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Reminds me of when the league had the lakers and celtics both down.... and magically kevin mchale sends kevin garnett to the celtics and jerry west sends pau gasol to the lakers lol
and then last season the way the Lakers acquired a new team at the trade deadline despite what seemed like a lack of resources was impressive
You're so right. I mean, even just LeBron going there and rebuilding the current team......most other franchises would have taken a decade to rebuild after Kobe.
But it's the celebrities. The top movie stars and rappers is the only entertainment industry people cooler than athletes. But be a Laker and especially a Laker while winning gets you just a little bit cooler. I mean, just look at all the celebs that go to random Laker games. That's always going to have a draw to it. Add to that a storied franchise that could be profitable with a losing team deep in the luxury tax and it is a recipe that is too good not to rebound quickly.
BI, Zion, and CJ had a net rating of +3 when on the court together. BI and Zion had a +13.4, BI and CJ had a +13.2, Zion and CJ was just +5.4.
BI and Zion worked. BI and CJ worked. It was CJ and Zion and all three together that didn't work.
Lebron openly said that a huge part of his decision to go to LA was the fact that it's better for his business opportunities.
It's where the celebrities live. It's where the movies get made. For historical reasons, it's considered a 'storied franchise' in the way other places aren't. If you're a big name guy looking to maximise not just the basketball but all aspects of potential money making (TV, movies, book deals, video games, merchandise, etc) then you probably will go to LA or NY at some point.
Basketball.
Yup , and that's exactly why the NBA will never be close to being #1 , heck they are only just above MLB. The NFL got it right. They have the franchise tag and they have compensation for losing star players. They have a hard cap to prevent major markets from a big advantage. The best way to build popularity is PARITY. And for those that say the NBA is more popular than it's ever been, I guess it's enough to be a couple % point above MLB and 25+ % points below the NFL
I would say the NBA is in a fantastic spot right now. Not because of the choices made or the flaws as you rightly pointed out. There is a ridiculous amount of talent in the league right now. You have multiple teams actually competing for championships every year now. I 100 percent believe the Pels have been hard done and railroaded by the NBA in multiple ways. But the NBA might be in the best place it’s ever been. It’s in a good spot even if it’s run by clowns.
It does not make a difference how much talent the NBA has. The way it's set up it will never even sniff the popularity of the NFL . In fact I just saw a Gallup poll that it behind baseball by 1% . Since it's a players run league with no restrictions on anything it will always be 2nd or 3rd. There really no big reason to really invest yourself in your local team if your a small market because it's just too hard a road to hoe for them to really contend for a championship. You draft a super star and in 4-5 yrs he can just decide he wants to play for the lakers or Boston or NY because of the market. Or because he wants to be part of a super team and have an easier road to the finals. It's what happens when you set it up so the players run the league
As I am fully behind having more parity and mechanism to protect the smaller market, it will be always harder for NBA to reach parity.
Don't forget that basketball is a team sport with one of the lowest number of players. One star account for 15 percent of his team minutes, so it's obviously star driven due to the inflated importance of stars vs others team sports.
Now is it rigged ? I don't think so, I'm sure if you survey all the american citizens on where they would love to live and work in the USA without consideration of familly ties (since basically most players can relocate their whole familly if they want), most of them will chose cities or area with with either low taxes, low criminality, good weather, good infrastructures or best schools. So it's no insult to say that most players won't sign to New Orleans unless for a better job opportunity (i.e. larger contracts or minutes). With such disadvantage, it's alway going to be an uphill battle to reach the championship.
It doesn’t need to be as popular as the NFL or whatever. The NBA is the NBA. It is not the NFL. Every sport has its pros and cons. All have issues with officiating, big markets and media bias. The NBA is run by clowns and if I’m being quite honest, this franchise has been run by clowns for quite some time. If we don’t-didn’t win a championship with CP3, AD and Zion that is our own fault for not being good enough. We need to start getting things right from top to bottom.
I think global fanbases also need to be kept in mind.
Apologies to Americans, but absolutely nobody outside of the USA cares about the NFL whatsoever. Obviously that doesn't inhibit it, it makes a lot of money, the domestic fanbase is absolutely in love with it, and that's all fine, but globally speaking it's not a sport where you can find fans everywhere in the world.
The NBA isn't like that. Due to the existence and popularity of things like Euroleague, as well as the Australian NBL surging in popularity, and of course the Olympics, it has a fanbase that's global. The average person in Europe has heard of Michael Jordan, Lebron James, Magic Johnson, and Kobe Bryant whereas I'm pretty sure if I went out in the street now and asked a dozen random people, none of them would know who Drew Brees is.
In that sense, the NBA is just going for a completely different business model. The NFL has an incredible deep hold in the US, but its reach isn't particularly broad. The NBA clearly wants a bite out of the larger global basketball marker and is willing to have a shallower domestic hold in exchange for that increased breadth.
If think if you asked Adam Silver whether they'd rather emulate the success of American Football or, say, global soccer, he'd say soccer. Sure, maybe no individual game of it (aside from the UEFA Finals or the World Cup Finals, which are both vastly larger events) exceeds the Super Bowl in viewers, but the sport is omnipresent globally and that holds value.
