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2019-2020 NBA Season Thread


Goo Punch

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The strip club incident actually made me like Lou Williams more. That was just a classic move. And I've always liked Joakim Noah because he would never kiss Lebron's ring. But the rest? They are completely 100% unlikeable. Even Doc Rivers, as heartfelt as he was last night in his post game comments, has a long history of bitchassedness.

As an all time unlikeable team, though? I mean, the Bad Boy Pistons really set the bar. Those 80's Jazz teams were tremendously unlikeable. There's also any team that Dwight Howard ever played for and every Lakers team in history. But the Clippers are tremendous. It's going to make it even more easy to hate them if/when they win the title this year.

He Made all of us hungry for wings that’s for sure and should’ve been granted immediate bubble access with zero quarantine

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1 minute ago, Pato del Muerto said:

I guess I’m just a sensitive bitch but I thought there should have been a little professionalism shown by the clippers because it’s a blowout, but they felt the need to keep attacking and score 43 in the 4th. Even with Dallas playing it’s last 5 for the final 6-7 minutes. 

doesn't bother me.  we came back from how many down last game?  the way we shoot we're never out of it and the clips learned that.

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1 minute ago, Pato del Muerto said:

I guess I’m just a sensitive bitch but I thought there should have been a little professionalism shown by the clippers because it’s a blowout, but they felt the need to keep attacking and score 43 in the 4th. Even with Dallas playing it’s last 5 for the final 6-7 minutes. 

Yeah, they can flex in blowouts but wilt in tight games.  Immensely talented but mentally soft ass team full of assholes.   I'm definitely rooting against them no matter who they play.

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19 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

I guess I’m just a sensitive bitch but I thought there should have been a little professionalism shown by the clippers because it’s a blowout, but they felt the need to keep attacking and score 43 in the 4th. Even with Dallas playing it’s last 5 for the final 6-7 minutes. 

In all fairness, they emptied their bench too with the exception of Montrezl Harrell, who probably needed the run to get back in shape and/or get in rhythm considering he hasn't got much burn since getting into the bubble. I thought it was a little chickenshit for them to still be jacking threes but I kind of consider it a function of how the game is played these days vs. them intentionally running it up on them. In the past, that would have been looked at as completely disrespectful but now it's just what NBA basketball looks like.

Also... I think Clippers put it to them again in Game 6, sadly. Nobody can stop talking about Luka in game 4, and rightfully so, but the untold story of that game was about the Clippers getting complacent with a big lead, blowing it, flipping the switch in the fourth quarter when they needed to and then just not making enough plays to overcome the greatness of Doncic. If the Clips flex their muscle defensively and have Paul George dialed in like he was last night, I don't see how the Mavs can hang with them even if Porzingis were healthy and playing.

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They got more than their fair share of open looks, but you can’t expect to hit 65% of your shots again. 
 

and yeah the personnel wasn’t the issue, but they were running up the court and taking shots with 16 seconds left on the shot clock, when it seems decorum would be to walk it up court and initiate the offense with 12 or 10 to shoot. But maybe teams just don’t know how to play like that anymore. Mavs weren’t doing it either. 

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Yeah they were a bit "front runnery" last night, and I can't wait until Game 6 in a tight game to see them doing the same thing...or against the Lakers or something.

I fully expect the Clips to win this series, always did...but I have the inkling Dallas will make them work for it and either keep it close in game 6, if not flat out win.

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5 minutes ago, Wally Pryor said:

Game isn't being played. 

Guessing none of the games will be played today.

I know it's Giannis, but other than that, it's still just Milwaukee and Orlando.  Love 'em or hate 'em, if the Lakers don't go out, that will be extremely powerful.

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The NBA is doing irreparable harm to their product.   The players don't care because they have tens of millions in guaranteed contracts.  The owners and Silver are scared to death to even question the players.  Football is back in mere days.

