We Are in the NBA's Nothing Means Anything Era
MOC on why pro basketball feels kinda empty these days.
One of the great things about the NBA has always been its ability to become a microcosm of whatever is happening in American society at that time. There were the racial conflicts of the ‘60s, the drug problems of the ‘80s, the influx of hip-hop culture in the ‘90s and ‘00s, and the social media boom and globalization of the ‘10s. Whatever happens to American culture, happens to the NBA.
Today’s day and age is no exception; the league feels just as broken as our society and culture. We are in what I am calling the NBA’s Nothing Means Anything era. Everything that happens feels both earth-shattering and completely mundane. Old norms, good and bad, are being discarded. Everything feels exciting and new; nothing feels comfortable or familiar. Everything is amazing, and everyone is miserable.
I’ve been a diehard NBA fan my entire life, and the experience of following the NBA feels drastically different from what I’m used to. Following the NBA is entertaining and attention grabbing, but unsatisfying and unfulfilling – and it’s led me to wonder how we’ve gotten here.
Why does everything feel so damn meaningless? Who is responsible? On the heels of the release of a disastrous set of TV ratings from opening week, it seems I’m not alone in asking these questions, so I figured it might be a good idea to delve in.
The end of familiarity
At the core of the appeal of any regularly consumed entertainment product is the feeling of familiarity. Be it TV shows, podcasts, or sports, regular viewers keep coming back in order to access feelings that are familiar. We tend to consume a certain product to feel a certain way.
With the NBA, the ever-increasing rate of change to the way the game is presented, played and covered has cut off the fan from any sense of connectedness to the distant or even recent past. The NBA’s product always feels different from how it did just a few years ago.
That dynamic is most evident in the constant change to the way the game is played – the pace and aesthetics of the game from 10 years ago look unrecognizable. The massive increase in pace and three-point attempts has revolutionized basketball to a degree that no one could have predicted. To be clear, it is not fair to say that three-point shooting has ruined the aesthetics of basketball, but I do believe that it’s ruined our ability to contextualize what happens and make the games narratively coherent in our minds.
The variance and freneticism that comes along with such rapid pace and off-the-charts three-point shooting has made it difficult for us to conceptualize the flow of the game. It used to be the case that a 15-point lead in the NBA was not only a huge deal, but something that was well-earned; nowadays, a hot shooting streak in the second quarter can open up such a deficit, and another from the other team can close it up before the half ends.
The rapid degradations of the norms that have been brought about by the offensive revolution also make the history of the game feel meaningless. Four of the 13 highest individual scoring performances ever have taken place since 2023, and nobody really gave a shit. Statistically, the records for best team offenses of all time are broken nearly every year, and nobody cares. That disconnect from history and tradition just… sucks. A baseball player hitting 60 homeruns in a year is an incredible feat, whether it happened in 1960 or 2024. A basketball player scoring 30 points per game was an incredible feat in 1990 but barely registers in 2024.
Additionally, certain unquantifiable changes have taken place during that same time frame, such as the league’s constant legislation against defense and the increase in flopping and foul-grifting, which make the game feel bastardized and manipulated in a way that it did not for most of its existence. The viewer, the refs and the players themselves all know these players are grifting, and they know they can’t stop, and it just eats away at the soul of the game.
In addition to the meaninglessness of the events within each game, there is also a new sense of meaninglessness to the plotlines that take shape outside the game – the constant reshuffling of players makes it impossible for teams and players to form coherent identities and for organic plotlines to develop that can rope in the average fan. It also limits teams’ abilities to form distinct identities from one another; the Rockets and Grizzlies, for example, had vastly different play styles 10 years ago, and now, teams never stay together long enough to form identities, so every team’s identity feels roughly the same. There is very little stylistic contrast or clash within the NBA – and that, combined with the increased competitive parity that means we haven’t had a repeat champion yet this decade, creates a landscape where teams don’t stand out from one another nearly as much as they typically have.
And not only are rosters being reshuffled with star players changing teams, they are doing so in ways that defy basic norms for most of the league’s history –- star players routinely demand trades to one particular team with multiple years left on their contract, and it often works. Every star player is a free agent, all the time. Having a star player under contract for four years guarantees next to nothing.
As a whole, the NBA’s regular season is openly regarded as meaningless, both by players and by the public discourse. Players routinely talk about the regular season like a chore. Those who succeed in it are given only superficial amounts of respect –- in fact, if you dominate the regular season and flame out in the playoffs, you will be lambasted as a fraud. Some might point to that as an example of toxicity of the fans, but I view it as a natural response towards the meaninglessness of the regular season; fans feel that they are being deceived throughout those 82 games, and so, they rejoice when those deceptions get exposed.
