Lebron won’t be around much longer and then what? The goofball/cringe king Jayson Tatum? So you go from Bird/Magic to MJ to Kobe to LeBron to LeBron/Curry ….to Tatum? It’ll be huge for the league for the mavericks to get revenge on the Celtics this year. Luka is more marketable than Tatum. Another thing the league is missing is a fun rivalry, or many. The spurs need to become good fast (Wemby is another potential face of the league) as having a Chet vs Wemby rivalry will be fun. The Thunder aren’t going anywhere, they’ll be good for years to come.

In terms of defense, I’ll have many old heads disagree with me. I don’t think defenders are even close to as bad as what they used to be. Watch film. They have to pick up players a lot closer than they used to. The amount of space between them is less than it used to. They don’t go flying across the gym on weak fakes like they used to. It would make since that as millions of new dribble moves and moves in general have emerged and as players can hit shots that they couldn’t hit before (how many people that Jordan played against hit a step back three?), the scoring goes up. Defenders have so much more to worry about nowadays, so I don’t buy in to this “no defense” narrative. Something I haven’t really explored is changing the zones or doing something different with the court/scoring. I only imagine any changes working against the league but I could be wrong. I imagine some people didn’t love the introduction of the three point line but I’m sure we all can agree that was a great change.

Load management. The league has recognized for awhile how big of a problem this is and actually seemed to work to put an end to this at the beginning of last year (https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/38635688/nba-pushing-82-game-mindset-players-ahead-regular-season )
whether or not it’s gotten better I have no clue. The constant unavailability of stars picked up since Covid (not sure why that would be) but it’s gotten really annoying. Not sure how to fix this since most of the time players are claiming to be hurt and they’re almost never listed out for “rest” or “load management” purposes.


Officiating, “star calls”. The biggest problem here is awarding flopping. Seems like we’re seeing a slight increase in technical fouls/fines for flops but it’s not enough. The problem is not in players flopping but the fact that if they flop they’re more likely to draw a foul. If that’s true, that tells me the refs are watching the players drawing the fouls and not the players committing the fouls, and that explains a lot. If refs can be more consistent on how things are called that would help with this problem.


Those are some common answers on why I hear people say the league is unwatchable. Why do you not enjoy watching the league as much as you used to?