Okay, let's get into it. It is February 18th,
2026. We are officially on the other side of
the all -star break, which means we're deep into
the dog days of the 2025 -26 NBA season. For
sure. The homestretch. And I have to be honest
with you, and I think I speak for everyone listening
right now. If you've been trying to predict who
is actually going to hoist that trophy in June,
you are probably exhausted. Exhausted is definitely
the right word. But it's a good kind of exhaust,
you know. Yeah, what do you mean? It's the exhaustion
that comes from genuine excitement. We are living
through what everyone, not just historians, but
like everyone watching is already calling the
parody era. It is absolute chaos. I mean that
in the best possible way. I was just looking
at the list of champions before we started recording
just to get my head straight. We've had seven
different champions in the last seven years.
Seven. It's just it's unheard of. From the Raptors
way back in 2019. all the way to the Oklahoma
City Thunder lifting the trophy last year. Yeah,
in 2025. It's unprecedented, really. If you grew
up watching the NBA in the 90s or even the 2010s,
your brain is just wired to expect dynasties.
For sure. You expect the Bulls or the Lakers
or the Warriors. Exactly. You expect the same
two or three teams to meet in June every single
year. But those days. They feel like ancient
history now. The script has been completely shredded.
And that, I think, is really the mission for
this deep dive today. We've got a massive stack
of notes here. Articles, legal briefs, historical
records. That's science and stuff. And it all
paints a picture of a league that's at this massive
crossroads. On the one hand, you've got this
incredible competitive balance. I mean, the Thunder
just beat the Indiana Pacers in the finals. Right.
That's a matchup that would have sounded like
a joke five years ago. Absolutely a joke. But
now? Business is booming. The new media rights
deal is, I mean, it's astronomical. And the talent
level across the board is just off the charts.
There's always a but. There's this massive shadow
hanging over the court right now, isn't there?
You're talking about the gambling prosecution?
Exactly. The news from last October. October
2025, it was a bombshell. The FBI arrests. Terry
Rozier, an active player. Chauncey Billups, a
head coach. Damon Jones. It's the sort of headline
that just shakes the very foundation of professional
sports. So that's our goal today. We want to
connect these dots. How did a league started
by? of all people, hockey arena owners, just
to sell extra popcorn. How did that evolve into
this global juggernaut that is somehow juggling
massive success with, well, a massive integrity
crisis? And that origin story, the hockey arena
owners, it's so important. It sounds so unglamorous.
It does, especially for a league that's now all
about high fashion, celebrity row, billion dollar
valuations. But that's the reality of it. It
wasn't born out of some deep passion for the
sport. It was born out of real estate. So what
does this all mean for the league in 2026? It
means that to understand the chaos of today and
understand why the Thunder are the champs and
why the FBI is making arrests, we have to go
all the way back. To 1946. To 1946. Okay, let's
dive in then. So our source material says the
Basketball Association of America, the BAA, was
founded in June of 46. And you're telling me
this wasn't really about a love of the game.
No, not at all. Not at its core. It was a landlord's
solution to a landlord's problem. Okay, explain
that. Well, you had these huge arenas in the
Northeast and the Midwest. Think Madison Square
Garden in New York, the Boston Garden. The guys
who owned these buildings, the guys writing the
checks, they had a gap in their calendars. A
pretty big gap. A huge gap. They had hockey games.
They had the circus, maybe a rodeo or a boxing
match here and there. But they had dozens and
dozens of empty dates on the calendar. And an
empty building doesn't make any money. Exactly.
An empty building is a money pit. So they looked
at basketball, which was getting pretty popular
in the colleges at the time, and they thought,
hey, we have the seats, we have the lights, let's
just put some teams together to fill the Tuesday
and Wednesday nights. So the NBA basically started
as calendar filler, like a monster truck rally.
That's exactly what it was. And that first game,
it really reflects that humble beginning. November
1st, 1946, Toronto Huskies versus the New York
Knickerbockers at Maple Leaf Gardens. And some
guy named Ozzy Sheckman scored the first basket.
He did. It's a great trivia question. Historic
moment, sure. But here's the thing you have to
understand. The quality of the play. Not so good.
It was not great. Because, and this is the key,
The best basketball players in the world weren't
even playing in the BAA. So where were they?
