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Why is the start of a season in sports so exciting?

Dear Sports Fan,

Sports seasons are so long — how can anyone get excited at the very start? It’s going to be at least six months until the playoffs in most sports.

Thanks,
Jan

— — —

Dear Jan,

The start of a season is exciting for many reasons and only a few of them have to do with making the playoffs. You’re absolutely right about how long sports seasons are. Take the National Hockey League (NHL) which is starting tonight. The NHL regular season is 82 games. It starts in early October and ends in mid-April. That’s a long, long time and a lot of games! The National Basketball Association plays the same number of games. Baseball plays 162 or roughly twice the number. Football is the outlier here with relatively short seasons — 16 games in the National Football League and around 12 for college teams. Setting football aside, the first few games for a baseball, basketball, or hockey team don’t actually mean very much in terms of their eventual record and qualification for the playoffs. A fan’s excitement for and enjoyment of the start of the season can’t be measured in wins and losses but it can be described. Let’s give it a shot.

Saying hello to old friends and meeting new ones

Part of following a team is getting to know the players on the team. The players on your favorite team or even their biggest rivals^[1] become like characters on a long-running sit-com. You learn their quirks. You cheer with them when they celebrate and you share their anger and frustration when the team is down. You track their various injury rehabilitations with bated breath. You might even wear a shirt with their name on the back. Players on your favorite team feel like an extension of your social circle in a weird way. The start of a season in sports is a little like the start of a season of a television show you really like or a new book in a series you love. You can’t wait to drop back in on their lives to see how they’re doing, if they’ve grown a funny beard, lost weight, gained weight, changed in any way. As a Penguins fan, I look forward to dropping back in on Sidney Crosby’s life just as much as I look forward to seeing what’s up with Lady Mary as a Downton Abbey fan.

Teams never stay the same from one season to a next. Players are traded, retire, or become free agents and move to another team. The first games of the season are your first chance to meet the new guys or gals on the team you follow. Some of them are players you know from other teams in the league. This can be great if you’ve always grudgingly respected their play. It can be challenging if you’ve always (sports) hated them and now you have to find a way to root for them. Rookies or players who have moved up from the minor leagues are always exciting to meet because their potential is unknown and therefore theoretically limitless.

Returning to ritual

Watching sports is also an important part of many fan’s social lives. Whether you go to games in person, watch them in a bar, or at home, watch them alone, with a partner, or with friends, watching and rooting can be a big part of a sport’s fans life. The start of the season means a return to social settings that you haven’t had access to during the offseason. It’s like the end of summer when you were a kid and all your friends got home from summer camp or the end of a long sustained period of craziness at work that allows you to rest, relax, and actually meet a friend for a drink instead of just heading home to rest up for the next day.

I have friends that I know I’m going to hear from ten times more during a particular sports season than I would otherwise. It’s great!

Getting a feel for your team

The first few games of a hockey, basketball, or baseball season may not have much of a statistical effect on their outcome for the year but that doesn’t mean fans don’t watch them attentively to get a feel for how their team might do. If you root for a team that just won a championship, you’re looking for evidence of the lethargy that often infects teams after they win. If you’re like most of us and you root for a team that did well but didn’t win the championship last year, you’re looking to see if the team has improved or taken a step back. How has a new coach affected the team’s play? How well are new players integrated into the team? Which players have improved? Which have lost a step? If you root for one of the worst teams in the league last year, the first few games may be your only time of true hope during the year.

Truthfully, the first few games probably can’t shed too much light on what the season will hold for your team, but that won’t stop fans from trying!

