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Performative Fandom. In particularly the NYKNICKS floor seat celebrities. Most are like Taylor Swift - she’s a celebrity and clearly not a fan but she will get her floor seats because celebs go to big games especially when the big games are in NY or LA. It’s Timothee Chamalet who since I barely know this stuff so many here may not too is like a big Hollywood Act. At first I thought he was loud annoying Hollywood guy whose there because he did videos like this Courtside. Which to me looks like he’s performing for the camera. Turns out he’s an actual fan and won some contest for free tickets as a teenager tickets
Some reason this has been living in my head for a few days as a feeling that’s not how real fans celebrate. Perhaps theatre kids it’s so natural to perform that it’s how they celebrate. Where it’s more an internal joy. Something just doesn’t feel natural to me here.
The other thing is it’s the blackification of celebration. Where you need to do things loud and visually to show how much it means to you. Yes I am now the old man who yells at clouds.
The other interesting sports related thing is the bifurcation of the ticket market for sporting events. With the rise of television, growing wealth inequality, and the ease of air travel very big events have seen their ticket prices skyrockets. The interesting opposing side is a lack of pricing power in similar but slightly lower tier events. True events have ticket prices going to infinity (World Cup/NBA finals) far above the rate of inflation (wealth has grown much faster). Supply being inelastic means prices go up a lot. But we can build a lot of supply of second tier events. World Cup has added teams to the tournament so there are both more total games but realistically only the same amount of seats for the top teams playing and championship games. This has led to much higher prices on big WC games and empty stadiums for other games. The one example that really stood out to me was College Football Playoffs. Championship game tickets were a 3k minimum ticket price watching team 1 and 2 play each other. The semifinal game say watching teams 2 and 3 play you could scalp tickets for $30. People are going because they want to be at the game that will be an event not for the quality of football. Which ties into television because watching the game is just better on tv now.
The games that are in the public conscious as the “Event” have high prices. The Knicks final being in NYC pulls in global wealth. The NC College Football game pulls in all the money in our Northern Indiana province which is a fairly wealthy province. These are far more than just games - also networking opportunities and serve a coordinating function of getting an entire group of people to all be at the same place at the same time. For a Knicks level event if you buy tickets at 15k get-in price even the nosebleed seats will be hedge fund manager sitting next to some rich kid from third world country or minor celebrity. For IU NC College Football it’s some dude who owns a 20m a year car parts company sitting next to a HVAC roll-up guy. I think if I were in an Econ PHD you could write an interesting paper on the modern ticket pricing market and what it means for a game to be labeled the “Event” for a population group.
I guess you could also draw a parallel with the SF escorts charge $4k an hour to ticket pricing. People supposedly have less sex now, but when they are it costs more. It’s just more enjoyable to jerk off to a porn star than put in the work or pay to have sex with a 6.
I'm going to double reverse uno you here. NBA "hardcore" fandom is itself performative fandom, the guys getting upset over Celebrity Row at MSG and Taylor Swift are pretending to some kind of fandom that doesn't fundamentally exist in the NBA.
Identity Disclaimer: I am a lifelong Sixers fan, which probably predisposes me to think that basketball is stupid.
Hardcore NBA fans don't really exist. I'm the kind of American kid that grew up catching morning Sportscenter before the bus and has a half dozen podcasts from The Athletic and The Ringer on my phone today. When I think of sports fan groups in America, I can name a dozen groups and chants and traditions off the top of my head easily across every sport, except NBA basketball: the Bleacher Creatures, Roll Tide, The Black Hole, Rock Chalk (Algeria), Skol!, Chiefs Nation, the Cheeseheads, Go Birds, the Seven Line Army, the Green Monster, Citizen's Bank South.
I can't think of a single such tradition in the NBA that I've ever heard of. The equivalent famous moments in NBA fan history are themselves celebrity driven, things like Spike Lee miming the choke at Reggie Miller, or Jack Nicholson courtside in LA.
The NBA has always been a celebrity driven, star focused, front-runner sport. There's no real fan tradition because the team's are fundamentally too malleable and too protean to be the focus of tradition, and nobody cares about the regular season (despite there being numerous obvious fixes for it). This is the result of fundamental aspects of the sport: the ten foot tall hoop means it's so much easier if you're tall, and the five men on the field mean individual players are so much more important than in any other sport. Team building in the NBA is about chasing outliers who happen to be a little athletic while also being freakishly tall. There are never enough of these to go around, so the haves are so far above the have-nots that the have-nots just chase the outlier that will turn them into a have. There's no amount of team tradition, values, or coaching that will bridge the gap.
Most NBA fans have more opinions about the current star players and franchises than they do about their own team. There's not the same degree of bond between the youngster and the backup catcher on his favorite team. There's not the same possibility that your sixth round pick turns into a star, and thus the lack of obsession with those minor players.
So when Knicks fans say that Taylor Swift doing a little dance on the sideline is performative...
She's doing it FOR YOU. This is what you like, that's why you're an NBA fan and not a fan of a superior sport. That's why anybody has cared about the Knicks for most of the past thirty years. For the celebrity culture of it. Because it's the sport that most mixes into modern hip-hop oriented celebrity culture, and has since the 90s. It's easiest to produce celebrities, every all-NBA player is famous in a way that every ace pitcher or quarterback fails to be.
Both the performative fandom of the sideline celebrity, and the performative fandom of the "real" Knicks fan who has some weird bullshit about their attachment to a mediocre celebrity driven sports team, are trying to flex their status now that the Knicks lucked into the smarter strategy of bringing in a bunch of guys from Villanova to curry favor with the Bishop of Rome.
The NBA is particularly embarrassing. The players don't even try to hide their feet shuffling and routinely take five-step layups (I remember when "the Jordan layup" was a jibe for the (illegal) three-step layup). The whole culture around the NBA is bling, showboating, loud, celebrity-driven. There is no honor. Iso plays are considered the mark of a great player, instead of teamwork and making the extra pass.
That said, the NBA is still about winning. The game has adjusted massively over the last twenty years with the analytics revolution. Height matters but not to the same extent. Big men are only valuable if they can also hit a three. Mr. Process himself is not a bad three point shot, and Wemby at 7-4 shoots threes like he is Reggie Miller.
Basketball as a sport is great. Pickup games can be fun even with a range of talent. It doesn't take an entire field like soccer or football. Half-court games mean 20 players can simultaneously play on a single court.
Winning a Championship, and nothing else matters. Which leads to a bad regular season product, because the regular season isn't set up to really reward winning in the regular season with better odds to win the championship.
I think it's just obvious that it's easier to shoot 3s when you're taller. There's no other way to make sense of Joel Embiid being a good three point shooter.
It's probably the best sport that can be played at any number of people. 1 on 1, 2 on 2, 3 on 3 all work. Though to be honest, as a kid we came up with indoor 1v1 baseball rules. It's just a matter of creativity and determination.
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IMO when rules change to allow what everyone over 30 knows as a travel then every player has to adopt to those rules. If you limited your moves to what use to legal then your just not going to be as good of player as guys playing within the full new rule set. Honestly a bit like MLB in the steroid era. They were tacitly legal so if you weren’t on steroids you weren’t going to be a good player or at a minimum worse than you would be.
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It's called a gather step, bruh. You uncs who grew up watching plumbers and electricians in the NBA wouldn't understand.
Once in a while in spaces like /r/nba there will be a thread mass-complaining about the state of carries and travels in the NBA, not realizing that since fans like them will provide the NBA with eyeballs and money no matter what, the NBA has little incentive to improve on that front.
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