Well, you had these amazing independent touring
teams like the Harlem Globetrotters, who were
significantly better than the actual league teams.
They were the show. And then you had the rival
league. The NBL, the National Basketball League.
Right. And this is where the story gets into
full -on corporate warfare. The NBL had been
around longer. It was more established. Crucially,
they had the real talent. The better players
were all in the NBL. So what was their problem?
They played in small industrial towns in the
Midwest. Places like Sheboygan, Oshkosh, Fort
Wayne. Okay, not exactly the media capitals of
the world. Not at all. So meanwhile, the BAA
has the big cities, New York, Boston, Philadelphia,
and these massive famous arenas. So the BAA just
executed a corporate raid. It was basically a
hostile takeover strategy. They just poached
all the good teams. They looked at the NBL and
said, we want your best assets. They lured them
away. They went to the owners of the Fort Wayne
Pistons and especially the Minneapolis Lakers.
Who had the biggest star in the game? George
Mikan. The first true superstar. And they promised
them the bright lights. They said, come play
in the garden. Come play in the big city where
the newspapers are. And it worked. Oh, it works
like a charm. The NBL just couldn't compete with
that kind of allure. By August of 1949, the NBL
basically surrendered. They agreed to a merger
with the BAA. And that merger created the National
Basketball Association as we know it today. And
looking at the notes here. The integration of
the league starts pretty early in this process,
too. It wasn't just a business story. No, it's
a crucial part of the history. You have Wataru
Misaka, an Asian -American player who actually
broke the color barrier in 1947, which is a fact
that's often overlooked. Wow, that early. Yep.
Then in 1950, you have the formal arrival of
African -American players like Earl Lloyd, Chuck
Cooper and Nathaniel Sweetwater Clifton. So the
league is diversifying right from its early days.
But even with the merger and even with all the
best players finally under one roof, the game
itself had a fatal flaw, didn't it? It was excruciating
to watch. You just have to try and imagine basketball
without a shot clock. I can't. It feels so fundamental
to the game. Like a hoop or a ball. Well, back
then, if a team got a small lead, let's say they're
up by two points in the third quarter, they would
just stop playing. What do you mean stop playing?
They would just hold the ball. They'd pass it
back and forth near midcourt, play catch. There
was no rule that said they had to shoot. So the
defense just had to stand there and watch them.
Or foul them, which made the game even slower
and uglier. It led to these incredibly low scoring,
boring games. I mean, fans were literally reading
newspapers in the stands. That's a bad sign.
A very bad sign. They were booing their own teams.
You had games ending with scores like 19 to 18.
It nearly killed the league before it ever really
got going. It's amazing to think the entire sport
could have died. Right there. Because of a lack
of a simple timer. It was that close. So in 1954,
they introduced the 24 second shot clock. And
I will argue to my dying day that this is the
single most important invention in the history
of the sport. Why 24 seconds? Was that just a
random number? It was math. Danny Biasone, who's
the owner of the Syracuse Nationals, he and his
general manager basically sat down with a stopwatch.
They calculated the average number of shots in
a game that was actually fun to watch, and they
divided the total game time by that number. And
they came up with 24. They came up with 24. And
it worked instantly. It forced action. It forced
teams to shoot. It created the rhythm, the flow
of the game that we love today. It saved the
entertainment value of the sport full stop. And
that invention. really paved the way for the
first true superstars to shine. We enter what
the historians call the era of giants. Yep. The
Minneapolis Lakers, led by George Mikan, were
the first real dynasty. He was the first dominant
big man superstar. He was so good under the rim
that the league actually had to widen the lane
from 6 feet to 12 feet just to push him further
away from the basket. They changed the rules
because of him. That's how you know you're a
legend. He won five titles. But if we're talking
about dynasties, the gold standard, the one that
still kind of haunts the league in a way, is
Boston. The Celtics. I'm looking at this stat
and it still just blows my mind. Eleven titles
in 13 seasons. It's the longest championship
streak in the history of American professional
sports. Eight straight titles from 1959 to 1966.
Eight in a row. Think about that. For nearly
a full decade, if you weren't wearing a Celtics
jersey, you had zero chance of winning a championship.