Enjoy the start of the season,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

note the outpouring of sincere love from Red Sox fans for the departing Derek Jeter↵

Cue Cards 10-2-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Wednesday, October 1

Following a boom with a fizzle — After the epic single-elimination Wild Card game between the Royals and the As, fans probably were expecting a little more from the second Wild Card game last night. This one was impressive but not exciting as the San Francisco Giants beat the Pittsburgh Pirates 8-0. I suppose we shouldn’t be that surprised. Of the four Wild Card teams, the As, the Royals, and the Pirates are all long-time tortured franchises while the Giants are a traditional power. If you just took a baseball fan out of a time-machine and told them those four teams were in the Wild Card round, after they fainted from surprise that the first three even made the playoffs, they would recover to say that the Giants were sure to advance.
Line: I’m not surprised but I do (unless you live in San Francisco) feel for the Pirates. It means so much for them to even make the playoffs and now their out having only played one game and scored no runs.
Basketball (and LeBron) is back — That’s right — preseason basketball has begun. The first official preseason game is not until this Saturday but teams are already practicing and scrimmaging. Yesterday, the Cleveland Cavaliers had a public scrimmage and showed off their new acquisitions, Lebron James and Kevin Love. These two players are expected to launch them back into the championship hunt.
Line: LeBron is back in Cleveland and this time, I think he’s going to bring them a championship.

Cue Cards 9-8-2014

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Sunday, September 7

The National Football League Makes its triumphant return — With all the off-season mess: players being suspended, players being suspended, owners being suspended, etc. it was easy to wonder why professional football has such a pull on us all. Yesterday’s football games reminded us why — because they are exciting! Full tiny synopses in our NFL One Liners column.
Line: That’s why the NFL is the most popular sport — two overtime games, comebacks left and right, fantasy football excitement!
Serena reigns supreme over nearly everyone — Serena Williams never lost more than three games in a set (you need to win 6 to win the set) during the entire U.S. Open tournament. Fittingly, she beat her opponent in the final, Caroline Wozniaki, 6-3, 6-3. Serena Williams is great.
Line: It’s amazing that Serena Williams is still so dominant at an age (32) when most other tennis players are on their way to retirement.
The Basketball World Cup gets serious — The round of 16 in the FIBA Basketball World Cup is complete after four games yesterday. There were no enormous surprises — the U.S. and Spain still seem fated to meet in the finals. The most hotly contested game was between neighbors and rivals Brazil and Argentina. Possibly seeking a little cosmic revenge for the soccer World Cup, the Brazilian team won 85 to 65. The next round of the tournament begins on Tuesday.
Line: Brazil had too much size inside, with Anderson Verejao, Tiago Splitter, and Nene, for Argentina to handle.

Basketball and Baseball Uniform Posters

One of my favorite professional experiences came several years back when I was working as a business analyst for Return Path. My boss back then, Jack Sinclair, found an Edward Tufte one-day course and decided to send me to it. Tufte is one of the foremost practicers, proponents, and gurus of data visualization, the art of showing information through graphics. One of Tufte’s favorite techniques is the use of small multiples. Small multiples are graphics that repeat the same basic frame over and over again in a single view to emphasize the differences. Think the frames of a flip-book but instead of flipping from one to another to deliver a message, you display them all at once.

A good example of this is Tufte’s reworking of an instructional display of air-craft marshaling signals, as reproduced by businessweek.com.

One of my favorite creative poster companies, Pop Chart Lab, has a couple of sports posters that use this principle of small multiples. They’re running a sale through August 29 on these and other charts. Use the code, “solongsummer” to get 15% off. My favorite is the visual compendium of baseball uniforms. This poster shows 121 tiny baseball uniforms from teams from 1869 through 2014. Each tiny uniform is a lens to an era. Baseball, with it’s rich cultural of historical respect and nostalgia lends itself perfectly to this treatment.

Also good is a similar visual compendium of basketball uniforms. The concept is the same and it still works. Basketball has a shorter history and doesn’t really share the timeless nostalgia of baseball. What it does have though is a strong fashion and pop-culture presence. Hidden among the professional jerseys of this poster are jerseys from movies like White Men Can’t Jump and He Got Game as well as jerseys designed for record companies like Bad Boy and No Limit Records.

Both posters are available for $35 before the 15% discount and are printed in my home borough of Queens. Get ’em while they’re hot!