There are a lot of things we still don't know about Kenosha.  I can't imagine there's ever been an echo chamber quite like the NBA bubble.

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I highly doubt the NBA isn't going to do anything. These guys could just leave the bubble at any point and shut down the season if the NBA comes down on them. Of all the leagues, the NBA is the most player-centric. They aren't going to play hardball with the players. They're going to give the players the space they want. Look at the court. Look at the jerseys. Look at the statements the coaches and players are making. And unlike the other leagues, the players in the NBA hold all the power. 


There's a thread for this now BTW if people want to move the talk there. 

Edited by mdmost
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2 minutes ago, Brothahorn said:

The owners will fold and reschedule. But this is a bad look for everyone involved. 

And I actually applaud the players for putting their money where their mouth is. Once you cross the gun line there is no going back.

Can they reschedule? They’re on a tight schedule as it is. Just take the loss and keep on trucking.

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6 minutes ago, mdmost said:

I highly doubt the NBA isn't going to do anything. These guys could just leave the bubble at any point and shut down the season if the NBA comes down on them. Of all the leagues, the NBA is the most player-centric. They aren't going to play hardball with the players. They're going to give the players the space they want. Look at the court. Look at the jerseys. Look at the statements the coaches and players are making. And unlike the other leagues, the players in the NBA hold all the power. 


There's a thread for this now BTW if people want to move the talk there. 

Exactly

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Always amazed when so-called fans of a sport or team get all butthurt when the players dare to express themselves as human beings and interfere with the snowflake's TV watching.  (not directed to anyone in particular in this thread)

Kudos to Americans exercising their freedoms.

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15 minutes ago, Don Johnson said:

The NBA is doing irreparable harm to their product.   The players don't care because they have tens of millions in guaranteed contracts.  The owners and Silver are scared to death to even question the players.  Football is back in mere days.

There are a lot of things we still don't know about Kenosha.  I can't imagine there's ever been an echo chamber quite like the NBA bubble.

Yeah you're way off with this one. 

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1 minute ago, shakahorn said:

I thought they had to actually proceed to the center circle for the tip off.  The Magic left the floor well before official tip time.

Maybe true.   I dont think its even worth speculating honestly.    Unless they refuse to play the rest of the games it wont really matter.

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5 minutes ago, d2o said:

Yeah you're way off with this one. 

Maybe.  And my comments aren't about whether they are doing the right or wrong thing.  But its turning a lot of people off.  There was a good article in The Athletic the other day discussing the NBA ratings.

https://theathletic.com/1997343/2020/08/17/strauss-why-the-nba-has-a-serious-viewership-problem-it-needs-to-fix/

Quote

 

The 2019-20 regular season is finally in the books and it took a truly Herculean effort to do it. Whatever happens from here, the NBA deserves credit for a feat of logistical mastery under unprecedented conditions, one that’s led to a saliva-based test for coronavirus that could prove beneficial to the world’s health. Plus, the bubble basketball has been fantastic, improbably so considering the long layoff for players. That Bucks-Mavericks game offered a tantalizing preview of the future. Damian Lillard’s star is ascending. There just might be light at the end of 2020’s tunnel.

Yet, the hardest part of all is on the horizon, as our David Aldridge and John Hollinger expertly detailed. The NBA must prepare for a real season in 2020-2021, perhaps absent fans and all the gate money they provide, right after the league suffered immense losses from the shutdown of 2019-2020. As Aldridge and Hollinger note, what the NBA craves right now, the thing that could potentially keep everything afloat, is a lavish new TV deal:

“There is hope for a potential balm in the form of an extension of the league’s current TV deal with network partners ESPN and Turner, set to expire in 2025, which would inject desperately-needed revenue into the system.”

Without that deal and its years of guaranteed income, it will be harder for the league to keep the lights on in the event that 2020-21 has no fans. There’s one big issue, though. The desperate need for a new national TV deal comes at the exact moment that viewership interest in the league has cratered. Not merely ebbed. Not subsided a bit in accordance to what one might expect with “cord cutting.” No, the NBA has fallen to a new viewership low perhaps not seen since the 1980s.

