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Spence seppy holidays to you as well. Appreciate you guys bringing me into the national lipos Ohio. That might be my favorite national song. So wow, good good call.
Look at that. Okay, that was just a blind guest by me.
I figured you'd like the National, but I did not know that was your your favorite song. So I'm glad
I knocked that one out of the park. All right, Howard, you know, I know you don't love the conversation about NBA ratings, let me say that right out of the gates, and I don't love it either, but you sent me a piece that also our buddy Andy Larson from the Tribune sat along as well, So just in fairness to put a little context on it, I thought the Sports Media Watch piece did a really good job of kind of digging underneath the service or surface, I should say,
to explain exactly why ratings are down with not just pro basketball, but linear ratings down with.
Pretty much all sports.
So I have given my take on this a couple of different times, so I just wanted to open up the space because we had this conversation a week ago, to kind of revisit it and put the proper context around it. What were your main takeaways from the Sports Media Watch piece.
Well, I mean primarily one that you listed, which is that you know, linear broadcast is just down in general, Now the NFL seems impervious saw these trends, right, So the NFL is the outlier, you can't compare to them, but hockey and college basketball, college football, some other sports that I think Sports Media Watch listed in its piece, which I encourage everybody to go to go look at on supports mediawatch dot com. But that's the broader context.
So there's a lot that's down And we've been grappling with these dynamics for the last five to ten years, ever since court cutting really became a thing and streaming came in and people started watching NBA games or anything for that matter, in so many different ways. And the media ecosystem is really just, you know, just so many different factions of it and so many different ways people
get their entertainment. And then there's also people who just watch maybe a quarter on League Pass or they you know, just watch highlights. So like the NBA can still be broadly popular without it showing up in strict old school Nielsen ratings. And that's not some wash it away or make excuses or say the NBA doesn't have some issues to grapple with. It's just to say that there's a
lot more contexts too. This The other thing that I thought was interesting, that I thought was really important in terms of analyzing the data is that people keep trotting out the down and excuse me, down fifty percent from a similar period in twenty twelve or whenever it was, or twenty eleven, and it was like literally like the season where the lockout had pushed the season start back and so suddenly everybody like the first month of the season was you know, Christmas going forward, and so it
was just a completely different context. So there's like there's some context stuff with ratings when people are trying to make these comparisons that don't work in a vacuum. And we're just in a different world now in twenty twenty four than we were in twenty twelve. So anyway, I do think that the NBA has some things to deal with. I don't think that it's a crisis.
Yeah, and certainly, I mean, and we can just move away from it because there's so many things to talk about with this conversation, but it has been discussed at nauseum. But one thing I will ask you is do you feel like the product is suffering? Do you feel like
the game is different? Do you feel like because one of the things I keep hearing, like the common threads if I read a piece or listen to a pod or whatever, is a lot of people do seem to believe that the game itself is different and quite frankly worse than it was once upon a time.
Is there anything there in your opinion?
No, I actually don't, and I will defend the game and the league on this count. The quality of play, the caliber, the skill level across the league has never been a high now. If you don't like things stylistically, with the three point shot being so prevalent, if you don't like certain aspects of the game today, that's a
taste thing. But for every person who doesn't like the proliferations of the three point shot and the disappearance of postplay, there's a whole bunch of other people who really love the pace of this game and the skill level and the movement. Because if you go back to what people start looking at as somehow this golden Age, a lot of the basketball in the nineties was brutal to watch because of the physicality, the over physicality, and this plotting
half court play and scores. In the sixties and seventies and that bled into the two thousands. All of this before the NBA changed up the hand checking rules and changed up the illegal defense rules. In the early two thousands, the game was in a really bad place.
Like it was.
It was dreadful, and it was eight standing on one side of the court on the weak side, and one guy try to take his man off the dribble on the other side. Because of the old illegal defense rules, you could just drag the entire defense to one side of the court and go ISO. It was awful. So the idea that somehow, oh too many three pointers and all this has made the game unwatchable. Folks, go back, go back and pull up some highlights from the nineties
and two thousands. Look at the scores, look at the style of play. It wasn't exactly the most aesthetically pleasing game.
