Jason (Hoops Tonight Host) (13:11)
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Regarding tanking as someone who started following basketball after decades of being a soccer slash football fan, I've always thought the lack of relegation or promotion as well as the bottom teams being generally rewarded with a High draft pick has created a void of competitive energy in the regular season. In terms of parity within the league, I believe the salary cap is what exists to level the playing field. So why not reward the better teams with a higher draft pick? I see no reason why the Utah Jazz couldn't have constructed a competitive team over the past 10 years. So why reward them? It might encourage team building and hard work. So I agree with everything you said. That's why I would flatten out the odds completely like I talked about earlier. But I want what your, your question kind of reminded me of a very specific part of this that I want to get into. You don't just build a good basketball team by getting top picks. It helps, but if you're going to have sustained success in the NBA, there's a, there's a multi level scouting kind of success that you need, culture success that you need. What does that mean? There's you got to be bad to get some top picks, but you also have to, you know, because you're not guaranteed to get top picks. There's a lot of teams that tank and end up with the seventh, eighth pick. You know, like that sort of thing. When you're in that range, that's where it becomes a lot more about your scouting department and your ability to turn more of those into hits than into misses. Even top picks can be misses. I talked about this with Colin the other day. We've had so many number one picks bust in the last 15 years. So like the truth of the matter is scouting is a huge part of this. Scouting the top picks, scouting the middle of the first round, scouting late first round. The good teams, a big part of what allows them to have success is they find rotation level talent late first round, you know, early second round, late second round, like the Clippers between Kobe Sanders and Jordan Miller, just two legit rotation players as late draft picks, right? So like there's that, there's the pro level scouting, finding high level talent overseas, finding high level talent within the NBA. Who's going to be the next guy that gets a Javante Green, right? Like a veteran minimum contract that turns into a really high level two way role player for a Detroit Pistons team, right? Like there is a, at every single level there's opportunities to turn your organization around and the good teams tend to be great at all those levels. And so I think in no. 1, I talked about this with the Rob Pelinka thing. No one hits on everything, but you need to generally hit on a higher percentage than the rest of the league in each of those areas to have sustained success around the NBA. That's why I hate the conversation surrounding tanking as if it's the only way to run a quality basketball organization. Just not the case. The best teams tend to be great at every level of their talent acquisition and then talent development as well. Like how's your player development? How are you turning players into pros when they get to your team? Idea for the 2027 All Star Game back to east versus West, but four team single elimination tournament. Top two teams are the All Stars that have been voted in While the other two teams are the 8 to 10 runner ups in each conference. What do you think? Love the show and keep up the great work. This is an interesting idea. So like I generally agree with you that a the I talked about this in the All Star reaction short games is through all of the stuff that Adam Silver has tried, we've discovered some things that work short games and multiple teams. Why? Because then each of the short games is its own entity. You can't just have short games running right next to each other. The league tried that and they got boring. Right. So like you got to have short games that are all their own individual entity. I also talked about how Adam Silver and the league just need to be creative about driving natural rivalry. The world versus the US is a great example. Older players versus younger players is a great example. I think your example is another example of something that could drive rivalry. You get your star, your top tier, you know, voted in All Stars, all on the same team and then you put all the bench guys on the same team or call it the top six or seven overall voting guys in each conference. What'll end up happening is you'll end up with a group of younger, hungrier All Stars that have more to prove. That might bring a competitive energy against the established stars that might drive a response from them and you end up with some kind of great game and then then you get some of that east west rivalry as well. So like I don't know if it's this particular format that you've pitched or if it's one of the formats that I've pitched. But just in general, I think the league needs to keep multiple teams short games, find ways within the roster to drive natural rivalry. Even just guys who don't like each other. Just put build the roster in a way that drives natural rivalry to the best of your ability. Sort of unrelated to All Star weekend. And you touched on this later in the video. But just curious, what are Your thoughts on Adam Silver as a commissioner? On the one hand, there are his recent tunnel visioning about abolishing, tanking, a half hearted attempt to follow through on enforcing foul baiting controls and a lack of action against Kawhi Clipper, Kawhi and the Clippers from the contract controversy this summer, the change to the media contract so that the remote fan viewing experience is now split across several streaming services. On the other hand, there is this in season tournament, the shake up to the All Star Game, the plan, etc. In that vein, if you were a hypothetical commissioner and you can make any as many changes to improve the NBA as a product, what changes would you make? This is a very wide ranging question. I, I'm going to hit it from a couple of different angles here. Adam Silver has been dragged through the mud in the last few months and I kind of land more in the middle. I don't agree with everything that he's done. I certainly think he could be more strong on some things. You mentioned him kind of this half hearted attempt to enforce foul betting. It looked like it