NBA 2019-20 thread.

Good idea to try to keep them playing competitively in every quarter. I"m not sure it really worked.

 

The target score is, um, weird?

 

Commercial-free 4th quarter is awesome.

 

All-Star game ending at 11:30 pm. ET? (sure it isn't a school night, but damn - 3 and half hours for some hoop?)

 

It was a little weirder because they made it 24 as part of the Kobe Tribute, so it took forever.

The Basketball Tournament uses the target score as plus eight, which should only be a handful of possessions and not the 40-plus minutes this was

 

I didn't get it when it was first announced but the target score is actually brilliant. It takes clock management and intentional fouls completely out of the game in the fourth quarter.

That was way, way more entertaining than a standard 4th would have been.

 

Until the game was won on a free throw ...

 

Not at all shocked that this experiment lasted less than a full season. Who approved a five-year deal for a 67-year-old who had never previously coached in the pros?

As I’ve said repeatedly, it blows my mind how billion dollar sports franchises hire such clowns to make franchise-altering decisions. Reminds me of the Suns hiring Ryan McDonough and watching him further tank the franchise.

 

What blows my mind is how owners who typically made money running a business somewhat successfully are so bad at hiring people.

 

Eh, but plenty of them made their money by like, being the best at doing shitty junk loans, or being The Guy in Industry X who was willing to be shitty. That's fine if you're like, trying to drive ma and pa small businesses out, but it takes more than force of will to win in professional sports, when you're up against 30+ similar owners, some of them who might be legitimately smart. (And hell, sometimes it doesn't matter anyway, because you're Cleveland, get the #1 pick and you can't fuck up the LeBron era even though you try in several different ways.)

 

And it's not like they're losing money by being idiots.

Robert Sarver of the Suns is a terrible, terrible owner. He meddles in decisions. He hires bad people. If he hires good people they get out as soon as they can. The team has become a joke under his ownership, missing the playoffs year after year after year.

He paid $400 million for the team in 2004. They're now worth $1.65 billion.

 

It takes even the most successful owners some time to learn that sports is not like regular businesses. The people you employ are more important to the winning and losing than you are, so just stick to the making more money part. Making matters more complex, the most important employees have egos as large or larger than your own, so you must learn to cope with them, something a great many titans of finance and/or industry are not too good at.