Where the NBA offseason meets entertainment
It’s that time of the year again for NBA fans. The NBA Finals are over, the draft has come and gone, and the preseason looks about a million miles away. But as the need for stimulation to distract the average adult from the chaos at home and abroad is at an all-time high, many in the world of NBA information dissemination have taken to the bombastic art of predicting blockbuster trade scenarios from their various digital platforms, almost relentlessly.
Occasionally, they’ll utilize some scrap of factual data to support their hair-brained idea, such as a misconstrued sound bite from a press conference, or something which might assist in constructing believability in whatever distracting nonsense is being unveiled as food for your thought. More often than not, though, the trade proposals in question are presented with little to no evidential proof. These scenarios are meant as flights of fancy, not to be taken with seriousness or to be attributed to any honest workmanship. They’re typically accompanied by a few slapdash paragraphs that essentially amount to: “If this actually happened… that would be, like, totally crazy to think about!”
It amounts to a hard pull from a sugary Big Gulp when you’re stuck in your cubicle. It’s a little sad, but as your brain has been trained to crave endorphin shots every half hour, you embrace the sugar high and the brain freeze. If I’m letting a seemingly harmless thing get under my skin, it could be due to the fact that it seems that their sheer numbers have increased exponentially this offseason. I can’t scroll through team news without being confronted with the bait of some hypothetical situation that would blow the roof off of the league, something you’d hate to be the last person to know about, installing in your psyche a need to check in on things more and more frequently, like any good investor would. Maybe there are other reasons for this new phenomenon of constant trade speculation and “proposals” aside from boredom and the sickly condition we find ourselves in thanks to the 24/7 news cycle and smartphones.
The term blockbuster is applied to trades in the sports world when they involve high-profile, very wealthy athletes shuffling passed each other on their way to different franchises in different US cities, often completely reimagining the style of play the respective ball clubs have been known for as a result. Notwithstanding the casual apathy that picture is drawn with, these large scale asset swaps can truly change the course of a franchise, and (more importantly) change the course of a league itself, showing that the only thing that’s predetermined here is change (and theater).
The NBA is, after all, not just for the athletes who compete in its games. The fan is unquestionably just as important to the league as the players are. Without the fan, there is no money to be made on the enterprise. So when ratings drop due to various factors, such as changes in viewing habits or due to the existence of other kinds of entertainment, which are immediately discoverable in every direction at every moment, the marketing team has to consider how to best re-engage their audience. And when there’s no action to watch on TV because the season has ended and the players get to blow their millions for a few months instead of playing games every night, something has to be done to keep people interested in the interim.
Now that we’re well into the era of players forcing trades, as well as the era of television sports analysts waxing hyperbolic on the importance of their own personal opinions, it has begun to feel as though the league is following in the well-defined footsteps of professional wrestling. Lately, it’s gotten to the point that major trades are turning the league into a bit of a sideshow, with conspiracy theories abounding in the wake of questionable agendas.
It’s obvious that the league itself has only aided the constant, nervous expectation of these major shifts in team personnel. In the end, it’s all about generating money for the very wealthy, often at the expense of the bored, which isn’t surprising in any way, but when it goes so far as to disrupt the heretofore fixture of team-loyalty, it suddenly feels that to be a fan of an NBA team requires a greater willingness to have your intelligence insulted than was ever previously needed.
What does that have to do with hypothetical trades? Ever since LeBron James forced his way to the Miami Heat, the NBA has been mostly about forming super teams. It’s all about the Big 3 in today’s game. That’s just how things have evolved. To a younger fan, that’s just the fabric of the reality that we live in. Major blockbuster trades have become the rule, rather than the exception. It’s part of what drives the entertainment. Like everything else, there’s no longer need for any patience here. Today’s losers will always have a chance of being tomorrow’s winners, and now we have hypothetical trade proposals to constantly reinforce the fluidity of that dichotomy. It’s the offseason. There has to be something to talk about, after all.