The Work of the NBA's Good Old Days
Pro basketball ain't like it used to be (and it never was)
A couple months ago, I recorded an episode of the Ashbrook Center’s American Idea podcast that was released yesterday.1 This is a great show in large part because Professor Jeffrey Sikkenga is a great host and interlocutor, meaning the discussion flows like water rather than getting dammed up on various irrelevant things like braindead culture-wars concerns. Watch it here:
My general critique of the NBA — as someone who has played many sports but never basketball, not even once, but who watched it carefully for many years — is that it is different than it was, heavily influenced by data analytics in terms of coaching and global financial flows in terms of funding, and not the rough-and-tumble sport it was until the culmination of the fascinating “Malice at the Palace” incident served as a coda to its Long Age of Violence. I freely concede that today’s players are much more skilled and better conditioned, and recognize that it is totally justifiable to prefer this iteration of the sport, but it isn’t for me.2
Here’s the full text of the essay that occasioned this interview, which first appeared at RealClear Books and has only been lightly edited for reuse here:
The big power forwards and centers, wide as canyons in the shoulders and waist, used to bludgeon each other in the post like elephant seals. That was basketball once — Charles Barkley backing down defenders like a bulldozer, Shaquille O'Neal shattering backboards, Oliver Miller eating his way through the league but still getting all the easy post buckets. Now DJ Burns plays in Korea and Kenny Lofton Jr. bounces between teams, simultaneously too short and too hefty for a game that's become addicted to the three-point line.
The numbers tell the story in red ink. NBA ratings have plunged 48% since 2012, down another 28% on ESPN just this year. Teams averaged 93.7 points in 2004, the last season defenders could place and keep their hands on offensive players. The scoring climbed after that — 97.2 points the next year, then triple digits by 2009. The NBA’s higher-ups were hungry for a cleaner game, a faster game, a supposedly more fan-friendly game. Commissioner David Stern and his hand-picked successor Adam Silver got what they wanted.
But the pair of bloodless technocrats lost something too, something unlovely but authentic. There was beauty in the ugliness once — the sweat-soaked jerseys, the bodies colliding in the paint, the pure physics of mass against mass. "Malice at the Palace" was the turning point, that night in Detroit when Indiana Pacers Ron Artest and Stephen Jackson went into the stands to teach the fans a lesson and the league decided it needed to change if it wanted to preserve that fanbase. No more hand-checking. No more bullying in the post. No more chaos. Before that, you had Latrell Sprewell choking P.J. Carlesimo at practice, Charles Oakley clearing out entire teams, statutory rapist Anthony Mason posting triple doubles as he mean mugged his way through Madison Square Garden, and ball-hogging savant Allen Iverson lamenting that he had to practice at all in preparation for willing his underdog teams to victory.
Take poor D.J. Burns, all 300 pounds of him. He dominated the NCAA tournament last year, backing down defenders like the ghost of Barkley obtained for pennies on the dollar from Temu. The Cleveland Cavaliers gave him a summer league shot but that was it. Now he's with the Goyang Sono Skygunners, too tubby for today's NBA but just right for the version of yesterday's game still played in Asia. In March 2024, he hit the only three-pointer of his college career in the ACC Championship. The crowd went wild because they knew — this wasn't supposed to happen anymore.
Kenneth Lofton Jr. — no relation to the Cleveland Indians’ all-time great center fielder, himself snubbed by the NBA after a fine career at Arizona — suffered an even worse fate. He's got Barkley's build and Zach Randolph's footwork, but four NBA teams have already waived him. He averaged 25 points in the G League, bullying defenders like it was 1993. The analytics guys don't want a low-efficiency player like that anymore. They want three-pointers, spacing, and transition baskets. In his first NBA start, Lofton dropped 42 points and 14 rebounds. They still sent him away.
The NBA thinks it's protecting the product. Technical fouls for staredowns, ejections for emotions, and all the left-wing politics you can eat. They give out techs like Halloween candy — Giannis Antetokounmpo gets one for looking at Al Horford wrong, Jokic gets tossed for nothing at all. The refs have more highlights than the rookies, more game impact than the All-NBA first team. Even the League Pass is a maze of blackouts and restrictions, making fans jump through hoops just to watch their home team.
Want more? Paul George has posted more podcast episodes than games played in 2024. Zion Williamson — once my great hope for a genuine throwback star, a massive bruiser in the Shawn Kemp mold — talks about how hard it is to diet with millions in the bank and nagging injuries constantly sapping his Bunyanesque strength. The players treat the league like a stepping stone to their guaranteed contracts, their brand, their social media, their next venture. Understandable in a mercenary, money-obsessed world like ours, but it means the passion's gone AWOL with the post moves.