What the Reaction to Paul George's Leg Injury Means

During a televised intra-squad scrimmage of the U.S. Men’s National Basketball team in their preparation for the upcoming World Cup of Basketball, Paul George, a star basketball player, broke his leg. The word used most frequently to describe the injury seems to be “horrific.” It was an open fracture of the tibia and fibula. Almost as soon as George had been carted off the court and the rest of the scrimmage canceled, the predominant story among the media became variations on the question, “What will Paul George’s leg injury mean for the future participation of NBA players in international competitions?” The thought running through my mind has been, “What does the reaction to Paul George’s leg injury mean? Why is this the media’s reaction? What can we learn from it?

NBA: Indiana Pacers at Charlotte Bobcats — Is the story of Paul George’s injury about his career or the Indiana Pacers?

The implication of the Paul George story that’s been percolating is this: now that a star player has been injured in a national team activity, NBA players should stop taking part in international competition. Who does this make sense for? There’s three main actors in this power play. There’s the NBA owners who employ the players. There’s the players. And then there’s the fans. Not to get all political science on you here, but they nicely represent Capital, Labor, and Consumer. Let’s go through this one at a time:

The Fans

Fans of the Indiana Pacers, the team that Paul George plays for in the NBA, are upset today. They just watched the best player on a team, someone who they’ve grown fond of after watching him play since he was twenty years old, snap his leg on national television. George will probably be okay, the surgery is said to have been successful but it’s not clear how okay the Pacers will be. They’ve been the second best team for two years running in the Eastern Conference, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll even be that good when George comes back in a year. Their second best player, David West, is in the final third of his career and may not be as good then. They lost their third best player, Lance Stephenson, in free agency, and their fourth best player, Roy Hibbert, is a riddle wrapped up in a seven foot enigma.

All that said, it’s hard to argue that the fans as a whole lose from international play. Basketball fans love basketball and international basketball is wonderful to follow and to watch. Furthermore, if you’re a fan of one of the other fourteen teams in the Eastern Conference… well, you’re not crowing about it but your team’s path to the finals just got a little easier. As a consumer of basketball, international play is a net win for you, a fact even the most depressed Indiana Pacers fan would admit if you stuck her with truth serum.

The Players

Paul George certainly lost out in this particular case. His leg is broken and he won’t be able to play basketball for another year. The players as a group, however, only gain by playing internationally — with a few exceptions. The first thing to understand about this is that contracts in the NBA, unlike those in the NFL, are guaranteed. George’s contract, which begins this year, runs for five years and $91.5 million dollars. His injury does nothing to affect that. Of the other players playing in that scrimmage, only one of them is slated to become a free agent in the next twelve months. Basketball players, even during the offseason, play basketball. It’s just what they do. They may take some vacation but most of the time during the offseason, they’re in gyms, playing high intensity basketball against the best players in the world. This injury could have happened in any practice at any time and the consequences physically and financially would have been the same. Playing in international competitions doesn’t increase the risk of injury for most players and it has great potential value in the form of professional development and exposure for sponsorship or endorsement deals.

The one major exception to this are players who, for whatever reason, feel or are compelled to play in these competitions, even if they are injured. Yao Ming, the Chinese great, forced his 7’6″ body up and down the court every summer for China and it almost definitely shortened his career and lowered his earnings in the long run. The solution to this isn’t to get pros out of these competitions, it’s for countries not to force their players to play.

One last point about the players. The likely alternative to having professionals play in these competitions would be to have amateurs, mostly college kids to play. The cost-benefit for them is significantly worse than for the professionals. College athletes don’t have guaranteed contracts. In fact, they’re not “paid” at all. If a college athlete broke his leg like George did, he might never get drafted, never make a fortune, never have a dream career. Let’s not have the grownups vacate something not-so-risky so that kids can take it up even though it’s more risky for them.

The NBA Owners

NBA owners don’t make any money directly from international competitions. It’s probably worth writing that again. NBA owner don’t make any money directly from international competitions. The downside of their players playing is exactly what happened on Friday. The Pacers owner is likely to make tens of million dollars fewer this year without Paul George than he would have with him playing. The upside? It’s hard to measure. Professionals playing in international competition definitely attracts new fans to basketball who then become fans of the NBA. Players who come through uninjured often benefit from the experience and become more valuable employees.