I think that the fact that the NBA is popular on a more global aspect hurts it domestically for the fan that is invested in their team. Most international fans follow the big market teams that have a Lebron or a Kobe or a Michael Jordan or what ever top superstar is playing at the time. They are not invested in a hometown team because they have none. After all, it is the National Basketball Association, not the International Basketball Association, with the exception of Toronto.
I would venture to say that fans of their hometown teams in all those leagues you mentioned are more loyal to them than any one particular NBA team. And Soccer fans are rabid about their sport because their team represents their country. The best way to build the popularity of a sport is to have a team the hometown fans can fall in love with. And make it so that team has the same chance as every other team in the league even if they are a small market.
The reason that basketball in general has taken a global aspect is because it's an Olympic sport. When it was added to the Olympics is when it took off globally. Football will never be , but watch out, the NFL is expanding to international markets more and more every yr. And every time a game is played internationally it's sold out , so I'll bet it's not that hard to find an international sports fan who knows who Tom Brady or Drew Brees is
It may hurt things domestically to some extent, but the NBA doesn't really mind that too much because they are, at the end of it all, a business that wants to make money, and the money is working for them. The TV deals keep getting bigger, the merch sales keep going higher. It's clear for them that the strategy is working.
That said, football (soccer) fans are rabid about the teams which aren't even national. Sure, you have the point that people will support England just because they're from England, but there's also people who are rabid over hometown teams (even if those teams are garbage).
One of the problems of UEFA football is that teams very explicitly do not have the same chances as every other team regardless of market size. It's actually a far worse problem than in the NBA. In UEFA, you can literally just spend money to make money. There's no strict salary cap like there is in the NBA, instead team salary just has to stay lower than a certain percentage of overall team revenue. So successful teams that make more money can (and do) just outspend the opposition when it comes to acquiring players and such, which in turn makes them more money, which means they can spend more money.
If you're a fan of your local town football team, unless you happen to support Chelsea or Manchester City or something, you're never winning anything at the highest level and the system is designed to make it nearly impossible for your team to ever get to the point where it might.
If you think that Tom Brady is known by most people outside USA, you will be surprised. I'd say even his wife is more famous than him in Europe.
American football is pretty much unwatchable for the vast majority of the World. I think it's deeply rooted in the american culture and that's why you all love it so much, but for the rest of the World it's more a curiousity, some expression of the american exceptionalism than a sport.
Then why is every NFL game played internationally sold out well in advance of the game? https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/...ahawks-germany
People everywhere will always support the hometown teams or teams that represent their country, there will always be fans regardless. Even if the scales are lopsided.Although from what I know to represent a country don't you have to be a citizen of that country? What I'm saying is with parity and each team having an equal chance of success the support becomes much more. If your hometown or your country's team is just bad or has no chance of success then the interest, especially of the non-rabid fan is not that great. It's just a fact the more interest you create the more $ you will make. If the NBA were to implement a hard cap and something like the franchise tag the NFL uses it would level the playing field for ALL teams, making it so no super teams could be created 2 or 3 superstar players saying " let's all get together and make a super team and get us a ring"
Last edited by djrnno; 06-10-2024 at 01:57 PM.
This is absolutely the case.
I really think most Americans don't understand exactly how insular a phenomenon the NFL is. From what I can gather, it's basically a nigh-omnipresent God-sport in the US, and almost completely non-existent outside of it.
Sure, games sell out when they go international, but that's not because it has legions of fans here, it's because they're novelties and we've all heard of the NFL because we watch American TV and American movies, so when it comes up as a once in a lifetime event, people will go. That doesn't mean that the sport itself is actually popular. I have never met anyone in the UK who actually watches the NFL, and absolutely Gisele Bundchen is more well known in Europe than Tom Brady is.
Over in the US, she was Tom Brady's trophy wife. In Europe, it was more like ''oh that's Gisele Bundchen and her husband, he's some kind of professional sportsman I think''.
I think the NFL also suffers from the fact that we already have rugby in the England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Germany, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, et cetera. It's obviously not the same game but it has some superficial resemblance, and there's a cultural divide in it. Why would you ever watch American football - where games take forever, have eighteen million advertisements, there are breaks after every play, and it's just fundamentally a boring sport to watch unless you grew up with it - when you have rugby which is kind of a similar idea in terms of physicality and the type of ball and the overall goal, but is much faster, more immediate, less corporate, and frankly more fun?
Most of you are missing the point It's not really about the NFL or even football, it's about a business plan that makes a sport more popular. And the key word is PARITY. The sport could be pickleball. The NFL business plan has set it up so each team has a level playing field. The hard cap has it so no rich owner can buy a championship. With the franchise tag a bunch of self centered star players can not decide to make a super team just to get a ring and then go elsewhere. It's all about what's best for the league not a bunch of star players.
Not to be disrespectful but Americans are really not concerned about how popular our sport is with the rest of the world.That's why we call it the NATIONAL football league or the NATIONAL basketball association. I truly doubt that South Africans worry about how popular cricket is in the US
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