Today's game is optimized for gambling and analytics. The three-point line might as well be a slot machine. Pull the lever enough times and you'll hit the jackpot. There's no room for a 300-pound post artist like Al Jefferson or Jahlil Okafor anymore. No space for the fat man's sumo ballet in the paint. The referees will blow the whistle if someone flexes after a dunk. There’s no space for tough guys in the game if you’re getting teed up for being human, all too human on a basketball court.
I genuinely thought Zion could bring it back. He had Karl Malone’s build and Julius Erving's hops. But he can't stay healthy, another casualty of a game that's become too fast, too lean, too predictable. The fun died somewhere between the Palace and the analytics revolution. His story reads like a cautionary tale — even the new Barkley can't survive in a league that's engineered all the Barkleys out of existence.
A single upload of the Conor McGregor-Floyd Mayweather press conference in 2017 has 8.4 million views on YouTube. By contrast, the 2020 NBA Finals, played inside the instantly memory-holed COVID-19 bubble, barely managed 7.7 million a game. People want drama and rivalry, something real, even in the context of a spectacle as silly as McGregor-Mayweather. Instead, they get Kevin Durant switching teams like changing shirts, LeBron James building superteams then abandoning them, players who are friends off the court trying to manufacture intensity on it.
Look, the NBA got what it wanted — a clean, efficient product. But cleanliness isn't always what the fans are hungry for. Sometimes they want to see Michael Jordan and Joe Dumars beating the hell out of whoever they’re defending. Sometimes they want to see Boris Diaw waddling down the court, dropping no-look passes like a man half his size. Sometimes they want basketball that feels more like life — messy, physical, human.
Watch Kenneth Lofton Jr. fill the box score in his Shanghai Sharks highlights. Watch DJ Burns methodically dunking on some hapless Korean center who's never seen a wide load like him. That's what basketball used to be, before the stat geeks and the gambling apps and the three-point revolution turned it into a math problem. That's what we lost when we decided the game needed to be saved from itself. The ratings say we've lost our taste for pro hoops. But maybe we just can’t recognize what we’re watching.
And since you’re still here, why don’t you read my long-paywalled Washington Examiner review of Pirates legend — now Hall of Famer, blessedly — Dave Parker’s autobiography? It’s as much critique of advanced analysis3 as discussion of a book I thoroughly enjoyed.
Dave “Cobra” Parker, the once-in-a-generation right fielder for the multiracial “We Are Family” Pittsburgh Pirates of the 1970s, played baseball with reckless abandon. In a close play at the plate, he collided with Mets catcher and former Colorado University football standout John Stearns and wound up with a fractured jaw and cheekbone — then returned to the plate first in a goalie mask and later in a modified football helmet. Cursed with balky knees, he used a rocket arm to hold base runners close. And he prided himself on his proficiency as a first-pitch fastball hitter, swinging away and rarely working deep into the count during a career in which nearly a quarter of his walks were intentional.
Parker was a two-time batting champ, league MVP in 1978, a World Series champion in 1979, and a notorious local celebrity, a king of Pittsburgh’s disco scene who wound up embroiled in Major League Baseball’s cocaine trials during the early 1980s. The one thing he wasn’t, at least by modern statistical standards, was an inarguably great player. Based on conventional metrics, Parker finished his career with borderline Hall of Fame credentials: 2,712 hits, a .290 batting average, and 339 home runs. In spite of that, he accounted for only 40 “Wins Above Replacement”; a typical Hall of Fame right fielder has delivered 72.1.
Parker addressed this discrepancy between the traditional “counting stats” and advanced analytics in his recent autobiography, Cobra: A Life of Baseball and Brotherhood. “The Pirates taught a batting philosophy focused on getting the run home,” he wrote, explaining why the franchise ranked among the bottom of the National League in walks during a decade in which they won two World Series and appeared in six National League Championship Series. “You hear a lot today about on-base percentage, folks rolling their eyes at small ball … but we were so talented, we had such elite, legendary playing ability, that we didn’t care about walks.”
Parker, like many athletes of his generation, played within the context of the advice coaches gave him — “I was told to drive brothers in, from the earliest age, and I did it just about as good as anyone” — but found within those then-looser parameters a way of stamping the game with that je ne sais quoi that distinguished a star professional athlete from his teammates and rivals. Even so, Parker acknowledged that, had he played in a later era, he would’ve followed the statistical revolution that began with the Moneyball Oakland Athletics of the early 2000s and accelerated right up to the present. “If y’all wanted me to walk, I would’ve walked,” he continued. “You think Scoop [star batsman Al Oliver] would’ve sneered at a damn regression analysis if he heard a way to get ten more hits?”