That’s why the story of this injury quickly became “Will this mean that NBA players no longer are going to play in international competition?” It’s because team owners, who employ the players, don’t want their players to play in international competition. At least they don’t want the players to play (to be allowed to play if we tell the truth about it,) without the owners getting paid.

As fans, I don’t think we should take the owners side on this one. I love watching international sports with the best players in the world competing against each other and it’s really not a bad deal for the players, not even for Paul George, truth be told. So resist the urge to take up the owners side on this issue!

Celebrating Women in the NBA

Two stories popped up recently about women in the NBA that are worth knowing about. The women in the spotlight are Becky Hammon and Violet Palmer. Both were successful point guards during their playing days and both have become pioneers for women in men’s professional basketball.

Violet Palmer

_MG_2587 — Violet Palmer, trailblazing NBA ref

The first story was mercifully underplayed because it’s really no big deal. Violet Palmer, who became the first female NBA ref in 1997, married her long-time partner, Tanya Stine. Palmer said in an interview that although she came out as gay to her fellow refs in 2007, this is her “big formal coming out.” Palmer has been a trailblazer for women in an arena inexplicably dominated by men. ESPNW covered this exhaustively in 2011 and unfortunately not much has changed since Jane McManus wrote this:

No women call NFL, Major League Baseball or NHL games. The NBA has one female official, Violet Palmer. The elite levels of professional and Olympic soccer are opening their doors to women, with the majority of the opportunities coming in the women’s game.

Being a ref is a tough job for anyone. A common cliché about refs, which I think is pretty true, is that the best refs are the least noticed ones. This is because fans usually only remark on a ref when they feel he or she has made a bad call. Violet Palmer has done it for seventeen years and has been thoroughly unremarkable for all the best reasons. Women, gay people, and all lovers of equality should be proud of her.

Becky Hammon

Becky Hammon has had an interesting career. Despite having been a star at her college, Colorado State University, she was not drafted by any WNBA team. Instead, she was signed as a free-agent by the New York Liberty where she became a solid player. That was 1999. Since then, she’s played professional basketball in one league or another for the past 15 years. She became mildly notorious in 2008 when, frustrated by not being invited to join the U.S. Olympic program, she became a naturalized Russian citizen and joined their team. This is slightly less crazy than it might seem at first. Like in some other women’s sports, while the most competitive league in the world may be in the United States, the salaries are significantly higher elsewhere. Many women who play in the United States also play professionally elsewhere for part of the year. Russia was a common destination for many top female players during the late 2000s. If you’re curious about the lifestyle, I dug up a great article from a few years back by Jim Caple that profiles a few top American players in Russia. For the past seven years she’s played point guard for the San Antonio Silver Stars.

Yesterday news broke that she was retiring from the WNBA to become Assistant Coach for the San Antonio Spurs, the men’s professional basketball team in San Antonio and reigning NBA Champions. Any major hire that the Spurs make would make news but this made big news because Hammon will be the first female Assistant Coach in NBA history. Hammon is already familiar with the Spurs and they are familiar with her. While rehabbing a major knee injury last year, she spent a lot of time at Spurs practices with the blessing and mentorship of long-time Spurs coach Gregg Popovich. According to Andrew Keh in this New York Times article, Hammon called that time an “internship.” She must have impressed because Popovich not only hired her but covered her with praise (effusive praise for the normally taciturn Popovich,) saying that he is “confident her basketball I.Q., work ethic and interpersonal skills will be a great benefit to the Spurs.”

The best part of this is that just because the Spurs did this, the rest of the league is waking up this morning not only respecting Hammon’s hiring but frankly scared of it. The Spurs have done such a wonderful job over the past twenty years and have developed such a reputation for finding talent where other teams miss it that I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the WNBA ranks were thoroughly scoured for other coaching talent in the next year. That’s a good thing.

What is a Conference in Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a conference in sports? What makes a conference a conference? And why is it called a conference?

