part two of the nba 2020-21 anything but regular season

imo it should be 60 games with every team assigned a regional rival they play a second home&away against

yeah thats cool i like it

They added Covington, they added Norm Powell... it's not like they didn't do anything. It's a strange thesis

tho if you get a real shitty rival thats nice lol xp

teams realizing that resting their guys is a competitive advantage has really become a big problem in a situation where even before that it was obvious there were too many games, we hardly ever get big national games with full strength lineups anymore, got to find a place where teams actually want to win every game

i just hate the number 58 is all

the other fix is to add a 31st team

its true 58 is a pretty lame number

They added Covington, they added Norm Powell... it's not like they didn't do anything. It's a strange thesis

― reggae mike love (polyphonic), Friday, April 30, 2021 10:40 AM (fifty-eight seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

he even mentioned that but just kinda threw it away. im not sure what else they can do if they are married to the idea of paring dame with cj (which caps how far they can go).

i suspect theyd trade cj but offers that makes sense for them just arent out there

xp it's time for the Las Vegas Blackjacks to finally take the court

teams realizing that resting their guys is a competitive advantage

― lag∞n, Friday, April 30, 2021 1:42 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

a funny thing about this is how many rings the spurs won off it before the rest of the league got wise, hmm san antonio went on another late season tear weird oh well back to playing my star 43mins a night

its the back to backs that kill everythign. i think just doing whatever they can to elimnate those would help a ton.

if they dont remove some games then theyd have to make the season duration longer which also isnt great from a rest and recovery perspective, also wld make the regular season seem and i guess actually be even longer which idk, fewer games its the way to go

its just not gonna happen. they are doing less games this year but a compressed sched so we dont really get to see if it actually helps and owners are going to take less money after the last couple of seasons.

owners arent*

its a tough sell for sure but i dont think its impossible, makes too much sense, obvs someone has to start making the argument as the first step

yeah each game is a little mechanism for printing money

there is no upside for ownership

thats just not true lol

well anything that subtracts money from their charts and spreadsheets is not going to fly, IHIBIDTAE

it's interesting to me that the league is apparently looking for an absolutely stratospheric number for the next round of national tv deals because that's one thing that could soften the blow of potentially changing the regular season.

tracer, spottie, whoever else is out there engaging in this uhh zero summary, youre smart guys im sure you can imagine a scenario in which from a game receipts perspective (itself an assumption fwiw) it would make sense to cut games

make NBA league pass $300, stop cable tv/local blackouts and include the playoffs imo; basically the same deal they do for international fans.

then sell mini packages direct to consumer and to businesses, fuck cable

tracer, spottie, whoever else is out there engaging in this uhh zero summary, youre smart guys im sure you can imagine a scenario in which from a game receipts perspective (itself an assumption fwiw) it would make sense to cut games

― lag∞n, Friday, April 30, 2021 11:03 AM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah theres options but i just dont see it happening is the thing

obviously major changes are always difficult and unlikely but i dont think this one is quite as impossible as it may seem

1. revenue and number of games played are not very highly correlated, one only has to look at football which plays 16 games and makes much more money than the nba to see that, or even march madness which is played over 3 weekends and has a bigger tv contract than the entire nba, the obvious variable here is not number of games but peoples interest in watching the games, and in fact the nbas biggest source of revenue its national tv deal doesnt care at all about the number of games played as they only broadcast a fraction of them, what they want is games that people want to watch, and fewer games are more likely to create those due to a. decisiveness and b. guys not resting/being injured

2. the idea that the owners are super micro focused on the bottom line is imo pretty clearly not true, these are play things for super rich guys, you can see that in the warriors paying a $100m in luxury tax for kelly oubre or whatever it was, nba teams arent really good business investments, except... for the resale values have been spiking the last however many years, which idk its tough to forecast how far that will go and what exactly is driving it, i dont think its gate revenue, tho having a league with increasing interest that seems —hot— couldnt hurt

3. the resting/injury issue is already acknowledged, theyve done what they can to eliminate back to backs, and are fining teams for resting guys on national games which is obvs just a pr thing to get teams to make up fake injuries so the fans dont get pissed off which is ridiculous but anyway the problem is well accepted already

4. the nba has been pretty proactive in the past about addressing issues with the game, rule changes, pr stuff etc, its not like theyre baseball, and now particularly there are a lot of newer tech/finance guy owners who might be more amenable to this sort of thing

