Player-empowered league

Player-empowered league doesn’t work well because the team aspect is left behind.

To win championships and play pleasing basketball, you cannot leave the team aspect behind. It is a team sport.

Player-empowered league means players think about themselves first. That means high salaries. That means less defense and more 3s (it’s a lot better for one’s body longevity to shoot long distance than to drive in the paint). That means a WAY more boring game. If regular season is quite boring these days, it’s because of that trend. Because games are now a bunch of individuals barely sharing the ball and if so, it is to find someone on the perimeter. It’s too dialed in.

It also destroys the playoffs. We can see right now how those teams built out of nowhere, assembling like giant robots, can be hit or miss. If the stars play well, cool but that also means blowouts, not really great to watch. If the stars don’t play well, not only the rest of the team can’t pull miracles while the stars dissociate, but the team culture and spirit completely disintegrate. It’s all about personal stats now.

And that’s foul.

There’s no more sticking together to make this shit work, which is part of the deal. That’s the only way to reach the next plateau, when the whole team becomes One. When you win championships.

Look, I can’t feel bad for multimillionaires paid to play basketball. A rookie ranked last in the NBA is making $1.6M in a year. That’s roughly what most people in the west will make in their lifetime. The average salary in the WNBA, including vets is around $100K. 40 years ago, NBA players often needed a second job.

Fans will get into debt to buy tickets and jerseys. A star jersey is $300. So they would do that to go see superstar players not give a fuck, or barely, because they’re getting paid and that they got rings with previous teams or will later with another team? That’s not a good look.

I hope the franchises that nurtured a team spirit will win big in the next few years. We need that. We need sustainability, not growth.