Thanks,
Erik

— — —

Dear Erik,

Thanks for your question. A conference is a collection of teams that play more against each other than they do against the other teams in their sport. As you’ll see, conferences have various histories and meanings in different sports. In some sports conferences are defined geographically. In some they are the remnants of history. In some sports the conferences are actually pseudo competitive bodies themselves and in other sports they are cooperating divisions within a single organization. Conferences vary in importance and independence from sport to sport. Before we get into the differences, let’s start with some general truths about conferences that apply across (almost) all sports.

Teams within a conference play more games against each other than against the other teams in their sport. It varies by league and by sport. In the NHL, for example, teams play at least three times per season against every other team in their conference but only twice against teams from the other conference. In Major League Baseball teams only play 20 of 162 games against teams from the other conference.

Conferences crown conference champions in all sports. In many leagues like the NFL, NBA, and MLB, playoff brackets are organized by conference. Teams in the AFC (one of the NFL conferences) only play teams from the AFC in the playoffs until the Super Bowl. So, the conference champion is basically the winner of the semi-final game. In other sports, mostly college sports, the conferences only really have meaning during the regular season, so conferences have different ways of deciding a champion. Depending on the sport and conference, there may be a conference tournament at the end of the regular season or a single championship game between the two teams with the best records in the conference. In some conferences, like Ivy League basketball, the champion is just the team with the best record in games against other teams in the Ivy League.

What Sports Have Geographically Defined Conferences?

A geographic division of teams is perhaps the most sensible way of defining a conference. Since teams within a conference play more games against each other than against teams outside of their conference, organizing geographically saves money, time, and wear and tear on the players by reducing the overall travel time during a season. The NBA and NHL are organized in this way. Both leagues have an Eastern and a Western Conference and both stay reasonably true to geographic accuracy. The NBA has a couple borderline assignments with Memphis and New Orleans in the West and Chicago and Milwaukee in the East. The NHL recently realigned its conferences, in part to fix some long-standing issues with geography like Detroit being in the West. Geographic conferences seem logical because they simplify operations for the teams within them. Many college conferences began geographically but as we’ll see later, that’s no longer their defining characteristic or driving force.

What Sports Have Historically Defined Conferences?

It’s easy to think about the sporting landscape as a set of neat monopolies. The NFL rules football, the NBA, basketball, the MLB, baseball, and the NHL, hockey. It wasn’t always that simple. Most of these professional leagues are the product of intense competition between leagues and only became supreme after either beating or joining their rival. The NFL was formed by the merger between two competitive leagues, the traditional NFC and the upstart AFC. The NBA beat out its biggest rival, the ABA, in 1976 but took many ideas from it, like the three-point line but alas not the famous ABA multi-colored ball. Believe it or not, Major League Baseball was not a single entity until 2000! Before then its two conferences (still called “leagues” because of their history as separate entities but pretty much, they are conferences,) the National League and the American League were independent entities.

Two leagues, Major League Baseball and the National Football League continue to have conferences defined by their competitive history. In baseball, the American League and National League each have teams across the entire country, often even in the same city like the New York Yankees (AL) and Mets (NL), Chicago with its White Sox (AL) and Cubs (NL) and Los Angeles/Anaheim with the Angels (AL) and Dodgers (NL). The NFL has similarly kept its historic leagues, the AFC or American Football Conference and NFC or National Football Conference. Each NFL Conference is broken up into three geographic divisions, East, Central, and West, but they all play more against the teams in their conference, even far away, than the teams close by but in the other conference. In the NFL the two conferences play under exactly the same rules but in baseball there are still some major historic differences in how the game is played, most significantly that pitchers have to also bat in the National League but are allowed to be replaced by a designated hitter in the American League.

What Sports Have Conferences that are Competitive?

So far we’ve looked at geographic and historically defined conferences. It’s clear that geographic conferences don’t compete against each other — they are part of the same entity. You can imagine that because of their history, the conferences in the NFL and MLB may be a little competitive with each other, like brothers or sisters. There are still some conferences though where competition against other conferences is their key driving force. These conferences are largely found in college sports.

