The End of Fun in the NBA

The big power forwards and centers, wide as canyons in the shoulders and waist, used to bludgeon each other in the post like elephant seals. That was basketball once — Charles Barkley backing down defenders like a bulldozer, Shaquille O'Neal shattering backboards, Oliver Miller eating his way through the league but still getting all the easy buckets. Now DJ Burns plays in Korea and Kenny Lofton Jr. bounces between teams, simultaneously too short and too hefty for a game that's become addicted to the three-point line.

The numbers tell the story in red ink. NBA ratings have plunged 48% since 2012, down another 28% on ESPN just this year. Teams averaged 93.7 points in 2004, the last season defenders could place and keep their hands on offensive players. The scoring climbed after that — 97.2 points the next year, then triple digits by 2009. The NBA’s higher-ups were hungry for a cleaner game, a faster game, a supposedly more fan-friendly game. Commissioner David Stern and his hand-picked successor Adam Silver got what they wanted.

But the pair of bloodless technocrats lost something too, something unlovely but authentic. There was beauty in the ugliness once — the sweat-soaked jerseys, the bodies colliding in the paint, the pure physics of mass against mass. The Malice at the Palace was the turning point, that night in Detroit when Indiana Pacers Ron Artest and Stephen Jackson went into the stands to teach the fans a lesson and the league decided it needed to change if it wanted to preserve that fanbase. No more hand-checking. No more bullying in the post. No more chaos. Before that, you had Latrell Sprewell choking P.J. Carlesimo at practice, Charles Oakley clearing out entire teams, statutory rapist Anthony Mason posting triple doubles as he mean mugged his way through Madison Square Garden, and ball-hogging Allen Iverson lamenting he had to practice at all in preparation for willing his underdog teams to victory.

Take poor D.J. Burns, all 300 pounds of him. He dominated the NCAA tournament last year, backing down defenders like the ghost of Barkley obtained for pennies on the dollar from Temu. The Cleveland Cavaliers gave him a summer league shot but that was it. Now he's with the Goyang Sono Skygunners, too tubby for today's NBA but just right for the version of yesterday's game still played in Asia. In March 2024, he hit the only three-pointer of his college career in the ACC Championship. The crowd went wild because they knew — this wasn't supposed to happen anymore.

Kenneth Lofton Jr. — no relation to the Cleveland Indians’ all-time great center fielder, himself snubbed by the NBA after a fine career at Arizona — suffered an even worse fate. He's got Barkley's build and Zach Randolph's footwork, but four NBA teams have already waived him. He averaged 25 points in the G League, bullying defenders like it was 1993. The analytics guys don't want a low-efficiency player like that anymore. They want three-pointers, spacing, and transition baskets. In his first NBA start, Lofton dropped 42 points and 14 rebounds. They still sent him away.

The NBA thinks it's protecting the product. Technical fouls for staredowns, ejections for emotions, and all the left-wing politics you can eat. They give out techs like Halloween candy — Giannis Antetokounmpo gets one for looking at Al Horford wrong, Jokic gets tossed for nothing at all. The refs have more highlights than the rookies, more game impact than the All-NBA first team. Even the League Pass is a maze of blackouts and restrictions, making fans jump through hoops just to watch their home team.

Want more? Paul George has posted more podcast episodes than games played in 2024. Zion Williamson — once my great hope for a genuine throwback star, a massive bruiser in the Shawn Kemp mold — talks about how hard it is to diet with millions in the bank and nagging injuries constantly sapping his Bunyanesque strength. The players treat the league like a stepping stone to their guaranteed contracts, their brand, their social media, their next venture. Understandable in a mercenary, money-obsessed world like ours, but it means the passion's gone AWOL with the post moves.

Today's game is optimized for gambling and analytics. The three-point line might as well be a slot machine. Pull the lever enough times and you'll hit the jackpot. There's no room for a 300-pound post artist like Al Jefferson or Jahlil Okafor anymore. No space for the fat man's sumo ballet in the paint. The referees will blow the whistle if someone flexes after a dunk. There’s no space for tough guys in the game if you’re getting teed up for being human, all too human on a basketball court.

I genuinely thought Zion could bring it back. He had Karl Malone’s build and Julius Erving's hops. But he can't stay healthy, another casualty of a game that's become too fast, too lean, too predictable. The fun died somewhere between the Palace and the analytics revolution. His story reads like a cautionary tale — even the new Barkley can't survive in a league that's engineered all the Barkleys out of existence.

A single upload of the Conor McGregor-Floyd Mayweather press conference in 2017 has 8.4 million views on YouTube. By contrast, the 2020 NBA Finals, played inside the instantly memory-holed COVID-19 bubble, barely managed 7.7 million a game. People want drama and rivalry, something real, even in the context of a spectacle as silly as McGregor-Mayweather. Instead, they get Kevin Durant switching teams like changing shirts, LeBron James building superteams then abandoning them, players who are friends off the court trying to manufacture intensity on it.

Look, the NBA got what it wanted — a clean, efficient product. But cleanliness isn't always what the fans are hungry for. Sometimes they want to see Michael Jordan and Ron Harper beating the hell out of whoever they’re defending. Sometimes they want to see Boris Diaw waddling down the court, dropping no-look passes like a man half his size. Sometimes they want basketball that feels more like life — messy, physical, human.

Watch Kenneth Lofton Jr. fill the box score in his Shanghai Sharks highlights. Watch DJ Burns methodically dunking on some hapless Korean center who's never seen a wide load like him. That's what basketball used to be, before the stat geeks and the gambling apps and the three-point revolution turned it into a math problem. That's what we lost when we decided the game needed to be saved from itself. The ratings say we've lost our taste for pro hoops. But maybe we just can’t recognize what we’re watching.