the Bubble Year and I suspect that's when they lost a lot of people.
There's also the Chinese Communist Party, and its actual, current human rights abuses, which the NBA stars profit from but mostly fail to condemn. Which is fine, being silent, but no longer fine when they loudly claim some moral leadership against real but lesser problems in the USA. Complain about all immorality, or none, but don't expect to be treated as morally superior with selective complaints about lesser problems.
God yes. Every time LeBron straps on on his Serious Social Justice Face and begins trying to educate viewers about Oppression someone should ask him about the Uighurs. Which is another thing that irks the hell out of me about sports journalism--the extent to which stars get a free pass from answering hard questions.
I quit watching sports because, for the most part, I got tired of the social justice messaging being sent by leagues with disproportionate amounts of spousal abusers telling me that I'm racist.
I also kinda blame them for Trump's loss since they were hocking registration and clearly most players hated Trump. I know so many people on here hate Trump, and I understand why, but there's no way the situation we're in now with Joe Biden is any better. It is much, much worse, at least for Ukraine.
Same. All of these wokey young sportswriters claim it is impossible to take "politics" out of sports. But what they really mean is, they insist on injecting woke politics into it. If Kaepernick had been taking a knee to protest abortion they would have been saying the exact opposite things about him as what they did say. I did enjoy watching them squirm, however, when Kyrie Irving did his heel turn.
That's funny, insightful and pointedly correct.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to find out when the modern-day slave examination (aka NFL Combine) is taking place.
If Kaepernick had been protesting abortion:
- A lot of people that hate him now would like him
- A lot of people that like him now would hate him
That is not insightful.
But it still needs to be said.
You blame Trump’s loss on sports? That’s honestly a new one to me, especially given the NBA has lost half its viewership in the past decade and was at an all time low in 2020, it’s amazing that they could have that much sway. The fact that that’s what it took for trump to lose (to BIDEN!) doesn’t make Trump look all that great.
Are you surprised if it added a couple hundred thousand anti-Trump voters to the rolls, if not more? You don't think the daily messaging by the NBA and near weekly by NFL changed anything?
btw I'm not blaming the loss on sports, I'm saying the constant messaging from leagues, teams and players helped contribute to the increase in voter rolls for Biden.
"hocking registration" is a very funny phrase
I think the media in general is anti trump, including sports media, but no I don’t think sports had any impact in actually moving the needle from Trump to Biden.
'Sports fans had to sit through a bunch of left-leaning preaching when they were trying to watch sports and that was *bad for Republicans*' is not a very credible narrative to me.
Yeah that is a Nate Silver Galaxy Brain take for sure
Seems to me that a lot of NBA writers consider themselves as part of the NBA product, not independent voices. So it's not surprising that they are defensive about criticism of it. But it makes sense that if the NBA is your only beat and all of your time is spent thinking, talking and writing about it you are more invested, and protective, than a pre-internet scribe who covers a range of sports topics. If you listen to NBA podcasts you'll regularly hear national NBA writers talk of being, e.g., "concerned" about this team's direction or "optimistic" about how these two guys will play together. I think that language gives something away.
This comment should get so much attention. Sports journalism in general has seen a massive (and I believe bad) swing towards being league PR. In fact that is a large part I find Ethan's writing so essential.
Interesting stuff. I read a fair amount of NBA coverage and had no idea the ratings decline was that monumental and long term. I wish you'd gotten into what might be driving that.
Ten years ago, I think the consensus (or at least, the elite consensus) was that the NBA would have overtaken the NFL in popularity by now. Adam Silver was sharp and connected; Roger Goodell was a a dissembling fool. The NBA had young smart owners; the NFL had old white guys. The NBA had charismatic stars like LeBron, Steph Curry, and Durant; the NFL had the likes of Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, who were under helmets. Past NFL stars were shells of their former selves due to concussions; old NBA players were showing up at events looking as sharp as when they were playing. The NFL was "American" football, and limited in its reach; the NBA was attracting talent from all over the world. We were all witnessing the decline of Major League Baseball, so we know that nothing lasts forever.
And, today, the idea that the NBA will surpass the NFL in popularity is probably and order of magnitude less likely than it was then. It is nearly impossible to imagine a couple days of the NBA capturing the public's attention the way this past weekend of the NFL playoffs did.
And I'm not sure why, exactly. But I do think the NFL understands that it is in the entertainment business, and the NBA doesn't always do that. And, maybe the NFL got lucky that analytics-inspired strategies (pass-heavy offenses, going for it on 4th down, athletic QBs) are more entertaining than analytics-inspired basketball strategies (the 2017 Houston Rockets).
But we'll see.
Like any big phenomenon, the NBA's decline vs. the NFL is multi factor. But I have a theory on one major aspect. https://houseofstrauss.substack.com/p/blame-twitter-why-the-nfls-hot-and
Paywalled. (Now freed up, thanks Ethan)
Forgot I paywalled that one. I tend to paywall most of my stuff, but in this case, I'll free it up.
I don't think vaxxing a major issue.
That is an amazing article. This part is especially on-point:
"And Twitter is terrible...Its main modern function seems to be allowing sociopaths to boost their reputations at the expense of other people."
Thanks.
As is probably unsurprising for a subscriber to this newsletter, I despise empty signaling. All being an NFL fan means is that you like football.
What's painful for me about the NBA isn't so much being confronted with opinions I may not agree with, but the suspicion that everyone is towing the company line. There's a difference between Jamal Murray putting the names of victims of police violence on his shoes, and every player putting a vapid slogan on the back of his shirt. Aaron Rodgers (and, for that matter, Kyrie Irving) may be wrong about vaccines, but I'm pretty sure they're saying what they mean. When an announcer praises some player's work in social justice, I'm not so sure.
And "eat your vegetables" has never been successful strategy for a sport. It didn't work for soccer when they were telling us we needed to embrace it because the world did, and the various ways the WNBA has pushed that haven't worked, either. There's a whiff of that in NBA boosterism that repels me.
In the US, the NFL's dominance is clear, and fans like me are to blame for it. But is the NFL superior from a global perspective? I can't imagine there are nearly as many NFL fans outside of the US as there are NBA. But I honestly have no idea.
This is the thing people always say but I wonder how much of this is anecdotal and how much is wishcasting. "They play basketball overseas the NBA must be popular there."
I was working on something about the respective popularities of sports and it lead me to believe that NBA popularity is mostly bullshit pushed by the league. And the league is VERY popular among the type of people who populate what now passes for media (nerdy white guys in Brooklyn & DC). I just don't see the evidence for it. So unless someone can give actual support for it, I think the safest belief is:
Domestically the NBA is less popular than the NFL but more popular than the NHL
Internationally basketball is popular and the NBA is less popular than the Premier League but probably not unpopular.
I believe a lot of the NBA's alleged overseas popularity is based on the China thing which Ethan has brilliantly written about.
I'm happy to be proved wrong on this (I'm a League Pass subscriber!) but I just can't find the evidence.
I think that's reasonable. Anecdotally, I grew up in Eastern Europe, and can tell you that the 90s NBA was a lot more popular in my very small neck of the woods than the NFL. But again, Michael Jordan is probably distorting this..