Since the NBA was founded in June, 1946 it’s been through several iterations. The Boston Celtics held court in the 1960’s. The Los Angeles Lakers ushered in Showtime in the 1980’s. Michael Jordan took over the 1990’s, the San Antonio Spurs team approach dominated the early 2000’s, the Warriors Dynasty and LeBron James the 2010’s, all preceding the parity, pace-and-space era that’s dominant today.

Rule changes along the way have benefited certain approaches. Some might say the league’s emphasis has created the unfolding eras we’ve seen, or at least opened the door for them. It’s easy to perceive this in hindsight, but what if it’s happening again right before our eyes? That possibility forms the core of today’s Blazer’s Edge Mailbag.

Hi Dave,

While I understand the reasoning behind the rule change regarding buzzer beaters, I disagree with the way the game is being tinkered with in order to turn it into a show. In this case it is allowing players to escape accountability for taking bad shots, and I can’t help wondering what unintentional consequences it might create down the line.

Do you think the new rule regarding buzzer beaters will lead to unintentional changes in the game? Do you like it?

Thank you,

Bo

I find the question about unintended consequences a bit more interesting, and applicable, than critiques of the rule change about last-second shots.

For those who missed it, the NBA is considering instituting a new rule for last-second “buzzer-beater” attempts. Heretofore they were counted as regular shots, credited as a hit or miss to the player who heaved the shot at the horn. The overwhelming likelihood of a miss under those circumstances, causing the player’s field goal percentage to drop, disincentivized such attempts, robbing viewers of the excitement that comes with them.

The new rule would say if a shot is attempted at the buzzer from a play that started in the backcourt and comes from at least 36 feet, a miss would be credited to the team but not the player who attempted the shot. In essence, the buzzer-beater becomes a “freebie”. A player gets credit if they make the shot but won’t be penalized if they miss it. This will allow them to take such shots without second-guessing.

Bo is not the only reader to question the wisdom of this change. A couple submissions have evoked the noble sacrifice expected of players, putting the team first instead of their own stats. My reply is simple. You can’t judge players based on a criterion, pay them (at least in part) on the basis of that judgment, and then ask them not to care about it when it suits you. If teams aren’t going to weigh field goal percentages when evaluating players, we’re good. If they are, then professional players need to protect theirs. That includes not taking risky shots.

Back to Bo’s question…the flaw in it lies in the definition of “bad shot”. A non-attempt at the end of the quarter nets a team zero points. That’s the same as a miss, and it’s 100% guaranteed since there’s no chance of a “make” on a shot you don’t take. In essence, a player can’t take a shot worse than not shooting it at all. Under those last-second circumstances, any attempt—even with a one-in-a-million chance—is better than no attempt. Thus the new rule actually encourages better shot-making and scoring than the current system does.

But as I said, neither of those points is as interesting as the other one Bo made, that the real purpose of the rule is to “gamify” the sport, making it more attractive to audiences. That’s neither a surprise nor in this case a bad thing. But the caution is apt. Further changes may not be so beneficial, nor made for the same reasons.

This rule reflects an unspoken sea change in the NBA. It has less to do with team or individual dominance, more about the purpose of the endeavor itself.

We’re transitioning from an era of sport to an era of entertainment. That’s been happening for decades, since the 1980’s really. But it’s shifted into high gear and it doesn’t appear to be reverting soon. Fans and observers should begin questioning what the league is going to look like as we head into an unknown future. Chances are the basis on which changes are made will look different now than they have in the past.

Several factors are conspiring to accelerate and cement this transition.

The NBA is increasingly becoming a television product more than an arena product. The massive new broadcast rights deal confirms this. It also shifts the emphasis, maybe the balance of power, in the league. Television revenue has always been important. Now a huge chunk of the salary cap is dependent on it.

Tickets are still in play, of course. That won’t change in our lifetimes. But fewer people experience the NBA in person than through screens and streaming. What the sport looks like on television drives ticket sales far more than the ticket experience drives people to follow teams elsewhere. Image and presentation matter more than ever before.

Meanwhile the nature of television—really, media consumption—itself has changed. Attention spans and grace are in short supply. Choices are near-infinite. In this climate, demands for viewer gratification take on added gravity. And they come more frequently than ever before.

You can see the evolution the league is caught up in by watching the products that networks, streaming services, and social media are built around.

I grew up in the infancy of reality TV. The big shows were Survivor, Amazing Race, Real World. Their premise was simple: you set up a gamed situation then put real (or at least seemingly-real) people into it. The tension as they negotiated their way through the show’s premise formed the core of the viewer’s connection. You’d watch players dig through sand for tiki icons and vote each other off of islands or try to live together in an apartment with unlimited alcohol, hot tubs, and cameras everywhere. In each case, the show was central—the game, so to speak—and the cast members rotated in and out as hopefully-interesting participants, not unlike a sports roster.

After a decade or so of that, several stars had evolved out of the reality show system. The attention they got was a shortcut to relevance for them and the shows they grew out of. At that point the emphasis switched away from premises to personalities. Everybody started casting for the next big icon or transcendent reality celebrity. The shows became vehicles for creating notoriety. This might be loosely compared to the “Like Mike” movement in the NBA. Stars became bigger than the action, the name on the back of the jersey bigger than the one on the front.