Okay, one more thing, because I will offer this and this is me personally coming at it from my prism, and you know, I have a feeling you are going to scold me and put me in the corner here, Howard.
But I trust.
Is going to be your nineties nixt upbringing coming into play.
I believe well said.
And also you know a Utah Jazz team that I grew up with, John and Carl who played hard every night, shut up to play every night.
I do feel and I watch.
Okay, this is not coming from a place where I'm a highlight guy. I watch games. I watch games almost every single night, and in my opinion, the effort level every night isn't there the way that it used to be once upon a time.
Now.
I also don't want to be the old guy that's complaining about a sport and a league that I love based off of what it was once upon a time.
Because things changed.
Things evolved, mainly guaranteed contracts and guaranteed money, where once upon a time, believe it or not, players did have to play for paychecks.
They needed to be paid twice a month.
And now a lot of these guys could never work again and they'd be just fine. And I'm sure if I had a seventy million dollar guarantee this year, i'd I'd make fart noises into my mic, you know, for four hours sometimes if I didn't feel like working.
But I will offer that at times, it feels like the effort.
Level isn't there every night, and it does feel a little All Star Game ish at times, and if you don't care, I don't care.
I feel like I have heard a version of that in almost every era that I've been covering the league. Right, so my time covering the league starts in ninety seven, so that's twenty eight seasons now that I'm in the twenty eighth year, and I feel like this is a periodic complaint. And salaries were much less than the late nineties when I first started covering the league than they are now, So on the one hand, I feel like this is something that always comes up, and I think
there's always a spread in the NBA. Among the four hundred and fifty players. There are some guys who absolutely live and die with the game, who are passionate, who live and breed basketball, and that's all they care about, and they want to win badly every night, and they always bring it. And then there's a spectrum that goes down from there. And yes, there's always a certain number of guys who are there just because they were good enough to make it and they like the money and
the lifestyle and the wins and losses. Eh, who cares? I just you know, it's a living. I think that some versions. That's always been present, and I don't know that it's any more prevalent now than it was before. But to your point, I do. I think the money is so off the charts now that probably psychologically makes sense that it would be harder to maintain the same level of intensity or dedication. But like that hasn't stopped.
Like Steph Curry, you can never accuse Steph Curry of not trying, or Lebron James of not trying, or Kevin Durant is not trying. And for all that Kawhi Leonard's been hurt and out, when Kawhi Leonard plays, he plays his butt off. Now there are some other guys I think fall more to the category you're talking about, but I don't know that it's any more prevalent than it
used to be. I worry more when it's things like the All Star Game, right, like the reason we keep tweaking it and we got the new format announced this week, they keep tweaking it because I do think that's a place where the player's fame and wealth does come into play. They don't feel any obligation to play hard in that game the way their predecessors did. Because the league's in a great place. It just signed a TV deal worth
tens of billions of dollars. The players are all making half of that collectively, and I don't know that they feel the same obligation to play hard in an All Star Game, or the Stars decided to be in the Dunk Contest with the way that they used to instead we get, you know, end of bench guys. I do think it's having an impact on some of those things.
I don't think I've ever asked you this, because one of the takes that I've heard a lot from people who, you know, do believe that maybe the league needs to look at some things is shortening the regular season.
Are are you a proponent of that.
I've never had a real strong feeling about that one. I think that there's definitely a case to be made for it. I do think scarcity has value to it that if you had fewer games, they would all take on that much more importance and they would feel weightier. And when they feel weightier, just like in football, every game then has a definable stake to it. And I think that there's something too that whether that would help with all the load management and injury issues. I don't know.