And that entire era was defined by this one rivalry,
Bill Russell versus Wilt Chamberlain. It's the
archetype for every great rivalry that followed.
It's the classic debate, you know. On one side,
you have Wilt Chamberlain, this individual force
of nature. He's the guy dropping 100 points in
a single game. Which is still insane. Completely
insane. He averaged 50 points a game for an entire
season, grabbed 55 rebounds in one game. If you
just look at the stat sheets, Wilt is a basketball
god. But Bill Russell had the rings. Eleven of
them. Russell was the ultimate winner. He didn't
care about his points. He only cared about the
team's defense, about winning. He was the anchor.
It was the classic stats versus winning argument
decades before Twitter existed to argue about
it 247. And Russell's side won out. Overwhelmingly.
He proved that a cohesive team led by a defensive
genius could consistently beat a singular, overwhelming
offensive force. But then we hit the 1970s and
the sources all suggest the league started to
wobble again. The Celtics dynasty faded and trouble
started brewing. Wobble is putting it lightly.
By the late 70s, the NBA was in serious, serious
trouble. Attendance was dropping off a cliff.
Why? What happened? There was a massive perception
problem about drug use among the players. Cocaine
was a major issue and it was widely reported.
The league was also seen as, well, too black
for many white advertisers at the time and just
too chaotic for mainstream America. It had an
image problem. I read here that the finals were
sometimes shown on tape delay. Can you even imagine
that today? In 2026, we're upset if the stream
buffers for half a second. But back then, CBS
would air the NBA finals at 1130 p .m. after
the late news. After the news. Because they didn't
think anyone would actually watch it live in
primetime. The league was treated like second
-tier programming, a total afterthought. That
sounds like a death spiral for a pro sports league.
So who saved them? Two guys who first met in
the 1979 NCAA championship game. The most watched
college game of all time. Magic Johnson and Larry
Bird. Magic and Larry. Lakers versus Celtics,
the next generation. But it was more than just
a rematch of an old rivalry, right? Oh, it was
a narrative goldmine. It was perfect. You had
the Showtime Lakers in Los Angeles. Flashy, fast
-paced Hollywood led by Magic Johnson's incredible
smile and no -look passes. Now on the other side.
You had the Boston Celtics. Gritty, blue collar,
tough, physical, led by Larry Bird's quiet intensity
and genius basketball IQ. It was East Coast versus
West Coast, black versus white, flash versus
fundamentals. It was perfect casting for television.
It was. And between 1980 and 1989, one of those
two teams was in the finals almost every single
year. The Lakers won five titles. The Celtics
won three. They didn't just play basketball.
They created a compelling story. They made the
NBA must -see TV. They brought the advertisers
back. They brought the fans back. They saved
the lead. And amidst all that, the league also
introduced the three -point line in 1979 right
as they were coming in. Was that a big deal at
the time? Not at first. Everyone thought it was
a gimmick, like from the ABA. Coaches hated it.
They thought it was a circus shot. It took years,
literally years, for teams to fully embrace the
math behind it. That three is worth more than
two. A pretty simple concept. You'd think so.
But Magic and Bird, they laid the red carpet
for the guy who would take the league from national
obsession to global phenomenon. His airness.
Michael Jordan. The 1990s belonged to Michael
Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. It's that simple.
You had two separate three -peats, 91 to 93,
and then 96 to 98. Six titles in eight years.
But it was more than just the titles, wasn't
it? It was the cultural impact. Absolutely. Jordan
wasn't just a basketball player. He was a brand.
He was arguably the most famous person on the
planet. Sneakers, movies, commercials. He was
everywhere. And the pivotal moment for that global
expansion was the summer of 1992. Barcelona.
The dream team. I still see clips of that and
it's just awe -inspiring. It was the first time
NBA stars were allowed to play in the Olympics.
You had Jordan, Bird, Magic all on the same team.
Charles Barkley, David Robinson. It was like
the Beatles of basketball decided to go on a
world tour. And they didn't just win gold. They
destroyed the competition. They won by an average
of like 44 points. But more importantly, they
sparked a global obsession. Kids in France, in
Argentina, in China, in Africa. They watched
that team and they said that I want to do that.
