In what was perhaps an ode to the infamous “Meet Me In Temecula” shenanigans of one decade ago—in which an angry Twitter user was baited into driving multiple hours to fight someone who disagreed with him about Kobe Bryant, on Christmas day—some very unhappy holiday people got into a social media civil war with each other last week. This battle was not about basketball—but immigration, industry, race, politics, and the meaning of America. The sides in the fight varied, but all of them had hoped for November’s election to go the way that it did: with Donald Trump’s re-election to the presidency. Now it would seem that they are having a hard time with victory.
Basketball was evoked, at one point. In a disingenuous appeal to his own self-interest—cloaked as an everyman opportunity parade—Elon Musk pretended to know about the sport, bringing up the examples of Nikola Jokic and Victor Wembanyama as the type of talent he needs to be allowed to recruit to his companies, from all over the world. The truth is that he seeks to protect only a very specific type of work visa policy, which allows him to save a lot of money on labor, and to have significantly more leverage over his workers.
Musk, fumbling through a topic he doesn’t care about, while in desperate need for an illustrative example that may help him re-persuade some of his defecting fans, spoke goofily. Not much more goofily than some of those paid to speak about the sport professionally, though. Contemporary debate about the NBA’s popularity has led to big bloody riots and massacres of strawmen; a vast, hollow war of signifiers so insubstantial that it can barely be qualified as grammatical, let alone coherent.
The problems with this discourse are myriad, but the primary issue is that it revolves around publicly available data that is junk. Nielsen ratings, historically an important indicator for broadcast success or failure, have degraded rapidly over the past decade or so. You already know why: the internet has changed how people view, hear about, or experience pretty much everything. And this change has been especially profound for cable television, which is where the overwhelming majority of NBA games are shown. Now, games are still available there, but also available through a wide array of increasingly popular streaming services—legal and illegal.
The amount of people who use these services is ostensibly known by the powers that be in the NBA, but it’s not information that, like Nielsen’s, gets shared with the broader world. So the debate being had is fundamentally uninformed; had in the way that a child might brave a winter’s day without layers or even a coat. Hubris would get that child sick for a week or more, and in this case the sickness is verbal and performative. For those who get paid to spread it, the sickness is profitable. Being stupid, on purpose, can pay pretty well. The marketplace for bad ideas is, in a collapsed and collapsing media industry, better than the one for wisdom, or even for basic information.
The information that a more intelligent discussion might take place around is this: in 2024, the league struck their largest media rights deal ever, setting them up to earn $76 billion over the next 11 years. Games will be shown on ESPN, ABC, NBC, Peacock, and Amazon Prime. TNT, long a stalwart partner, is in an age of austerity led by American villain David Zaslav, who has also cut ties with Sesame Street, and Batman and Looney Tunes properties. Zaslav is trying to winnow things, stuck with the unpleasant janitorial work of bloated conglomeration, likely to get worse under a freshly re-Trumpified Federal Trade Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission.
For everyone actually trying to build or grow a following, though, the NBA was worth bidding over, to the point of historic profits. Clearly, the numbers that we don’t get to see are saying something appealing to the people who write the world’s biggest checks. Most of what’s said contrary to that is part of someone’s resentment factory. Those things are thriving, in part because Musk has bought and brutalized Twitter—now “X”—effectively damaging the NBA’s wellspring of conversation of enthusiasm. The sport doesn’t rely on one social media platform for its relevance, though, and we don’t need to care about the hot trash that takes flight there. We can just watch basketball, instead. Starting next season, there will be even more ways to do that.
Much else about the world is wrong, in catastrophic ways, which is maybe why some people filter their Christmas discontent into vengeful polemics that they’re willing to fight or re-shape the world over. Given the scale of brewing conflict in a multi-polarized globe with very few functioning economies or governments, an argument about the impact of three-point shooting volume on viewership numbers that haven’t told us anything for a long time seems silly, because it is. We are lucky that this dumb and beautiful game, flawed as its flagship league may be (please, shorten the season!) is one of the few good things that seems, quite definitely, to be a big part of the troublingly uncertain future.