Here’s one, yet to be publicized stat to know: 45 percent. As in the league’s ABC games, its premium broadcast, are down a whopping 45 percent off what the NBA averaged back in 2011-12. In that hastily promoted lockout season, ABC games drew 5.42 million viewers on average. The final tally on this latest 2019-20 season was 2.95 million average viewers on ABC games. Every ABC game from 2011-2012 received higher viewership than 2.95 million, save for a meaningless late season 1 p.m. Thunder-Bulls game that Derrick Rose sat out.

That 2.95 million is a great number for a cable comedy, but less so for live sports on network television. Or put another way, the NBA lost nearly half its big game audience over a very brief stretch of time, eight years in fact. That’s not a small divot and it’s not normal. It most certainly does not square with the narrative of perpetual ascendance that the league had successfully marketed for a time. The big network slide has also coincided with sharp declines in local numbers and cable as well. TNT’s average NBA viewership is down over 40 percent since 2011-2012 and ESPN is down roughly 20 percent over that span. With both cable channels, I am waiting for a final read out of the numbers for specificity, but that’s the ballpark figure as of now. If you’re looking to the playoffs for salvation, you won’t find it. Last postseason saw a double digit fall in viewership. So, this isn’t just a blip or a fluke, simply brought about by the Warriors’ rough season, though that certainly didn’t help. It reflects something long standing.

It’s been easy to miss the troubling trend for a variety of reasons. First, ratings data can seem a little complicated to the uninitiated, so reporting from that sphere can get lost in the shuffle of other sports news. When the data is presented, it’s often accompanied by a helping of sports league spin. Leagues are eager to portray health and stability, so they make sure to trumpet any good ratings news in all the trades and sugarcoat any bad ratings news. When the news gets bad, certain coping mechanisms kick in. You’ll usually hear something about social media razzmatazz and youthful demographics. By all means, look away from the tangible measures of commodifiable interest in the league. Think of Twitter, think of YouTube highlights. Under this veil of distraction, the troubling signs accumulated imperceptibly until the dam broke in 2019-2020. Finally, the issue generated some broader coverage.

Then Rudy Gobert tested positive for coronavirus and the league disappeared from TV sets for nearly five months. Through incredible effort, Adam Silver and company allowed the show to go on. In interviews leading up to the bubble opener, Silver conveyed a sense that America was desperate for this sort of entertainment. “For the country, it will be respite from enormous difficulties people are dealing with in their lives right now.” That’s a commissioner’s gloss, but it didn’t sound so far-fetched. Maybe basketball’s return could be this big national moment, one might have thought. People had been starved for entertainment. The novelty that was “the bubble” received a ton of sports media coverage. It would have made sense if the NBA, by returning through a logistical miracle, resonated in a way not seen since Michael Jordan.

Instead, very few watched. The bubble viewership has been even lower than the NBA’s pre-COVID averages in this ratings disaster of a season, with the NBA’s most-watched game of last week trailing golf, NASCAR and wrestling. This, despite an incredible run of exciting games in Orlando. So far, the NBA built it but very few came.

While it’s easy to cite “cord cutting” as a catch-all explanation for what’s going on, keep in mind, Nielsen ratings do incorporate streaming services, albeit imperfectly. While some offer theories of pirated games, there just isn’t much evidence that a massive population engages in that, at least not at the scale that would explain this big a drop. To be fair, though, there are some mitigating factors for the league’s lower numbers in this recent bubble. It is not optimal for the NBA to be showing games in August, a month when people typically tune out of television. It is also not optimal for so many games to be close together on the schedule, as the NBA had to do given necessary timing constraints. Also, while Nielsen does incorporate streaming services into its ratings, the process is dependent on which providers it has deals with, which confounds the data. Additionally, as the NBA is fond of telling us, its games still lead most nights in the 18-49 demographic favored by advertisers. (Why 18-49 is still a category that matters in an era where baby boomers and silent generation folks boast the vast majority of wealth is a different subject for a different day.)