You can draw a straight line from the dream team
in 92 to the flood of international talent we
see dominating the league in 2026. It's a direct
line. The seeds that were planted in Barcelona
blossomed into the forest we are living in right
now. We'll definitely get back to that international
takeover because it's a huge part of the current
landscape. But, you know, moving into the 2000s
and 2010s, it felt like we were still in the
era of dynasties just with different faces. For
sure. It was the era of the West's dominance,
really. First, you had the Kobe Bryant and Shaquille
O 'Neal Lakers, a true force. Let's repeat. Yep.
And then you had the quiet dynasty of the Tim
Duncan and Greg Popovich Spurs. between 1999
and 2014, the Lakers and the Spurs combined for
10 titles. 10. That's an incredible concentration
of power in just two franchises. It really is.
And then, of course, LeBron James enters the
chat. And he defined the entire 2010s, that streak
of making eight consecutive NBA finals. It's
absurd. First with the Miami Heat, then back
with the Cleveland Cavaliers. We kind of took
it for granted at the time because it was happening
every year, but making the finals eight years
in a row is just superhuman. And of course, his
run collided with the rise of the Golden State
Warriors dynasty. The Steph Curry revolution.
Steph, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, they completely
changed the geometry of the game with the three
-point shot. It wasn't a gimmick anymore. It
was the primary weapon. Four titles in eight
years for them. And that 73 -9 record in 2016,
breaking the Bulls' old record. An incredible
run. But even then, that 2016 Finals. Cleveland
coming back from being down 3 -1. That still
gives me chill. An all -time historic moment.
But notice the pattern here. We're talking about
the same three or four teams every single year.
Lakers, Spurs, Heat, Warriors, Cavs. Right. It
was predictable. Totally predictable. We knew
who the main characters were before the season
even started. Which brings us to today. February
2026. Because that norm, that predictability,
it's dead. Completely dead and buried. Since
2019, the script has totally flipped. Let's just
run through the list of champions again because
it's worth hearing. Go for it. 2019, Toronto
Raptors. 2020, Lakers in the bubble. 2021, Milwaukee
Bucks. 2022, the Warriors get one more. 2023,
Denver Nuggets. Then last year, 2024, the Celtics
finally got their 18th title. breaking the tie
with the Lakers. And then 2025, the Oklahoma
City Thunder. Seven years, seven different champions.
We haven't seen a repeat winner in almost a decade.
Why is this happening? Is it just a coincidence?
Is the talent just more spread out? It is definitely
not a coincidence. It is by design. Specifically,
it's because of the new collective bargaining
agreement, the CBA. In 2023, the league and the
players union agreed to these new rules that
introduced something called the second apron.
Okay. Apron sounds like we're about to start
baking, but I know this is about money. So break
it down for us. Why does this rule kill dynasties?
Think of it like a hard salary cap, but in disguise.
It used to be that wealthy teams like the Warriors
or the Clippers could just pay a luxury tax.
If they went way over the salary cap, they just
had to pay a fine. And if your owner was billionaire,
he didn't care. Exactly. Steve Ballmer would
just write the check and keep signing superstars.
Money was no object. But the second apron changes
the penalty. Now, if you go over that really
high spending threshold, you don't just pay more
money. you get handcuffed handcuffed how the
league takes away your tools you lose the ability
to trade your draft picks seven years into the
future they just get frozen you can't sign players
who get bought out by other teams you can't combine
player salaries in a trade to match a bigger
contract so the league basically takes away your
ability to improve your team You're stuck. It
forces you to break up the band. It makes it
almost financially and logistically impossible
to keep three superstars together on maximum
contracts. You have a very short window to win.
And then the financial penalties basically force
you to trade someone. And that spreads the talent
out across the whole league. That's the idea.
The whole super team model is now legislated
out of existence. It's just unsustainable. Adam
Silver, the commissioner, said it himself. the
goal was to have 30 teams capable of competing
for a title and looking at the standings in 2026
he kind of got his wish he really did any team
that drafts well and manages their salary cap
can win it all and the teams that just won the
thunder they seem like they were built perfectly
for this new era they are the poster child for
it they didn't go out and buy a super team they
built it They spent years accumulating draft
picks. They suffered through losing seasons.