There are a lot of differences between the regular season and playoffs, but they all basically boil down to this: The teams are trying way, way harder in the playoffs. And, so, it’s hard to read a lot of meaning into an 82-game season in which teams are oftentimes simply not trying very hard.
The NBA has become a world of non-stop insanity, and therein lies the problem. If everything is earth-shattering, then nothing is earth-shattering. Everything — and I mean everything — feels meaningless. Not even the start times of the games mean anything; a scheduled 7:30 p.m. start is liable to tip at 7:52 with no warning, explanation, or even acknowledgment of it.
To put the cherry on top, the aesthetic backdrops of the game, unlike other American sports, have been in a frenzied state of change over the past decade. NBA teams change their uniforms and court designs at a far faster rate and in much more dramatic ways than the MLB or NFL. That may not sound like a big deal, but it cuts off any opportunity to make the game feel familiar, consistent or nostalgic for the average viewer. Even worse, virtually none of these changes to teams’ designs or schemes are based on any symbolic or logistical reasoning. It’s change for the sake of change. The new uniform colors mean nothing, as did the old ones, as did the decision to change them.
It all coalesces to create an underlying feeling that nothing that happens is important or meaningful in any way. The team jersey colors of yesterday didn’t mean or represent anything, nor did the decision to change them. The fact that your favorite player signed a four-year contract extension doesn’t mean he won’t force his way off the team in six months. Star players of today scoring at rates way better than star players of five years ago doesn’t mean that star players of today are better. The fact that your team went down 14 points in the second quarter didn’t mean anything; neither did the fact that they came back. If your team won, there’s a reasonably good chance that it was more of a result of shooting variance and the fact that the other team simply wasn’t trying very hard – so don’t read into it too much.
The NBA cannot maintain its status in a state where everything feels this frenetic, meaningless, and ever-changing. The league seems to believe that they need to treat their customers similar to how an adult jingles keys to grab the attention of a toddler; instead of actually fixing any of the fundamental problems with the league, Adam Silver continues to try to find shiny new distractions for his customers. Here’s a play-in tournament! Here’s an in-season tournament! Here are names for all the awards! Here’s yet another new format for the All-Star game! Wait, nevermind, here’s the old one back! Here’s an app where you can make the game look like your favorite movie! Their solution to the league’s superficiality seems to be more superficial changes.
Without the ability to find meaning in what happens in the NBA, you can’t emotionally or intellectually invest in the majority of the things that happen in the NBA world. You’re just an overwhelmed witness to mass chaos. You can still enjoy the art of the sport itself, but the league is losing the ability to provide meaningful stories worth emotionally investing in over long periods of time – which is absolutely necessary for the success of the league, and which they have, up until recently, done very well.
To be clear, I’m not saying any of this because I hate the NBA; I’m saying this because I love the NBA and I want it to prosper. Personally, I love basketball, and I’m always going to watch the best basketball players in the world no matter what, but I worry that the league will start to lose its cultural standing if it can’t provide a product that connects with the average fan in ways that it has for most of its existence. I don’t think the league is doomed to fail any time soon, but I certainly feel that it has been on a concerning path for quite some time now. Major changes are needed both on a policy and a cultural level, and my chief concern is whether the current leadership has the vision or the gumption to make that happen.
Mike O’Connor is the best O’Connor in basketball writing. Previously of The Athletic, you can find Mike on Twitter @MOConnor_NBA. Mike’s writing is brought to you by Body Bio, supplements based on science, focusing on your gut and brain health.
Well said. I think this is very much related to something which is hurting all sports: championships are everything. This psychosis did not exist when I was growing up, it's very much a 21st Century phenomenon.
The point about the hollowness of the regular season and the players who dominate hits home. The media can't talk about greats like Barkley, Malone, or Iverson without mentioning their lack of "rings." Who cares?! They're great.
The vast majority of games any team plays will be regular season games. You can't demean them! I think this is also why so many of us enjoyed the Process years. We knew there would be no postseason but the games felt like referendums on Hinkie. I can vividly remember dozens of regular season games from that era. I can count on one hand the amount I've watched in the last year.
All the other points in this essay are really good and I agree with all of it. But until the NBA finds a way to make the regular season matter, it's pointless. And yet their approach will definitely be to come up with some gimmick instead of fundamental change.
Why isn’t this guy (MOC) writing for a national NBA platform. Always produces quality stuff, but this is one of the most thoughtful pieces I’ve ever read about sport fandom. Somebody get him an agent.