There's a case that, well, you play sixty six games instead of eighty two, we'll just ratchet it down and the guys who were only playing sixty out of eighty two will now play forty out of sixty six. Like, I don't know, I don't know how that ends up actually playing out in reality. I just know that the league has been really resistant to the idea of shortening the season because everything is tied to that, and not just the history of the game and stats and records,
but the actual revenue. And you know, you'd like to think you could offset the loss of revenue of the games by just charging more for the games that you do play because there are fewer of them. But I don't know if that math actually works. I don't know if it's as easy as that. But there's a case, well, and.
You reference revenue streams, and one of the things that certainly people probably don't care about but also probably don't know about, is the international revenue streams that the NBA has that Pro football doesn't. I think kind of allows them to not turn a blind eye on maybe lack of consistent interest domestically. But there's a reason when Darryl
Morey tweeted out what he did. Everybody froze, and like, I tried to get information from a lot of NBA execs during that time, and I actually had a couple of conversations, but people were terrified to even utter the phrase, you know, China or whatever. But the you know, according to Sports Business Journal, the number one sport in the world is soccer and the number two sport in the world is basketball.
So is there.
Anything there as far as revenue streams generated from international interest that kind of allows them to, you know, accept what would be maybe a little bit of a decline in domestic interest, if that makes sense.
I get it, But I don't think so like that would that would suggest that they think it's that that US interest from North American interests somehow expendable as long as they've got this kind of like safety net of international revenue.
I don't.
I don't think it quite works that way. And I think that, you know, to the to the point of this whole China, you know debacle, like there's a reason that you know, despite all the morality conflicts, that they are there anyway, and there's a reason that losing that revenue you know, like it just shows you how validle those relationships can be. There the base is the US or the US in Canada, and so like they need
to nurture that obviously. So I don't I don't ever get the sense that they're feeling like, oh, we can, we can let it slide a little bit. I think it's important that they always have that that that passion for the game and that interest and sales and everything. Here, by the way, one of the things the other data points to note here real quick, before I forget if the game we're if the interest in the game, we're really ebbing that much, you would see it in attendance too.
And well, I'm sure there's always you know, there's always a handful of teams that just aren't that interesting and so they don't draw, or they're in smaller markets or whatever. But you know, the NBA keeps the sending attendance records the year after year, and so you know that now that's a that's a number, right, Like you don't you only need nineteen twenty thousand sol of the building. You need millions to generate ratings to make you competitive on TV.
But I think if a tenants started to creter, that's when they would really start to panic, because that would indicate that that interest is gone or interests is ebbing. And again it's the same thing with the social media stuff they do. Bunkers social media traffic, and that doesn't draw as much revenue and it doesn't show up in Nielsen ratings, but it is an indicator that the interest remains very, very high.
All right, moving off of it, and I do want to talk a little NBA Cup. Okay, So we saw the final in Vegas, Giannis and the Bucks win. The year after Lebron the Lakers win, and that's not nothing, you know, to of your biggest bride of stars NBA
Cup champs. Here's my beef with it, though, Howard, like, could we do something along the lines of a fan giveaway, Like if you're a Bucks fan and if your if your team advances to the NBA Cup semi finals to Vegas, can we do like, Hey, let's get five thousand Bucks fans there. You don't need all the revenue, so let's just give away tickets. Let's bring them to Vegas, Let's give them free accommodations.
Like it felt like a Super Bowl.
Crowd and all Star crowd, there was not a lot of enthusiasm, and I do think if the enthusiasm and atmosphere was a little bit more I don't know, final four March madness, it would add to the product.
So just give me your thoughts on that.
And also the dynamic of Jannis winning the year after Lebron did.
It's a great sign for the league that Jannis very clearly overtly wanted this badly. Right because, as I've said many times, and I say this to somebody who's not you know, I'm neither pro nor con the NBA Cup. As I've said many times, I'm skeptical, agnostic. It's fine, but I'm not that into it. I just I don't think it's that interesting. But it doesn't matter what I think. It matters whether the players care to win this thing. If they believe it has meaning, then it has meaning.