Those are indeed mitigating factors in the short term, but the aforementioned long-term trend after 2012 remains bad, especially compared to other leagues. Since 2012, the NFL went from a 16.6 million-person average on nationally televised games to 16.5 million last season. The MLB, more of a regional than national sport, averaged 2.5 million viewers on network TV in 2012, versus 2.4 million in 2019. Basically, the other major sports have held steady on network TV during the NBA’s free fall. When you review all the evidence, and compare across sports, we are left with a basic Occam’s razor explanation for the NBA’s viewership problem: Domestic popularity decline.

There are many theories as to why this is happening, and many are probably true. Is it load management? All the free agency shuffling? Too many three-pointers? Flopping? Big trends tend to result from multiple factors, and it’s hard to disaggregate these competing explanations. The thorniest theory to discuss is the political component.

In a Thursday interview with Chris Mannix of Sports Illustrated, Adam Silver did his best to navigate the issue when it was broached. In response to Mannix asking, “Is the criticism that comes with the NBA’s embracing this position, from conservative networks and politicians, just the cost of doing business?” Silver said, “To be honest, it makes me uncomfortable. I understand critics who say that they turn to sports to avoid controversy. But it’s unavoidable at this moment in time in our country. I wish there was an easier path for us to follow right now. Even if there were, I don’t think it would necessarily be the responsible thing to do.”

That’s a fairly solid articulation of the issue. In a pure business sense, the NBA is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. Morality aside, if you can set it aside, the league will receive criticism for taking relevant stances and criticism for avoiding relevant stances. Its base mostly votes Democrat and likely expects progressive messaging in an era where almost everything has a political valence. Also, there’s the matter of the NBA needing its players, who increasingly view their platforms as all-important means of political persuasion. As Silver said, “Of course, there’s the recognition that roughly 80 percent of our players are Black. George Floyd’s killing and the protests were happening right at the time when we were negotiating the return protocols with the players, and they also felt that it was part and parcel with returning to basketball that we collectively focus on these issues.”

There is simply no way for the NBA to avoid “controversy” at a time where any method of communication is inherently controversial. It’s probably not morally or even practically possible. Players will speak their conscience and there’s nothing the league can or should do about that. If players wish to kneel for the national anthem, it would be crazy at this point for the NBA to intervene.

The question is whether the NBA is committing unforced errors, antagonizing and alienating the nation in vain. On the latter front, the NBA’s adoption of “social justice” jerseys seemed to be a misfire, absent much criticism. The gesture immediately lost moral authority, since the phrases required the NBA’s sign-off. Suddenly, we are asking questions on what is and isn’t allowed (#FreeHongKong, for instance).

Beyond that, as a functional matter, the experiment was confusing to those who aren’t completely plugged into NBA mores. Luka Doncic racked up 36 points and 19 assists in front of a national TV audience with a jersey that read “Enakopravnost” in place of his name. It seems the NBA just assumes that casual fans in America, fans who haven’t necessarily heard of Luka and aren’t necessarily listening to the announcers at full volume, are just supposed to know that “Enakopravnost” is Slovenian for “Equality,” and not assume this is another dude entirely, who vaguely looks like the European phenom they might have heard Scott Van Pelt mention once. Keep in mind, this is the national showcase of a rising young superstar the league wants fans to know the name of, far and wide. And just what is accomplished by an American, or anyone for that matter, reading “Enakopravnost” on a jersey?

Apart from the basic stumbling block that some announcers are already forgetting to explain, we have superstars showing their real names, while, in other instances, multiple role players on a team sport the same phrase. Nobody wants to say it, but it often comes off more bizarre and ridiculous than virtuous.