And they developed their guy. Shy Gilgis Alexander,
he's the face of this new generation. He really
is. He was the 2025 scoring leader, the MVP,
and the finals MVP. He just plays with this smooth,
relentless, herky -jerky pace that nobody can
seem to stop. And importantly, he's Canadian.
Which brings us right back to that Dream Team
influence we were talking about earlier. The
international talent is just... It's not a novelty
anymore. It's the whole show. It's the dominant
story of individual talent in the league right
now. I mean, just look at the MVP list. For seven
straight seasons, from 2018 -19 all the way through
this current cycle, the MVP of the league has
been an international player. That is a staggering
stat. Think about the names. You've got Giannis
Antetokounmpo from Greece, Nikola Jokic from
Serbia, who won three of them, Joel Embiid from
Cameroon. and now shy from Canada. It's wild
that the best players in the National Basketball
Association aren't from the United States anymore.
It completely challenges that old USA versus
the world narrative we grew up with. The world
is here, and they're winning the biggest awards.
And remember, the NBA's definition of international
is anyone from outside the 50 states and D .C.
Right. So even Tim Duncan counted because he
was from the U .S. Virgin Islands. Exactly. But
these guys now, Shai, Jokic, Luka Doncic from
Slovenia, they are the system. They run the league.
They control the game. OK, let's pivot a little
to the actual structure of the league itself.
For someone who might be tuning in this season,
maybe they stepped away for a few years. What
does the NBA calendar actually look like now?
It's still a grind, but they've added some new
wrinkles to spice it up. It's still an 82 -game
season. We've got 30 teams, 29 in the U .S.,
and, of course, the Toronto Raptors up in Canada.
The season runs from October to April. But they've
tweaked the format recently to keep people interested
during those long winter months. Yeah, the big
one is the in -season tournament. That was introduced
back in the 2023 -24 season. It's basically a
cup competition like you see in European soccer
that happens in the middle. of the regular season.
The games count toward the normal standings,
but there's a separate trophy, the NBA Cup, and
significant prize money for the players. I remember
a lot of people were skeptical at first. Oh,
very skeptical. People were saying, why do we
need another trophy? This is just a gimmick.
But it was designed specifically to cure the
November -December boredom. That lull before
the big Christmas Day games. Exactly. That period
where casual fans tend to tune out. And it brought
this playoff -level intensity to a random Tuesday
night in November. And now, looking back from
2026, you have to say, it's actually worked pretty
well. The players care because of the money,
and that makes the games better. And then, after
the regular season, we have the play -in tournament
before the actual playoffs even start. That has
been a massive game changer for competitive balance.
It used to be simple. The top eight teams in
each conference made it, and if you were ninth,
you went home. That meant a lot of teams would
just give up late in the season or tank to get
a better draft pick. But now? Seeds 7 through
10 have to battle it out for those last two spots.
Exactly. The 7th and 8th seeds play one game.
Winner gets in. The 9th and 10th seeds play an
elimination game. It keeps way more teams trying
to win late into the season. It adds this high
-stakes single elimination drama right before
the main courts of the playoffs. And the playoffs
themselves are still the same format. Still the
classic best of seven series. No receding. It's
a fixed bracket. You have to survive four grueling
rounds. First round, conference. semis, conference
finals, and then the NBA finals to win the Larry
O 'Brien trophy. We mentioned the money earlier
with the apron, but let's talk a bit more about
the business side. The NBA is, I mean, it's incredibly
rich. It is a financial juggernaut. It's the
second wealthiest pro sports league in the world,
right behind the NFL. And because the rosters
are so much smaller, only about 15 guys compared
to 53 in football, the NBA players are, by average
annual salary, the highest paid athletes on the
planet. And the really big news for this 2025
-26 season, the one we're in right now, is the
huge shift in media rights. NBC is back. I have
to admit. Hearing that round ball rock theme
music again. Yeah. The nostalgia is very real.
It hit a lot of people right in the feels. The
new 11 year deal kicked in this season. So you
still have ABC and ESPN with their package of
games. But now you've got Amazon Prime Video
streaming games and you have NBC and their Peacock
service back in the mix. And NBC losing the rights
back in 2002 was such a huge cultural shift.