And Johannis, the way he went about it, the way he played, the way he celebrated winning it showed very clearly Yannis cares a lot about this thing. And then on the heels of that, if the players cares, then the fans will care. But yeah, the atmosphere in Vegas, and I watched from home as you did. I was not there, but it was very clear, and I've talked
to people who were there. It was like an All Star game where people are sitting on their hands that the energy level is not that high, and the semi finals on Saturday clearly were not sellouts, far short of it. They announced the sellout for the final, but I'm not sure if I believe it. And even if it were like it's just it's a neutral site, it would have felt far different if that game had been in Milwaukee
or in Oklahoma. And I do think that that's I don't know how big of a problem it is, but it's not great because it's all psychological, right, The game matters if we believe it matters. Okay, so Yannis acted like it mattered. Great, But if you don't have that roar of the crowd, if they're not reacting to every deep three or every incredible dunk or guy breaking another guy's ankles, it doesn't feel as intense because you don't
have the crowd to back it up. It was almost like watching some of the Bubble games during COVID or post COVID, when they were only allowing like arenas to be half full and you miss something. When you don't have that immediate crowd reaction, it makes it feel a little less important. And so I don't know how they fix that. I don't know, Like trying to do this in home markets is hard because you can't just tell
arenas to block off all these games across the league. Yeah, because you don't know who's going to be in it. It's hard. It's a puzzle.
Yeah, And that's one of the things.
I'm glad you said that at the end, because a couple of guests I have I've had to talk about this have mentioned that Dynamic and most arenas need the Dark Knights with pro basketball like we have hockey now, and they have a lot of concerts at the Delta Center.
So I'm not sure that that's the remedy. But like you, I'm not all that into it.
But this is the endeavor that the NBA has decided to take on to try to generate interests in the regular season. If we have this conversation in I don't know, ten years, are we talking about the NBA Cup Differently, I'm asking you to read the future now, Howard.
Yeah, I don't know. I don't think it's going anywhere, Like I do, think it's here to stay. The league has obviously invested a ton in the concept and the execution, and they now have Amazon lined up, you know, as their new partner starting next season, and Amazon will own this thing and they'll they'll you know, they'll broadcast it, and they're paying for it. So it's not going anywhere. The question just becomes more the logistics and the mechanics of it all. But ten years from now, yeah, I
think it's probably still around. But the question is more, you know, does it look and sound and feel the same as the structure the same? Do they need to tweak it along the way, and are we still buying into it right Like right now I'm sitting here going, hey, how great was it that Lebron That Giannis really went all out for it and that Lebron did a yur ago Like that's a great sign.
Those are great signs.
But what if next year we get two kind of Lacklusser teams and it starts to feel like something where they're doing it just because it's on the schedule or you know, you know what I mean, Like it there's no guarantee that this is going to feel as vital year after year. But if it does, then ten years from now we'll be talking about how this is now
just it's part of the landscape. It's it's become part of the institution, and you know, it's not a surprise or a mystery about whether or not people will care. And maybe after ten years people will truly care. Like right now, I still say I don't care that the Bucks won the Cup. It's nice that they did, but it doesn't it doesn't have any real intrinsic value to it. I don't have any you know, like the Lakers won
the Cup a year ago. Nobody cares. They just care that they didn't get anywhere in the playoffs, and that Lebron is at the end of his career and the Lakers are going nowhere, that that Cup is not gonna We're not gonna look back and say, you know what, before Lebron retired, at least he got that cup. I don't. I don't think that that's going to be a check mark on the resume. I don't. But maybe ten years from now the discussion is different, and I've changed my mind.
The only time will tell, all right, So you know, when it comes to this time of year, the deadline is coming gone where I think it's eighty seven percent of the league can now be traded it And so you hear a bunch of rumors about players that and there have been a couple of deals done.
You know, Dennis Shrudi goes to the Warriors.
But if Jimmy Butler has traded Howard, that is a guy and a player that could change things.
