sp6r=underrated wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:sp6r=underrated wrote:Ticket sales make up less and less of NBA revenue. Do you think the day will ever come when players say get rid of the fans alltogether from the arena?
Look at the bubble, players shot way better in the bubble than elsewhere. Guys like Durant think of themselves as artists. I could easily see him or someone like him saying in essence fans are impeding the artists.
I doubt it will happen but I wouldn't be surprised if a major players makes that demand this decade.
For the NBA? No.
But could I see a guy like Kyrie leaving the NBA and trying to monetize one-on-one and AND-1 style videos where only cult members are allowed to be present? Absolutely.
The real risk for the NBA is an enterprising businessperson figures out a way to make 3 on 3, half court basketball work. You need to tailor the rules carefully to ensure guys like Kyrie are the best players in the League and ensure no bigs.
But if you could design a league that resulted in players who play like Kyrie being the best players, that league really would have a market as a boxing style, Vegas centric PPV sport.
There wouldn't be a season at all. It would just be a random collection of games announced. One month Kyrie-Durant-Harden vs Curry-Lebron-Zion. And then in a two months the names are scrambled.
A lot of basketball fans really are player fans. They don't care at all about games without the stars hence the constant demands to shorten the regular season. And out of the player fans many of them plainly prefer the Kyrie Irvings of the world over other player types.
And there are a lot of players who really don't enjoy 5 on 5 basketball. Does Durant ever give the impression that he thinks the courts needs 10 people? Not that I'm aware of.
If you made a league were those guys dominated, I could see a real possibility of the basketball culture fracturing, with a portion of the audience following the PPV league and a portion of top players jumping over. The superstar centric player fans would like it without Danny Greens out there. Kyrie would like it because he could have a boxer's schedule.
Maybe 5% chance this happens over next 30 yrs.
I actually felt that during the Covid Hiatus, the NBA had a vulnerability to something like this getting formed. Had some enterprising players started something like that then with an effective plan, it could have potentially made enough money that players would decided to leave the NBA and do this instead.
Not suggesting that players en masse would ever stop playing in the NBA when an NBA team still owed them $100,000,000+ more in salary so long as they reported for work, but once the door got opened there, you could see a player like Kyrie deciding he didn't need the NBA any more.
Now, Kyrie frankly doesn't seem like a big enough deal that him leaving would necessarily be devastating for the NBA, but if someone had Kyrie's aesthetic game with his wacko brain and was a bit more effective as a competitive 5 on 5 player, it could end up being a big deal.
Imagine Jordan stepping away from the Bulls after the first 3 peat in an era with social media. If the best and most popular player in the world leaves the NBA, look out. And then you'd get into the ugly realities of a league like the NBA being unable to easily downsize. If the NBA loses 20% of its revenue while still being on the hook for contracts they made in headier days, a whole host of problems will come to the fore.
Realistically now though, given how unimportant Kyrie is to the NBA, I think the possibly bigger threat to the NBA comes with the future of the Olympics.
Let's say 2024 comes around and either Jokic or Doncic leads their team to the Gold, and then leaves the NBA to play full time in Europe. In a basketball world where globalization means that international players determine where the best basketball is being played, the NBA's dominance is potentially at risk if those international players no longer feel like proving themselves in the NBA is the goal of any top basketball player.
This would of course have to come with other leagues being willing and able to pay salaries at least in the ballpark of what the NBA pays, which might seem far-fetched, but it's not like European soccer clubs aren't already paying out cash on this scale. There will be forces in Europe that can pay that amount of money if they want, so it will be a question of whether the European fan market will justify paying that money.
I don't know how close that is to being a reality, but learning things like the fact that more RealGM GB posters are European now than American is pretty eye-opening. Surely was not the case when I joined the site.