Most college conferences have geographic names — the Big East, the South-Eastern Conference (SEC), the Pacific Athletic Conference (PAC 12), the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Sun Belt, and the Mountain West. When they formed, they formed for all the reasons we discussed above in the geographic section but also to take advantage of financial arrangements that could only be made together, most importantly television contracts. As the money has gotten bigger, especially in college football, the competition between conferences for the best teams and the most lucrative contracts has become incredibly intense. In recent years, you’ve seen conferences poach teams from one another in a race to provide television viewers with the most competitive leagues to follow and therefore generate gobs of profit. This scattered the geographic nature of these conferences so that a map showing which teams are in which conferences now looks like a patchwork quilt.

Like it did with the ABA and NBA, the NFC and AFC, and the NL and AL, my guess is that this competition between conferences in college sports will resolve itself into some more stable league form. No one knows when this will happen but my guess is that it will be in the next ten or fifteen years. I guess we’ll have to stay tuned.

Thanks for asking about conferences,
Ezra Fischer

How a Basketball Team is Like Inigo Montoya

Spurs Heat — Will the Spurs take their revenge on the Heat this year?

The San Antonio Spurs are like Inigo Montoya three-quarters of the way through the Princess Bride. I know what you’re thinking… have I finally and forever lost my mind? The Spurs are an NBA basketball team and Inigo Montoya is a fictional Spanish sword-fighter. You are technically correct but bear with me and I’ll tell you why they are similar.

In the Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya is single-mindedly obsessed with finding the man who killed his father and defeating him. The death of his father at the hands of a distinctive, six-fingered man, so haunted and infuriated Montoya that he trained harder and smarter than anyone and became one of the greatest fencers in the world. So armed, he pursued his enemy with unequalled intensity and focus until he could say to him, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Last year, the San Antonio Spurs faced the Miami Heat in the NBA Finals. The Finals are a best four-out-of-seven series and after five games the Spurs led 3-2. They needed to win only one more game to win the championship. In the sixth game, they led by five points with 28 seconds left in the game. They were so close to winning the finals that the rope used to keep spectators off the court had already been deployed. Then the unthinkable (or at least the very unlikely) happened and the Heat came from behind to win in overtime. In game seven, the Spurs were behind by only two points with less than a minute. They had the ball. Then the unthinkable happened again. Tim Duncan, one of the greatest and most reliable players of all time, missed a shot he’s made a thousand times. Watch the video. Pay close attention to Duncan’s reaction a few seconds after missing the shot and then again a few seconds after that when the Heat call time-out. If there’s a sports equivalent of witnessing your father being murdered, it’s what happened to the Spurs last year in the finals against the Heat.

This year, instead of under-playing the factor of revenge, as teams often do following losses, the Spurs this year have been single-minded and open about their goal — to get back to the finals and beat the Heat. It’s almost as if they’ve been repeating at every practice, during every game, and at every press-conference, “We are the San Antonio Spurs, you beat us in the Finals. Prepare to be defeated.”

We’re almost there. The Heat are up three games to one against the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference finals and the Spurs are up two games to one against the Oklahoma City Thunder. We still have a little ways to go but if the Spurs make it to play the Heat in the finals, my money (or at least my heart,) is on Montoya to beat the six-fingered man one last time.

Cue Cards 6-28-13: NBA Draft and Trade

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Sport: Basketball
Teams: All of them
When: Thursday night, 6-27-13
Context: The NBA Draft (for more detailed context, click here or here)
Result: 60 young men now have high paying jobs
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

The first pick. After weeks of discussing whether the first overall player selected was going to be Nerlens Noel or Alex Len or maybe Victor Oladipo, the Clevelend Cavaliers instead picked a guy named Anthony Bennett from UNLV.
Things didn’t get less strange after that. Often drafts are pretty predictable — not this one, it was full of surprises all the way through.
Most people will be talking about the team they root for and who they picked or didn’t pick. Let them do this — no one really knows anything at this point about how well these choices will turn out although everyone will have an opinion.