So there are unintentional barriers, but sometimes you can wonder whether the league’s most established, elder voices are actively driving people away. It’s one thing to rip Donald Trump. He deserves criticism and has brought politics directly to the sports leagues with his constant antagonism. He’s even involved himself in the NBA’s ratings topic. Increasingly, though, some of the NBA’s most prominent speakers are ripping the nation and its people. On Aug. 5, Gregg Popovich said, “As a population, you worry about the fiber of our country to some degree because we just don’t have the discipline. All we want is the instant gratification. We need to understand the long-term effects.”

Maybe you agree with that, maybe you don’t. Maybe you think it’s necessary tough love. Whatever it is, it’s coming at a time when the country is experiencing a deep, quiet kind of pain, as people get sick, businesses shutter and social life withers. Maybe the public isn’t so geared up for a speech on their lack of discipline? Not everyone has the luxury of riding this crisis out with the means and wine collection at Pop’s disposal.

There can be an incongruity to the externalized blame. Popovich has garnered a lot of media praise as a crusader for racial justice, one that’s often upbraiding White America about its ills. Perhaps that’s welcome to many, but it’s a lot of lecturing directed at a population of people who, unlike Popovich, mostly don’t scream humiliating tirades into the faces of their Black co-workers. As recently as 2013, Popovich told ESPN that he believed foreign players to be “fundamentally harder working than most American kids.” The American players, in Pop’s estimation, were “coddled” and “entitled” due to their AAU path. Perhaps he was talking about Matt Bonner and perhaps he wasn’t. The point isn’t to say that Popovich is inauthentic or guilty of something nefarious. It’s just that Pop’s beloved “pounding the rock” mantra might well now apply to pelting stones from the confines of a brittle abode. And people sense it. They can grasp that coaches might be overcompensating just a bit in a world where mores suddenly, rapidly changed.

While the racial consciousness espoused by the league’s coaching set receives much praise from the likeminded, their commentary is often undercut by another accusation of moral compromise: The NBA does China’s bidding, to the point of running academies wherein minors reportedly get beaten by coaches, all for the sake of growing the game over there. It can be a cynically deployed accusation, one lobbed from people merely pretending to care about, say, the Uighurs, but it draws blood nonetheless. This dynamic is encapsulated by Stan Van Gundy, now a lead announcer for Turner Sports and doing a great job on those games by the way, tweeting the following in response to an op-ed that mocked the NBA’s fealty to China’s government: “We committed genocide against Native Americans. We have enslaved, lynched, segregated and incarcerated blacks over 400 years. Women couldn’t vote for 140 years. Using abuses elsewhere to try to distract from our own poor record on human rights is dishonest.”

In drawing a moral equivalency between his own country and China, Van Gundy is acting as moral absolutist across time, but relativist across space. It’s an obfuscatory trick but the message is obvious: America is sinful, so therefore I and my colleagues can’t be expected to criticize our league’s business partner. Maybe you agree that America is irredeemably sinful. Maybe you cheer SVG for calling that out. I certainly want employees to speak on issues not directly related to their jobs. I definitely have respect for Van Gundy, Popovich, and of course, local political pontificator Steve Kerr. There’s just an issue of proportionality. How much public commentary out of the league should be a lecture directed at people other than themselves? And if you believe the answer is, “A hell of a lot, that’s what is morally necessary,” then can we admit that “A hell of a lot” has practical downsides?

Outside the bubble, the metaphorical one as opposed to the literal one in Orlando, you wonder how many fans are losing patience with this tone, one that’s been years in the making. It’s hard to ignore that those employed by the league can’t bring themselves to ever criticize the rival superpower they’re in business with, regardless of how badly it treats ethnic minorities and neighboring territories. It’s also hard to ignore that league employees respond to the accusation of silence on China by shouting louder at the United States. This setup might have something to do with why the most precipitous drop in the league’s long ratings ebb happened in 2019-2020, after the Daryl Morey imbroglio in the preseason.

