Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A soccer thought. I think it’s fair to say soccer is an inferior sport and us Americans are correct to not play it. However since it’s an inferior sports that’s also why you can have a World Cup.
Tiny nations could not put up a fight in America’s sports even if they played them at the same rate. You need to be a rich country to compete in American sports. For American football it’s probably only America that is richest enough to play it. It requires a huge amount of resources and technology to play at the highest levels. Even if the European powers played American football at the same rates I have my doubts they could create a team that’s competitive with a NFL team and we have 30 of them.
Baseball is showing some ability to create a few competitive national teams but baseball can’t be played internationally because of how much we’ve perfected pitching to the point that a human arm has limits on how many pitches it can throw a year. Elite arms can handle about 150 innings per year so there is basically no ability to use them for an offseason tournament.
And since Soccer is a low event sports it means that inferior teams can actually pull out ties or wins against power house teams with the right luck.
I'll bite: how're you defining "inferior"?
Soccer is inferior because 98% of possessions do not advance the game state.
In American football, every play advances the game state. Even if nothing happens, 2nd and 10 is meaningfully different from 1st and 10. 3rd and 10 from the 20 is a very different game state from 1st and 10 from the 20.
In basketball, about half of all plays end in a score (arguably this is too much).
Let me bend your ear briefly on why modern basketball is the worst of all sports.
First, it is the only major sport with a freakish morphology requirement. The best predictor of success in basketball is your height - the average for pro players is the 99th percentile. The only other team sport where you see this is volleyball, which nobody cares about, so it's fine if it caters to a small group. But basketball is the sport for many demographics, and yet 98-99% of people can never go pro no matter how hard they work or how skilled they become.
Second, the rules are stupid. Running with the ball in your hands is not allowed, except you can take a few steps I guess? Especially if it leads to a cool dunk! (Pretty sure that's the actual reason, people like dunks so they bend the rules to allow them). On a more serious note, the modern style of play has devolved to take advantage of these silly rules. Many plays I see in modern games are just a big player bull rushing with the ball in their hands for three steps, then leaping through the air and tipping the ball up while in midair. There's no teamwork beyond setting picks, no finesse, just a big flying body that the defender is not allowed to do anything about. If the ball goes in great, but if the defender gets in the way it's usually a foul and free throw so just as good.
Third, shooting baskets is stupid. It requires kids to spend thousands of hours on a movement skill that has no application to anything else whatsoever. Seriously, can someone come up with any other action in life that is remotely like shooting baskets? How much of our kids' time is wasted on this junk?Also, there's relatively little interaction involved in shooting baskets. I should say, there is interaction if the defender is taller and can put their hands over you, in which case you simply can't succeed no matter how good you are (see point one), but most of the time it's just a skill check roll to see if you get the points or not. What, in every similar sport, is a battle of wits between offense and defense, in basketball is often just a roll of the dice. Player XY hits 3 pointers from this distance at 38% chance. What fun! (BTW, how are there professional players who can't hit free throws? What an embarrassing sport!) The result of this is that basketball is a highly statistical game - the opposite of soccer, upsets and comebacks in basketball rarely happen, because there are so many scoring plays, and scoring is so easy. By minute 5, you can already see which team is better, and the same ratio of points will likely continue for the rest of the game. Everything about basketball is boring.
All basketball arenas should be renovated into indoor soccer arenas.
I strongly dislike basketball and, especially, the NBA.
And - you are wrong on almost all of your points and have betrayed the fact that you don't watch much basketball.
Let's start with the whopper:
(Link) Literally the most recent NBA championship included the largest comeback in finals' history.
This is an embarrassingly cliche level of "truth nuke" as the kids say. Basketball is not "highlight statistical" (what does that mean?) and there's a ton of randomness. You can tell because of the length of the season. They need 80+ games to feel confident that one or more teams didn't just hit a statistical (there's that word again) improbability for a 10 game stretch.
(Link) And the Finals MVP, from this years' championship team, is 6'2"
Again. Big yikes. Sure, 6'2" isn't manlet territory, but, in relative sense in the NBA, in actually is! Brunson's whole "vibe" is that he is undersized and also not a giga-autist shooting specialist. He works his ass off and mostly focuses on ball movement and causing defense schemes to falter and break so he can exploit it. It's actually quite cerebral.
How is this not literally exactly true for MLB, NHL, NFL, UFC, Pro Soccer, Olympic Wrestling, Professional Musician, Professional Actor etc. etc. etc.
(Link) Again, literally the opposite of what is happening
Mid 2000s NBA? Maybe. That's back when the typical (white) boomer Dad joke was "NBA, more like WWF!" But Steph Curry et al changed the game on such a fundamental level that a Shaq-like player wouldn't make it out of the D League today. You might be pointing to Lebron as this "bull in the China shop" And it's also true that LeBron has always received favorable foul treatment. He's also a 5x 1st-Team Defensive player and noted for his assists. Much like Brunson, interestingly enough, LeBron is so good because he makes other players on his team so good that the opposing team has to make a lose-lose choice to double up on LeBron and leave someone else open, or single cover LeBron and open themselves up to his penetration game (...hehe).