What’s Next: Now that the draft is done, trades and free-agent signings will rule the NBA landscape.

Sport: Basketball
Teams: Boston Celtics and Brooklyn Nets
When: Thursday, 6-23-13
Context: A trade!
Result: The Brooklyn Nets trade Kris Humphries, Gerald Wallace, a signed-and-traded Keith Bogans, Reggie Evans, Kris Joseph, three first-round picks (2014, 2016, 2018), and the right to swap picks in 2017 to the Boston Celtics for Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Jason Terry.
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

Now it’s really the end of the Big Three era in Boston. After trading their coach on Sunday, the Celtics continue to dismantle the team they’ve had for the last few years. Paul Pierce in particular had been a Celtic his entire career since being drafted in 1998!
Who “won” the trade. Like the draft, it really won’t be clear which team got the better side of this trade for a long time (many years considering we won’t know who the Celtics will draft with all those future draft picks) but that won’t stop any fan from having a strong opinion on one side or another.
The crazy Russian — Nets owner Michael Prokhorov is known to be an eccentric Russian billionaire willing to spend gobs of money to win. He just put his money where his mouth is. The NBA has a “luxury tax rule” that if the amount a team is paying in player salaries exceeds a certain figure, they have to pay the league an equal amount over that limit. That money is then distributed to all the teams whose payroll’s are under the figure (called a salary cap.) The Nets just committed to being way over the salary cap for the next couple years.

Why is the NBA Draft a Big Deal?

Dear Sports Fan,

I know the draft has been televised before but I don’t remember hearing about it as much – has it always been this big a deal?

Thanks,
Terry

CSF-NBADraft2011 — The NBA draft is quite a spectacle

— — —

Dear Terry,

Drafts have become a much bigger spectacle in recent years, particularly in the NFL and NBA – there’s no doubt about it. But for die- hard fans they’ve always been a critical part of the off-season.

That’s because, for lack of a better phrase, it gives the losers hope. Being a fan of a bad team can be an incredibly frustrating experience. Once the season starts it becomes fairly easy to see who the contenders are and fans of other teams have to find other things to get excited about. Before the season starts, though, everyone has hope. That hope may seem completely untethered from reality and can come off as desperate, where fans wildly overestimate the potential of players (and coaches!) who have never amounted to anything in their careers. But before a single game is played to prove them otherwise, long-suffering fans psyche themselves up for every season by convincing themselves that SOMETHING that happened in the off-season will make the next season different.

The draft is perhaps the greatest and cruelest purveyor of off-season hope. Since the worst teams generally have the best picks, they have the best chance of picking a player who might single-handedly turn their franchise around – witness the success last year of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts and Washington Redskin led by rookie quarterbacks Andrew Luck or Robert Griffin III; or, the sustained success of the NBA’s Oklahoma Thunder after they drafted Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook.

BUT – and this is a significant but – drafting players is the ultimate hit or miss process. Despite all the time and money teams spend getting to know these players, ultimately there is no real way to tell how they will perform at the next level. Witness Greg Oden, a “can’t miss” center who was drafted first the same year Kevin Durant was drafted second. Oden turned into a complete bust, largely due to the fact that his knees proved shakier than the Greek economy. For every Luck or RGIII in the NFL there are a dozen quarterbacks drafted and proclaimed a team’s savior who don’t pan out – the Cleveland Browns have been victimized by this repeatedly, which is why Browns fans are some of the saddest, if most dedicated, fans in the world.

Even for the oft-burned Browns fans, though, the draft represents hope and is one of the highlights of the off-season. Still, they have become bigger spectacles in recent years. This is primarily because the leagues have become much more focused on sustaining attention on their brand in the off-season – essentially trying to turn their part-time sport into a year-round commodity. Turning the draft into a televised spectacle is a natural part of that evolution. It may not seem like compelling TV but by incorporating clips packages and highlights of previous action and interviews with coaches and other players networks (ESPN) have managed to create a passable product that can help keep a sport relevant in the off-season.

Thanks for the question,
Dean Russell Bell