Going forward, the public might just notice a dynamic where it’s open season on America and its coronavirus failings but mum on the nation where the outbreak first spread from. That public, by the way, now registers a 73 percent disapproval of China, with 78 percent placing, “a great deal or fair amount of the blame for the global spread of the coronavirus on the Chinese government’s initial handling of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.” This is a bipartisan sentiment, Democrats and Republicans. The NBA has found the one unifying issue in our culture and landed on the wrong side of it. Inside the NBA bubble, this is all fine and well, though. Only a crazy person would criticize China’s government for its handling of the coronavirus, so crazy that they might even hail from that wacky 78 percent of the citizenry.

To win back its domestic audience, the league likely needs to convey some grounding in the United States, the nation that made basketball possible. Football calls itself, “America’s game,” and baseball calls itself, “America’s pastime.” Basketball has every right to a similar terminology but has exchanged national branding for the presentation of international conquest. When people ask why the NBA gets more blowback for its China adventure than other similarly entrenched megacorporations do, one reason is that the NBA made its China expansion parts of its brand. As in, the NBA sold China to America as much as it sold America to China. That move appears to have had repercussions, since the relationship between the two nations has curdled.

Now, as the league desperately tries to win back China’s business, it needs America like never before, more so than a superpower an ocean away. The American national TV contract, worth $2.66 billion per year, is the NBA’s largest revenue stream. That’s a source that cannot be taken for granted, especially since the inking of another contract has the potential to float the NBA through this current financial crisis.

So what’s a league to do? Its most prominent speakers don’t have to abstain from ripping politicians or other displays of conscience, but they should probably lessen the lecturing or add “China” to the suite of issues worth broaching. If that results in China’s government separating from the league, then so be it. The NBA’s favored alliance out East is hurting the sport’s ability to maintain domestic popularity and certainly robbing its main communicators of moral authority. The money received from China is highly conditional and can always be dashed by unpredictable political events. It’s prudent for the NBA to save itself the headache, as opposed to waiting for when the inevitable fracture is forced upon it (again).

Next, the NBA and its most prominent speakers need to actively re-establish a connection with the league’s home nation. That could mean more NBA training acadamies in America, as opposed to the ones that went off the rails in China. It’s great that the NBA has rising international superstars like Giannis Antetokounmpo and Luka Doncic, but it should also appear committed to growing the game at home.

Really, it’s about balance. The American public senses when they are and are not considered part of your thing. It’s time the NBA understood that, now more than ever. In his answer to Mannix on the league’s potential alienation of certain fans, Silver said, “I think our fans are able to separate words on the floor or messages on the players’ jerseys or the floor. Even to the extent that they don’t, I think they recognize that these are not simple times.” I was a little unclear on the meaning there, so I asked around. Silver was referring to how fans can compartmentalize, how they can enjoy what an athlete does without necessarily endorsing everything he says. I wonder if the NBA is having that compartmentalization problem in the other direction. Its international ambitions inform neglect on the home front. Its coaches are so infuriated by Trump that it sours their speeches to their countrymen. Meanwhile, the games go on, glorious as ever, watched by fewer and fewer. The cord has indeed been cut, by the league, to its country. Reconnection can happen, but only if and when the NBA admits it needs to.

 

 

Edited by Don Johnson
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Great to hear.  Hope they shut down the whole fucking league.  These games are worthless anyway, justice for  dead black men is perhaps a tad more important.  

Edited by Lobo
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200.gif

Yeah, I think this shit is done, and as much as it hurts, I think it’s the best thing players can do to deliver a firm message. Really sucks for the end of the roster guys who are trying to pay bills... hope the league, owners or players like LBJ step up and take care of them.

 

We’re about to see how true Juvenal’s words ring... with the circuses closing down, and the bread running out, perhaps the people will awaken to their plight and fight for social justice once more.

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