So what are you hearing as of.
Now with the potential of the Heat trading Jimmy Butler, And what do you think is the I guess the way I'll ask it is the destination if it happened, that could actually change the landscape of how this year goes.
There are any number of teams that if he go ends up there, it's going to change the landscape, right Like you know, forget for a moment that the Warriors looked like they forgot how to play basketball last night and absolutely just got their doors blown off. But you know, a couple of weeks ago, when the Warriors were within the top two or three in the West, you could argue that they were one Jimmy Butler away maybe from being an actual contender, and I tend to think that
that's still the case. I don't think that they're as cooked as they looked last night. But I think last night underscore is just how badly they need another all Star caliber player there, and that you know, the Dennis Shrewder acquisition is nice, and you know it was not a great debut for him, but Steph Curry needs somebody else toe lean on, and Jimmy Butler would be fantastic
for that. Will they heat actually get to the point where they decide to trade him, I mean, I think they're genuinely listening, and I think they're genuinely in a position where it makes sense to move on him, because you know, it's been five years, Butler's thirty five now. They balked at an extension over the summer. They did so for a reason, and he's potentially a free agent. He's got an option for next season, so he's potentially a free agent this summer, and he's certainly indicated that
he's going to explore free agency. So I think, if I had to guess, they do trade him before the trade deadline, but it's probably close to the trade deadline. Complicating all of this is that they're playing just well enough in a so so Eastern conference that they're six right now as we speak, even though they're only two games over five hundred. And you know, you have to decide you're gonna you're willing to pull the plug on
a playoff team or a potential playoff team. So maybe some of this will be determined by how did he play over the next you know, four to six weeks.
All right, Howard, before I say you loose, I'm contractually obligated to ask you a question about the Jazz.
Okay, So here's here's what I will ask you.
Uh, It's it's time to just simply acknowledge, at least in my opinion, and the data says it as well, that John Collins has played his best basketball of his career during this start of the season for the Jazz, and he played well enough and Atlanta to get paid. But you know, fifty to forty ninety, it's a real thing. He's eighteen points, he's nine boards, he's a couple of assists.
So it's only good news because now the Jazz have a situation where they could potentially move him because he's been showcased.
Or at the age of twenty seven. He's around for the long haul. Is it real? Is what we've seen real?
Or is it Shreif abdul Raheem with the Grizzlies twenty and twelve for a team that wins fifteen games? Like, would there be interest in him on the open market or maybe the Jazz found a surprise piece to the puzzle.
I love the Sharif reference. I so it's hard. It's hard, Like I don't know. I honestly, if I got five scouts on the line right now, I don't even know what they would tell me about how real it is, how tangible it is, whether it contributes to winning. It's so hard to assess some times a player like him that can up numbers. We saw it in Atlanta, and we saw it. We're seeing it again now. He's obviously a very good and skilled player, and he's right in
his prime. He does have a player option for next season at at you know, twenty six and a half million. That's not unmovable, but it's big enough that it could be semi challenging. Is there a good fit for him somewhere? I haven't really looked around the league to see, like, is there somebody who's a John Collins away or who could really use him maybe. I mean, I have no doubt that they'll be exploring that. I because to the
to the back half of your question. Yeah, I don't think you look at what he's doing right now and say, Okay, this is a guy who now we want for the long haul. I mean, it's it's it's hard enough trying to figure out if Lowry Markinen is there for the long haul. And I don't think that, you know, Lowry and Collins are the cleanest that fits in the first place together. So, as I've said many times, I'm not sure there's anybody on that roster that is absolutely there for the long haul.
Yeah, with you, Like I said, I'm contractually obligated.
All right. Is uh is Christmas to mainstream for you to celebrate or are you actually a holiday guy?
No, we will. We will observe in our in our own way, and I will probably watch way too many hours of basketball that day.
All right, my friend, We'll have a great one. Happy holidays. Thanks so much for the time.
Okay. The great Howard Beck from The Ringer