Sports

Is the NBA Alright?

Plus: Horse racing thrives, and spring football should too.

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LeBron James holding a basketball, with his back turned to Stephen Curry, who is crouched down low guarding LeBron. | Ariana Ruiz/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom
(Ariana Ruiz/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom)

Good morning and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! You've seen field-storming and court-storming, and now you've seen rink-storming.

But our focus today isn't on hockey, it's on the association (as cool people call the NBA). We'll talk about the state of pro basketball, plus more horse racing and a little bit of pro spring football. Hopefully you have some fun along the way.

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Is Basketball OK?

I watched more NBA basketball this season than in the prior five seasons combined. But that was still only a handful of games, so perhaps I'm not the best person to start giving out suggestions—or maybe I am, because I'm exactly the person the league needs to draw back in.

My Detroit Pistons—three-time NBA champions, who in my formative years made it to the conference finals six years in a row—are finally good again and made the playoffs for the first time since 2019. Their last three playoff trips ended in first round sweeps, so I cautiously dipped my toe into the NBA postseason again, a territory I usually only visit for the occasional play-in game or title-decider. I was rewarded with a 4–2 series loss to the New York Knicks, but a fantastic series nonetheless. Every game was a coin flip, no lead was safe.

That's what every NBA playoff series should be. The NBA can't design it that way, but there are changes they can make.

The modern complaint seems to be that everyone got too good at shooting, so now there are too many three-point shots and there's not enough action in the key. I'm inclined to agree with Substack writer and podcaster Ethan Sherwood-Strauss' proposal to bring back hand-checking beyond the three-point line. I have no idea what a foul is anymore (and apparently the refs don't either), and this change might worsen that confusion for casual viewers, but the resulting increase in defensive conflict outside the three-point line seems worthwhile.

Another idea, perhaps more crazy: Get rid of the straight lines in the three-point arc and make it a semicircle. You shouldn't get three points from a shorter distance just because it's in the corner. A wild stat: One in nine shots in the NBA is a corner three, as Kirk Goldsberry points out.

But teams should get a three-year warning before changes like this are made. It's not fair to draft and develop your roster under one set of rules and have it suddenly changed when your squad is reaching its prime.

Then there's the schedule problem. In an 82-game schedule, any single game doesn't make much difference in the standings, unlike in the NFL. Andrew Bogut recently made this point—he's an NBA champion (2015 Golden State Warriors) and current assistant coach in Australia's National Basketball League, where teams play just 28 games in the regular season, spread over roughly 20 weeks. I'd love to see the NBA reduce its schedule by about 25 percent (along with every other professional league I follow), and this would help with the "load management" issue too—but reducing the number of games means less TV money, and it doesn't exactly scream "thriving, growing sports business."

The NBA is not a league that's consumed primarily on TV, however. It's consumed on social media through slams, shots from wayyyyy downtown, buzzer beaters, hard fouls, trash talk, fits, sneaks, and anything else that might go viral. It's consumed through podcasts, talk radio, and daytime TV talk shows that often spend more time talking about player moves and coach drama rather than team performance. When fans are watching games, many are watching pirated streams instead of boosting the league's TV ratings and ad revenue. The NBA can't really monetize any of this, it can only hope all the attention leads people to spend their money on tickets, merchandise, NBA League Pass, or maybe even cable.

At the end of the day, there's only so much the league can do (and maybe its viewership problem isn't as bad as it seemed). Basketball is destined to have lots of stoppages in crunch time and almost every critical possession will involve some debatable referee call/no-call. But the clearest way to make me and billions of people around the world watch the NBA is simple: Make the Pistons good.

Old Horse, Old Tricks

I was ready to write that horse racing needs some new blood to get people engaged. Apparently I was wrong, because NBC's viewership of the Kentucky Derby peaked at 21.8 million viewers, a record.

Going in, the Derby felt a little light on engaging storylines, other than trainer Bob Baffert's return from a three-year suspension. This year's winning trainer, Bill Mott, comes across as a nice old man who's only just broken through for success (his other Kentucky Derby win came in controversial fashion in 2019), but has actually been in the sport's hall of fame since 1998. There are also the hundreds of racehorses who die every year, all subsidized by your tax dollars, as we covered last week.

New trainers, owners, and storylines might wash away some of those stains. But apparently viewers are interested enough as it is (at least in the Kentucky Derby, though perhaps not the rest of horse racing). Why is that?

I haven't surveyed all 21.8 million viewers, but I imagine there are a few factors: People like gambling (especially on long shots), traditions (like the fancy hats and the bugler), specialty drinks (mint juleps), and parties. The Kentucky Derby lets you combine any or all of the above. Since the race lasts all of two minutes, it's not like people are deciding whether to watch or not based on the quality of the competition. It's also possible a new Netflix show helped increase viewership too.

It turned out to be a great race, with a pack of long shots leading the field until the homestretch, when the top two favorites dueled it out for the win. That's not really why people watch though. Horse racing thrives on tradition, but that can only get it so far.

Watch Football

I'd argue this part of the NHL and NBA playoff calendar is a bit of a lull before conference championships start up. So it's a great time to start watching spring football in the United Football League (UFL).

The league has eight teams, six of which are legitimate title contenders. Anyone should be able to find a rooting interest, whether it's a nearby team, a player who went to that college you like, or your feelings about head coaches like Skip Holtz and Bob Stoops. Jump on a bandwagon now and you've got four more regular season games to watch, plus the playoffs.

I've been a big fan of the D.C. Defenders since the XFL made its short-lived return in February 2020, was quickly thwarted by the pandemic, and came back in 2023 before merging with the USFL for 2024. As a lifelong fan of the franchise (their life, not mine), can confirm: If your team wins, it'll be awesome—if they lose, it's no big deal, it's just the UFL.

Replay of the Week

Game seven. Down by a goal. Seconds away from elimination. Goalie pulled. How could replay of the week go to anything else?

If the Winnipeg Jets had lost in (double) overtime, we would have gone with something else, but they didn't.

That's all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the weekend, Hamburg vs. SSV Ulm in Bundesliga 2.