I think Wilson Chandler and JR Smith were the most noteworthy guys who did that. And the Chinese basketball season ends in March, so that’s before the NBA playoffs.
Hm. The pre- and post-all-star records look like they could be the lazy man’s version.
So I looked at the pre-All-star standings (which is give or take 50 games into the season) back to the 2001-2002 season, and not surprisingly no team that made the conference finals would have missed the playoffs with that cutoff.
I understand that. The point here though is that when you get up and say fuck-it I’m going to Italy to play it comes across, to me any way, as fuck you fans I’m not committed to working to a deal. I’m going to go get paid!
It is their right but it definitely paints a shitty picture of the players when they walk away from the table and go play elsewhere.
That’s not the message, it’s your (apparently) preconceived opinion. The players aren’t the ones sitting at the table negotiating the contract. In any case Kobe’s contract in Italy and Deron Williams in Turkey are part of the negotiation anyway: it’s the players saying to the owners ‘if you don’t give us a good deal, we’ll get our money elsewhere and you’ll get nothing.’
The players aren’t getting up and leaving, it’s a lockout.
The players have signed contracts to play for their respective teams, for an agreed to amount of money, and the teams are refusing to open their doors to allow the games to happen.
Some of the players have opportunities to play for other teams while their NBA franchise refuses to do business. While I don’t buy the “My family’s gotta eat” card, I’m not going to begrudge someone a business opportunity, just because their favored business partner is deciding to shut down for a while.
I’m glad they’re going overseas to play. Hopefully they’ll stay in shape and maybe, just maybe even learn a thing or two. Who knows, it could result in an improved NBA when it does return.
Also, I don’t know the details of J.R. Smith’s contract, but I do know that he has said he’ll come back when the lockout is over.
It means a good number of people don’t care, including me. I wouldn’t even discourage dropping the current players’ contracts and renegotiating them completely. I did one search online for the phrase, Who Cares about the NBA?. There are tens of articles from Toronto to Dallas asking the same question as the OP.
So, I have to agree that there’s quite a lack of interest in basketball in America. This lockout just makes that fact very visible. Jeff Van Gundy is just one person who has already said as much on ESPN (an article you can find with the above search). And people seem to be quick to replace this “entertainment” with other alternatives. Here’s hoping it’s a good book for most.
I’m sure some people don’t care. That’s obvious. Not everyone is a basketball fan.
That proves nothing except that there are column inches out there that needed filling. I’m not surprised some people aren’t interested in the lockout. That doesn’t prove the NBA’s popularity is waning or that people don’t care about basketball.
I didn’t realize this was a court of law. Proof is required? I just showed you what the public, the news and sportswriters are talking about. Other than the NBA fanatics, most people don’t care what happens to tne NBA. But thanks for taking the three minutes to think about it.
I think the reaction to the NBA lockout shows something… but not necessarily anything about popularity.
We can probably agree that the NFL is more popular than MLB, but I believe the reaction to an MLB lockout, missed games, etc, would be far more angry and long lasting than to an NFL lockout.
My guess is NBA fans are mostly more casual than MLB fans and care less about the regular season (because the huge playoffs devalues it).
I think this is probably true.
For many reasons, baseball feels more important, particularly to the older sportwriters that generate the type of media storm that we are talking about. Canceling the World Series was a travesty orders of magnitude greater than canceling the NBA Playoffs would be, at least in their minds (and mine, to be honest).
It seems like (and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) we’re past the era of strikes and into the era of lockouts. Fortunately, the damage done by missing the beginning of the season pales in comparison to missing the end of the season.
With the current labor climate, I can’t see players willingly giving up paychecks when their labor deals are quite good for them. Hopefully this continues in the future.
If you do a search online for the phrase “Who cares about home-brewing clubs,” you will get zero results. This is because lots of people actually don’t care about home-brewing clubs. What you’ve shown is that lots of people hate the NBA and don’t want other people to care, which is not the same as not caring. For instance, you signed up to talk about how much people don’t care about the NBA, which could be a coincidence, but probably isn’t.
A higher percentage of people definitely seem to hate the NBA than other leagues, and would take a lot of pleasure from the thread title being accurate, but that’s a different thing.
No, you said “tens” of writers are asking who cares about the NBA as if that means something. It’s like the OP saying nobody cares about the lockout. The OP doesn’t care, but that doesn’t say anything about other people. The NBA is, objectively, pretty large and popular. Saying that none of its fans care if it goes away is objectively silly.
Thank you for sharing, but that’s not exactly a revelation. Nobody claimed that the whole world is waiting with breathless anticipation for the lockout to end. Most of the people who care what happens are basketball fans - also not a surprise. Not all hard core fanatics, but at at least casual fans. The OP asked if the league’s popularity has waned based on his assertion that “nobody cares” (which is sourced as well as your ‘tens of writers’). There hasn’t been much to support that. The NBA’s popularity seems to be going up because it’s become more international. $3.9 billion in revenue isn’t nothing, and game six of this year’s finals was the most-watched game six in 11 years.
And the fact that the Mavs/Heat game 6 was so watched had a lot to do with the Dirk vs. LeBron thing. If it was Kobe vs. LeBron, I think it would’ve been a different story altogether, and that right there is what a lot of people who are more or less indifferent to the NBA think about the NBA in general. There are most certainly ugly inferences that can be made from that, but I don’t want to go there, because it’s, well, ugly. The NBA chooses to market themselves this way, and they can just deal with it. I don’t really blame them; I wish more entities (political, in particular) would just say “fuck a bunch of cranky old white men”.
I don’t think that’s true. The series was watched because the Heat were a big deal. People were going to watch them in the finals against anybody. Plenty of people watched the Lakers-Celtics finals the last few seasons, and the closest thing to a white star player on either of those teams is Pau Gasol.
Maybe. But I sensed a visceral reaction among some more casual white, non-urbanite fans that Dirk was their LeBron-the-big-bad-uppity-negro-slaying hero. Like I said, I thought it was ugly. I’m not a big fan of the NBA or LeBron, but I felt weird about that stuff.
I think those issues are complicated and I’m not really inclined to make inferences into the reasons people rooted against LeBron because there were so many different reasons. I do think that people who say ‘nobody cares about the NBA’ are highly likely to be older white guys.
Yeah; that’s true. I’m kind of hitting that demo, myself, but I don’t like it. I don’t want to be like that, but I think all the earhair and arthritis are interfering with my efforts. 