was something they were going after a couple years ago and it, it's, it's just, it just hasn't been followed through. I agree with you. I think the main thing you're hitting at there that I think is most important is just how hard he's been on the league, how much of a disciplinarian he's been. I think, I think that a lot of the stuff I've seen from Adam actually is well intended, like he's willing to try stuff. Everyone's been criticizing him for the all star stuff. He's tried a half dozen different things over the last 10 years and yeah, a lot of them haven't worked, but all of them have kind of incrementally led to this format that worked on Sunday, you know what I mean? So like say what you want, there have been some serious wins there. I, I do think the in season tournament adds intrigue to the game. Like you guys talk about the play in tournament in the in season tournament. There's some problems there, right? It's a fundamental disagreement that we have as fans with the league, which is, we think, I, I think it's pretty much a consensus among most basketball fans. We think you should shorten the season. Too many of your stars are getting hurt, too many of your stars are missing games. Who cares if your national TV games are higher volume throughout the season? If stars are missing them, not as many people are going to watch. Might as well have 60, 66 games or something like that and get rid of back to backs and make the schedule easier. And chances are the Stars will actually play in any downside from the 20% loss in in total volume of games is going to be made up for and just a 20% increase in viewership if not more because the games will matter more. They'll be worth more in the standings. The Stars will be playing more often. That's how we all feel. The league disagrees though because they want money. Like to your question about the media contract, yeah, it's a pain in the ass that I had to get a Peacock membership and you know, most of us already have Amazon but like it's pain in the ass that we had to do that. But like ultimately Adam Silver is just trying to make money for the league. That's his job. Adam Silver's job is to drive revenue for the league. It's he that is what the owners want from him. Because the owners want money, right? And the players want money. So like ultimately Adam Silver's just doing his job in that regard. But if the owners and the players go to you and they go, we don't want to shorten the season because we want all this money. We'll just sit out games even though we disagree with it. That's what the league wants from him. And so I admire that. Adam Silver goes, all right, so these guys never want to get rid of games. They only want to add games. So how do I drive more intrigue and interest in the league while also acquiescing to the request of the people that pay me, the people that are have employed me to maintain the number of games. That's what the play in tournament is. That's what the in season tournament is. We don't think more games is the solution, but they don't think less games is the solution. So for them, even though for us we go 20 teams make the postseason out of 30, like and you already have an 82 game season, like all you're doing is getting rid of urgency. And Adam Silver's like, yeah, but this is what they want. So why not at least try to add some urgency at various points in the regular season. So teams do want to avoid the play in. So they're fighting for a seating to get up to that fifth or sixth seed. Right. You do get this week of highly entertaining playing games. We've had some really good playing games over the last few years. I think the in season tournament is a great product to add something different during December. So like again when you are a realist about what Adam Silver's job is, which is to make the league money and to serve his clients, that does that. Don't want to shorten the season. He's at least trying shit to make the most out of what the circumstances are. Don't agree with everything. I 100% agree with you. I do think he needs to be really hard on this foul baiting thing. I think it's legitimately hurting the league. I do think that he needs to be hard on tanking and he's clearly trying shit. He's sending out these big fines. I'm sure he's going to keep attempting stuff over the course of the next couple years to fight this. He's trying. I just think he needs to take a harder line on some of that stuff. The hypothetical commissioner role. If I was in charge again, I would shorten the season to 66 games. That's not going to happen. I would continue to aggressively find any team that deliberately tanks or sits players for national and TV games. I would try to drive player participation as much as possible and I would make a significant effort to get rid of non basketball plays in games. To me, the biggest thing that will drive health of the league is the quality of the basketball. If you can't increase the urgency because you can't shorten the schedule, then you could at least increase the quality of the TV product. And one of the ways you can increase the quality of the TV product is get rid of these ridiculous sequences where a dozen of our best stars are driving into defenders and just throwing up bullshit shots because it gets them to the foul line. And like say what you want about the rule book and you know, guys having to beat people to spots and all of the little details of defense that can avoid grifting. I don't disagree with you guys in principle there that these guys are just punishing defenders for being out of position. But it's just fucking ugly on tv. It's bad. And the league will be better if that doesn't exist. And so I would personally implement a sweeping rule that had a subjectivity that the refs have to kind of work their way through, which is if there's any sort of non basketball play, automatic turnover. Like just oh, you did some sort of crazy low gather that no one would ever do, or you jump into a guy to shoot or you do some sort of janky flop in this way or that way, just like tweet, tweet, we're going the other way. Sorry, that's that, that, that's bald to the opponent. You did that for two weeks, six games for each of these stars. They'd adjust and they'd stop doing that shit. They'd start playing, start playing real basketball. It's, it's. I doubt it'll ever happen, but that's just one of the bigger changes that I would make. 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