The NBA has a problem, and it isn't on the court

I’ve got a problem with the NBA, and it doesn’t involve the game on the court.

The NBA these days isn’t as much about basketball these days as it is about chess: Who can find which pieces in the right combination.

Part of this is a natural outgrowth of free agency, which (don’t get me wrong) is a good thing. Players should be able to have a say in where they play and whom they play for. It takes two sides to make a contract, after all, and back in the days of the reserve clause, players were basically stuck with one team for as long as that team wanted them.

That was unfair to say the least. Imagine working in an office job for a company that refused to let you accept a higher offer in a better work environment elsewhere? The reserve clause, clearly, had to go — and it did in 1975, paving the way for free agency.

But you always have to give something up in order to get something, and what was sacrificed in this case was a sense of stability. You could count on Lou Gehrig or Joe DiMaggio always being Yankees, Ty Cobb always being a Tiger, or Jackie Robinson always being a Dodger. With the advent of free agency, though, players staying with teams their whole careers became the exception rather than the rule.

Kirby Puckett played his entire career with the Twins, and Tony Gwynn did the same with the Padres. In basketball, Kobe Bryant spent his whole career with the Lakers, and Tim Duncan did the same with the Spurs. But beyond those and a few other isolated cases, players move around these days. Sometimes a lot. Pitcher Edwin Jackson spent 17 seasons in the majors, and played for 14 different teams.

By 2020, Justin Turner had become the face (and the red beard) of the Dodgers, even though he’d been in L.A. just seven seasons. But that was still longer than anyone else.

Basketball’s problem

Somehow, though, it’s all worse in basketball. There are fewer players, and they’re more recognizable, and the rules about moving them around are more complicated.

Some bemoan the longtime obsession of baseball fans with stats. And others (myself included) decry and increasing reliance on those stats by managers who seem intent on making every decision based on analytics. It can be annoying to watch managers depend solely on pitch counts, but at least that’s happening on the field. In basketball, much of the chess game happens off the court.

It’s gotten to the point that fans pay more attention to the draft, free agency, and trade deadlines than they do to what’s happening on the hardwood. If you can’t tell the players without a scorecard in baseball, you can’t tell what’s happening in basketball without a dictionary. There are mid-level exceptions, two-way contracts, 10-day contracts, Exhibit 10 contracts, Bird rights... there’s even a rule that applies to players over the age of 38.

I don’t pretend to understand most of it, and here’s the thing: I don’t really want to understand most of it. I just want to watch a good game of basketball. But the convoluted world of salary caps, rookie scales, and trade deadlines has become so important in determining who plays where that it’s impossible to ignore. And a lot of fans have become so absorbed in the intricacies of contracts that the game has become almost secondary.

And that’s a problem, at least for me.

Corn maze

The NBA’s financial structure has become a game in its own right, a series of rules that don’t quite work the way they’re supposed to, so those rules are tweaked, and then the tweaks are tweaked. The end result looks like a patchwork maze of pipes and chutes and (sometimes dead-end) tunnels held together with duct tape and gorilla glue.

I tuned in to watch a basketball game, not navigate a corn maze.

Part of this plays to the NBA’s advantage, because it keeps fan interest up during the offseason, at least among some fans. For me, it’s more oversaturation and a distraction from the game itself. To be blunt, it seems more soap opera than sport: It’s got all the drama (and even some of the trash talk) of the WWE, just without the script.

Or here’s another analogy: The Masked Singer is a TV series that keeps people tuned in by building and sustaining suspense about who’s behind the mask. But all the buildup and intrigue get old for me pretty fast; I just get bored, so I tune it out — the way I tune out the NBA’s byzantine contract machinations. I don’t care how much room is left under the salary cap or whether they’ll be a fine for exceeding it. I care about whether Stephen Curry’s going to make that 3-pointer to win the game.

Maybe I’m in the minority. A lot of people loved The Masked Singer. And WWE. But I’m not tuning in to watch those shows. I’m tuning in to watch basketball.