See above. Teamwork has never been more important. The pace at which defense (and offenses, frankly) adapt in game is so fast that incomplete team play is how you get blowouts.
Okay, but later on you say:
So, free throws aren't "just" as good as making the basket. Hmm.
There it is.
This is perhaps the strangest argument. Practice one's shot is absolutely a necessary part of training, but it's not the only thing you do. And eventually, you know, you're playing or practicing with other people. Specifically, you are coordinating in real time with a group of peers to accomplish a competitive goal against a common opponent. This is what makes all "sports dumb lol" arguments so tedious. Sports are one of the most effective ways to build real pro-social capability. There's a reason why college athletes have such better life outcomes (in general, across the distribution) than college non-athletes. This "shooting baskets is stupid" (literally what you said) is taking a very specific item and stripping away all of the context around it as a means to paint the entire enterprise of Basketball as vapid. It's almost a .... Motte and Bailey.
Even if I shared your potentially homoerotic inclinations for indoor soccer, I couldn't get past the fact that this is an insane de-growth position. The 30 NBA teams are worth, on average, $5.4bn each. That's About $150bn in just team value right off the top. Add in the various marketing, promotions, adverts etc. and The NBA (like the other Big 4 sports) is probably close to a half-a-trillion-dollar-per-year economic impact across the US.
Indoor soccer is not. It's not a tenth of that value. It may be a hundredth, but I don't know (nor do I care). But your position seems to be that we should turn a half-a-trillion-dollars into far, far less because you don't particularly like Basketball. But literally millions and millions of other people do and are willing to pay for it. You must make a stronger case.
Here's The Stronger Case for Why Basketball - Specifically, the NBA - Sucks
All of these are common knowledge problems. I've done enough citations above for the day. If you want to look these up on your own, you can. They are all valid.
Tanking. Because of how the NBA draft works, teams towards the bottom of the league, at the end of the season, will lose on purpose to secure a higher draft pick for the next season. One player can really be that important (LeBron in Cleveland being the canonical example). This means that the end of the regular season is a fucking travesty.
Sports Betting. In the past few years, several players (including major names and, oddly, retired superstars) have been indicted for fixing games, point shaving etc. This corrupts the game, of course, and creates is own gravity because it helps the mobile sports books make money and set better lines. It's become so ubiquitous that, IIRC, the NBA league office is hiring Cybersecurity teams to monitor and secure player devices around game times. There's probably a lawsuit in there somewhere. But the larger point is that guys making seven figures a year still think it's a smart move to get paid $50k to shave points. Which leads to point number 3....
Culture War (Hey, we made it!). The NBA is the most "culturally" aware of the Big 4. Baseball, Football, and Hockey dudes tend just to want to score points, win, and go home (and / or party). The Colin Kapernick saga in the NFL showed that if you really want to get hyperpolitical, you can Resist (TM) your way out of a contract (Also, side note, Kapernick really did suck as a QB, but that's a different thread). In the NBA, being "cultural" seems to be par for the course. It starts at draft night where guys are wearing the most retarded suits in the world. It extends to post game interviews where they discuss, with the media, the scientific merits of flat earth theory (look it up, seriously). And eventually you get the fuckery that is smile posing with Jay-Z while wearing comic sans "I can't breathe" t-shirts.
The issue isn't that the NBA has gone too woke (ask them how they feel about gay players!), it's that the league has become a hyperslop live action TikTok. This is the league of "dabbing each other up" before games (look it up). If Gen-Z wanted to ironically-vibe-code a sports league, it wouldn't be surprising if the "app" turned out to be today's NBA.
I appreciate your thoughts! I intended my original post as somewhat hyperbolic, I thought the last line made that pretty clear - that said, I do think the criticisms I leveled are valid reasons why basketball is comparatively worse than other sports in its fundamental design.
Fair enough, I didn't distinguish roles in my first post. Point guard is the one position where shorter guys can be successful (mostly because it's the position that doesn't take shots). Although apparently the average height of point guards has been increasing in the last few decades - they used to be able to be much shorter!
I'm saying that shooting baskets is a far worse activity than shooting goals in other sports. It's interesting that you highlight "coordinating in real time with a group of peers" when practicing shooting baskets is largely a solo activity - again, in comparison with shooting goals in soccer (which you do against a goalie) or throwing a baseball around. In fact, have you ever seen basketball players get together and have fun practicing passing the ball? Of course not, instead they take turns shooting baskets, because that's the activity that requires the most practice. It's fundamentally less pro-social compared with other team sports.
What are you even saying here? If basketball were replaced by indoor soccer then obviously soccer would make more money...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link