Therein lies the rub. Professional athletes of all stripes, Parker included, will do whatever it takes to maximize their chances of winning, even if it means utilizing a narrow range of acceptable approaches to their games. Baseball has seen enough advances in the use of statistical analysis to have launched a half-dozen well-regarded books, including one that covers the Pirates’ use of pitch framing and shrewd defensive shifts to return briefly to relevance during an unexpected three-year playoff run between 2013 and 2015.
Basketball now occupies a similarly optimized place, with the post-“hand check era” that began after the 2003-2004 season reducing defensive aggression by barring defenders from placing and holding their hand or hands on an opposing player away from the basket. With this change in place, the aggressive defense that characterized the heyday of Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan evanesced, and a series of enterprising coaches and general managers exploited lookalike high-percentage offenses built around three-point shots, slam dunks, and little else in between. Pro football, with quarterbacks and receivers now protected against the defensive interference that prematurely ended many careers in the 1970s and 1980s, has evolved into a pass-heavy affair that 44-year-old Tom Brady can continue to dominate.
Tennis, arguably the most popular of the mano a mano sports, has gone from a sport ruled by bandy-legged little men with idiosyncratic styles — think Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe — to one dominated by tennis academy-trained Novak Djokovic, as close to a lab-grown “perfect player” as any in the game’s storied history. Even mixed martial arts, a far less mainstream one-on-one sport once known for its “freak show” fights, has settled on a more or less tedious winning philosophy: straight punches thrown at distance supplemented by copious kicks to the opponent’s legs and well-timed sprawling and grappling against the cage to prevent takedowns.
Academics and former players have long lamented these changes. The revolution in management described first by James Burnham and later by Samuel Francis didn’t necessarily lead to greater managerial efficiency, only more layers of management. Allen Guttman’s 1978 book From Ritual to Record described how sports evolved from events primarily serving ceremonial or play functions to carefully recorded and controlled mass-media industries staggering under the weight of their recorded statistics. Christopher Lasch devoted a section in his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism to this “degradation” of sports, the ever-increasing commercialization and professionalization of which has led to sports becoming a “business subject to the same standards as any other.” The result is a sports “managerial apparatus” that “makes every effort to eliminate the risk and uncertainty” from its big-budget spectacles, culminating in “the demystification of sport, the assimilation of sport to show business.”
Lasch is right, insofar as much of show business has converged on a seemingly unbeatable PG-13 Marvel Cinematic Universe template of CGI action. Viewers get the finest of Hobson’s choices: You can watch any movie you want, as long as it’s an Avengers movie — the most agreeably middlebrow blockbuster that can be manufactured by committee under current circumstances. And sports spectators find themselves on the receiving end of a similar bargain: You can watch any sort of baseball game you want, as long as it involves innumerable walks, strikeouts, pitching changes, and home runs because this is the statistically safest route to success.
However, even in the midst of all this perfectly calibrated, lookalike action, one still encounters surprising moments. The most unusual story in baseball concerns Japanese import Shohei Ohtani, a 26-year-old Los Angeles Angels designated hitter and right-handed pitcher who will almost certainly remain the only player in league history to strike out 145 batters and hit 45 home runs — unless he goes against every statistical best practice and improves on those numbers next year.4 Gable Steveson, the 21-year-old enfant terrible of amateur wrestling, seized Olympic gold in freestyle wrestling for the United States using little more than extremely well-honed collegiate folkstyle methods. In so doing, he upended the conventional wisdom that held that even all-time collegiate greats such as Cael Sanderson needed to suffer a defeat or two in international competition before finally mastering the ostensibly faster, more fluid, and more technique-driven Olympic style.5
Stories such as Ohtani’s and Steveson’s remain capable of captivating an otherwise indifferent public largely tuned out to any of this spectacle save for occasional YouTube or TikTok highlights. Meanwhile, those of us fortunate enough to remember great athletes such as Dave Parker can count our lucky stars that they ran on their own two feet rather than walking at some staff statistician’s behest.
Not reading Erica Zendell’s awesome sports Substack yet? You should be.
Timed to coincide with the NBA Playoffs, which are underway.
Nor is it for my good friend, frequent co-author, and lifelong Pistons fan Ian Douglass, who grew up observing the greatest of all the violent teams doing on-court violence better than any teams before or since.
Which do indeed work — work too well, alas.
Since then, I’ve written lots more about Ohtani. Going in very early on that guy — and being a longtime fan of the NPB — paid dividends, much like immersing myself in sumo over the past several years.
Steveson’s recent NCAA tournament finals defeat, at age 25 and after attempts to “make it” in the NFL and WWE, was also appointment viewing.
I’m just here to say this one was jam-packed and that anyone who takes up your closing recommendation to visit my substack should not expect nuanced takes on basketball culture 😆—just a deep and peculiar knowledge of a weird sport suffering from similar “good old days” and “fan-friendliness, but at what cost?” problems.