Over the last 5-6 years, that process has gone into overdrive, largely thanks to the democratization of “broadcasting” through TikTok and other social media. Now everybody has cameras everywhere and everybody else’s lives are potential subjects for fame or notoriety. The Coldplay Affair story and Hawk Tuah meme get enacted in different forms through a seemingly-infinite cycle.

The pacing and purpose of legacy reality shows on television have changed in order to catch up. Now it’s not about a show premise or a transcending star, it’s about how awkward and uncomfortable of a situation you can put the show participants in so that viewers can experience their struggles like kids holding up a magnifying glass to make ants scurry and melt. The game doesn’t matter. The participants don’t matter. The shock and jolt to the viewer matters.

As this progression has unfolded, the scope of time needed for payoff has shrunk. Once upon a time you’d watch a whole season to see who won the reality show game. In the star era, you’d at least want to watch a whole show to see if your favorite person said something interesting. Now nobody wants to watch more than ten seconds before seeing an embarrassing pratfall or outrageous utterance.

In a way, it’s like what’s happened to the food industry. You used to have steaks, stews, and salads. They’d take a long time to cook but they were good. Chefs could do it better than the average Joe, and they became stars. But somewhere along the line came the encroachment of ultra-processed foods that obliviated the need for steaks and salads entirely. Why cook or eat a whole, time-consuming dinner when, in an instant, you can open a bag of chips with chemically-engineered flavors designed to hit your taste receptacles just right? Bam! Dopamine! Dopamine! Dopamine! Give me the next bite!

That’s where we are with media consumption right now too: pre-packaged, who cares if it’s mostly fake? Just tickle my brain every time I click and I’ll keep opening that bag.

This is a big problem for sports leagues for one huge reason: sports are often boring. They take time. They unfold over hours, months, and years. You have to establish a predictable routine before you can understand the game and the purpose of the players in it. You also need that predictable, daily routine before you can truly appreciate when players stand out from it.

You don’t get how cool it is that Klay Thompson shoots 40% from the three-point arc until you’ve seen a hundred players miss more shots than that. You don’t understand that Steph Curry’s shooting from near halfcourt is amazing until you see Thompson needing to stand near the arc in order to excel. You don’t get how impossible Nikola Jokic throwing a water-polo heave from three-quarters court is unless you know that even Steph can’t do that the same way. Without the steady baseline, nothing is in context and nothing can be viewed as remarkable.

In sports, remarkable things don’t happen every night, let alone every ten seconds. Excitement at a sporting event centers around the chance of seeing things that almost never happen. Our media consumption now demands that we be shown electrifying events non-stop every time we click the video or turn on the show. You can see the problem.

Tying this all together with a bow, you have a sports league that’s increasingly dependent on media, television, streaming, and social media not just for publicity and relevance, but for dollars. You also have a media climate that’s increasingly demanding an unceasing stream of high-tempo, dopamine-inducing beats that the traditional sports league cannot provide organically.

The big question in this situation is, will the sports league hold tight and hope the media culture changes or accepts it or will the league try to become more acceptable to the media culture as it stands?

Before we answer that question, we have to examine one more factor. Old-line owners—single or family entities who grew up with the NBA and helped create the sport as we know it—are increasingly disappearing, selling out to billion-dollar interests. The Lakers were one of the last bastions of old-school. They just sold, to the shock of nearly everybody who heard the news.

Those traditional owners and their curmudgeonly prerogatives were a source of inertia across the league. Sometimes that was detrimental, but it was still weighty, a counterbalance to cultural trends.

New NBA owners are often corporations looking to sell the product as widely and efficiently as possible to make up that multi-billion-dollar investment. New individual owners are also billionaires, people who have grown up with those same corporate assumptions and have operated in a culture where media ubiquity was taken for granted.

So then…we have a league increasingly aware of its media image/palatability, increasingly financially dependent on same, and a shift in owner priorities from putting the brakes on these things to throwing them into high gear, wringing the most marketing and revenue out of the sport possible at the fastest rate possible.

At this point, Bo, I’d say your concern is well-founded.

Right now we’re just entering this new era. We haven’t seen its fruits yet. But I’m guessing that fans who grew up with the NBA as it has been will want to watch changes carefully. The needle is now likely to move away from sport towards a reality show/social media model. Most people regard responsiveness and openness to change as virtues, but they’re not necessarily neutral prospects. Maybe a little inertia is a good thing sometimes?

I don’t think this buzzer-beater rule is going to do anything bad, even if it’s a move towards “gamifying” the sport. But I don’t think this is the last rule change we’ll see towards the game-ish end of the spectrum. I’m not so certain, myself, that I’m going to like what the broadcast/media-heavy version of the NBA ends up looking like.

I don’t know if the consequences will be intended or unintended, but we purists are going to have to buckle up for the ride.

Thanks for the question! You can always send yours to blazersub@gmail.com and we’ll try to answer as many as possible!

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