*i am aware the the nfl just switched to playing 17 games lol

i think most of them are bottom-line focused in that they're not just going to punt revenue for the abstract idea of a "quality product" but there are pathways to making up most of it. obviously a big bump in the national tv deals would help, premiumization of the remaining reg season games, some other iffier things like international revenue, gambling, topshot, etc. i think one of the harder things left is breaking free of the RSNs and the 72 games a year thing but the crumbling of cable tv should help with that. i think we're 10 years away from this being a serious discussion.

re punting revenue idk most or some of these rich guys im assuming have made long term strategic plans before or at least heard of the concept

i think baseball could be a useful warning too, dont want to end up like baseball

like also the players and basketball ops people have already made their position pretty clear. the traditional methods of capturing consumer sentiment like tv ratings and game attendance are pretty useless at the moment but my guess is that there's an underrating of the erosion of interest due to guys never playing. i heard somewhere that we recently went like 3 weeks between national tv games where both teams were good and at full health--that should be pretty scary.

not totally relatedly but the huge drop off in viewership across all sports during the pandemic and the question of how much thats going to bounce back is pretty... interesting

also will people ever wear non elastic waistband pants again

no kidding, the nba store always pushes jerseys but maybe they should do a promo on shorts.

the viewership thing is fascinating and no one predicted the dropoff, so i think we're totally in the dark about what happens next.

i suspect some people who got out of the habit of watching will just not get back in, from a human nature perspective and so forth

also i think not having fans was a huge part of it, the fans are key, which was tbf obvious already

yeah agreed. also saw a survey recently saying that for teens watching tv/movies is like distant last on things they want to do after gaming, streams/youtubes, surfing the net, etc.

basically pandemic took a trend that was slowly happening anyway and put a brick on the gas pedal.

teens need to learn about the two screen experience

this is why Meyers Leonard is the most popular basketball player for teens

Fewer regular season games would reduce total revenue, which would also hurt player salaries. There are enough players on every roster who aren't paid like the big stars and who are looking at short or uncertain career arcs that I'm not sure the NBAPA as a whole would appreciate a drastically shorter season and lots fewer playoff games, unless all the rookie base salaries and vet minimums stayed at current levels and the supermax players took the biggest hit.

lag∞n you definitely know more about this than me and you could be right, and i hope you are! i didn’t realise that only a fraction of the games were televised. that does change the equation.

i have certainly wondered about whether there is a tipping point with “OTT” services that stream games directly to subscribers - when leagues just decide to take their ball and go home. i don’t see it happening soon but it certainly seems plausible in the future. and at that point ownership can have a much freer hand with these things. subscribers might grumble that they’re only getting 50 games for the same price they paid for 58 the year before but they’re likely to just suck it up.

so for accuracy's sake there are actually 2 aspects of the nba tv universe:

- the national tv deals with turner and abc/espn. these are your espn wednesday doubleheaders, tnt thursdays, sat/sun abc games, the playoffs, etc. they're mostly showing prestige games.

- the regional cable channel deals for like fox sports upper midwest or whatever to broadcast every pistons game to the local market.

the *sole* reason this current regular season is as long as it is is that all those regional contracts are set up so that the league needs to have at least 72 games for the contract to be honored. right now these contracts are probably the single biggest obstacle to shortening the season.

for years the RSNs served a purpose of getting the games out to anyone with a cable package, since they're usually bundled into the lower tiers of cable iirc. but obviously streaming and cord cutting are going to disrupt this in the very near future.

crazy that you cant just buy a single game on youtube right now

nbas back baby

The Hornets have moved LaMelo Ball (right wrist fracture) to questionable for Saturday's game against Detroit.

— Marc Stein (@TheSteinLine) April 30, 2021

LeBron James has been upgraded to questionable for tonight’s game against Sacramento.

He’s been out since March 20 with a high ankle sprain.

— Mike Trudell (@LakersReporter) April 30, 2021

just yesterday i had to google what lebron's injury was bc i'd forgotten, 5 weeks is a long time for an ankle sprain!

tbf it was of the infamous high variety

i suspect some people who got out of the habit of watching will just not get back in, from a human nature perspective and so forth

― lag∞n, Friday, April 30, 2021 3:21 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

but even if your max possible audience has decreased theres still a lot you can do to make sure youre hitting that max

2. the idea that the owners are super micro focused on the bottom line is imo pretty clearly not true, these are play things for super rich guys, you can see that in the warriors paying a $100m in luxury tax for kelly oubre or whatever it was, nba teams arent really good business investments, except... for the resale values have been spiking the last however many years, which idk its tough to forecast how far that will go and what exactly is driving it, i dont think its gate revenue, tho having a league with increasing interest that seems —hot— couldnt hurt

one one hand you have lacob, on the other you have fertitta