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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.

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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.

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Jan 25, 2022·edited Jan 25, 2022

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.

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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.

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Jan 25, 2022·edited Jan 25, 2022

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.

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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.

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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.

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Thanks for this, it was fascinating. I'd really enjoy more interviews by you on these sorts of off-your-usual-beat topics.

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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?

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Jan 25, 2022·edited Jan 25, 2022

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.

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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.

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Jan 25, 2022·edited Jan 25, 2022

"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.

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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.

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My kids are far far more into eSports, like League of Legends, and other computer games. Today, I'd prefer playing some computer game for fun, rather than watching live sports.

Betting will continue keeping live sports alive.

Freddie's honesty about his own bets is GREAT.

But betting often reduces the casual fun.

Meat Loaf died but had an always relevant sports (MLB) metaphor song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C11MzbEcHlw&list=RD5bErFXjUGvQ&index=11

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On an earlier topic:

"My college stopped relying heavily on the SAT. Enrollment of students of color climbed." Shawn Abbott is vice provost at Temple University and was previously the dean of admissions at New York University and the director of admissions at Stanford University.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/24/temple-university-sat-experiment-student-of-color-enrollment-climbing/

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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.

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