It was. For a whole generation, that music was
the NBA. Having them back feels like a homecoming
for a lot of older fans. It's interesting how
they're targeting different demographics. You
have Amazon for the younger cord cutting crowd
and then broadcast TV for the traditionalists.
They have to. The NBA has the youngest audience
of. any of the major American sports. Something
like 45 % of the viewers are under 35. These
are people who don't have cable. They live on
streaming services. So putting games on Prime
is just meeting them where they live. It's also
the most diverse audience. Correct. It's the
only top North American sport without a white
majority audience. And that diversity drives
a lot of the marketing strategy, a lot of the
storytelling. Speaking of marketing. Yeah. Let's
talk about the jerseys, the sponsorships. The
patch. Yeah, that started back in the 2017 season.
It's just a small 2 .5 inch square on the shoulder.
It seemed so controversial at the time. People
were screaming about ads on jerseys. And now
you barely even notice it. Now it's just normal.
And it generates hundreds of millions of dollars
for the lead. It was inevitable. And Nike took
over the uniforms in 2017, too. They completely
changed the naming conventions. They did. They
got rid of the simple home is white and away
is color. Now it's the association. edition,
which is white, the icon edition, which is the
main team color, the statement edition, which
is an alternate, and then the city editions.
The city editions are the fun ones because they
change every single year. It's a brilliant revenue
stream. It almost forces diehard fans to buy
a new jersey every single season just to stay
current. It's basically fast fashion applied
to sports. They say it ties the team to the local
culture, which it does, but mostly it ties the
fans' wallets to the team store. And here's where
we have to take a serious turn. It's not all
just cash flow and cool jerseys and fun tournament
games. We have to talk about the elephant in
the room. The dark side. This is where the story
of the modern NBA gets really complicated. And
frankly, quite ugly. We have to talk about gambling.
Right. So for context, in 2018, the Supreme Court
overturned the federal ban on sports betting.
And the NBA didn't just accept it. They embraced
it. Embraced is putting it mildly. They sprinted
towards it with open arms. Adam Silver, the commissioner,
was actually one of the first sports execs to
write an op -ed saying we should legalize this
and regulate it. He argued it would bring integrity
and transparency to something that was already
happening in the shadows. And the league signed
huge partnership deals. Massive deals with DraftKings,
FanDuel, MGM. If you watch a broadcast today.
The betting lines are right there on the screen.
The announcers talk about the over -under on
a player's points. It's completely integrated
into the product. It is the product now in many
ways. But this opened a Pandora's box because
the history of gambling in the NBA is, well,
it's traumatic. You have to remember what happened
in 2007. Tim Donahue. Tim Donahue. He was a veteran
NBA referee, and he went to federal prison because
he was betting on games that he himself was officiating.
It's the ultimate conflict of interest. Absolutely.
He claimed he wasn't fixing the games in the
traditional sense, but that he knew the other
refs' tendencies, he knew how the league office
wanted a series to go, and he bet accordingly.
He made these specific explosive allegations
about the 2002 Kings -Lakers series. The infamous
Game 6. Infamous Game 6, where the Lakers shot
27 free throws in the fourth quarter alone. I
mean, that game is legendary for all the wrong
reasons. I still watch clips of it and just shake
my head. Right. The league survived that. They
did. They painted Donaghy as a rogue actor, a
lone bad apple. They said, we fixed the problem.
Our refs are clean. But fast forward to October
23, 2025. This season's bombshell. The FBI executes
arrest warrants. They arrest Terry Rozier, an
active player for the Miami Heat. They arrest
Chauncey Billups, the head coach of the Portland
Trailblazers, and Damon Jones, a former player.
An active player and a head coach. That's unprecedented
in modern American sports. It is the absolute
nightmare scenario for any league. And the charge
isn't just that they were, you know, placing
a few bets on their phones. It's that they were
connected to a federal investigation into the
American mafia. Wait, the mafia? In 2025, it
sounds like a movie plot. That's what makes this
so jarring and so scary. We all thought we were
past the Goodfellas era of sports fixing. But
the allegation is that massive gambling debts
were accrued and that organized crime figures
were then exerting influence on these guys to
try and clear those debts. That strikes at the
very heart of the integrity of the game that
Silver is always talking about. It completely
destroys it. Think about it. If a coach makes
a weird substitution in the fourth quarter or
a player misses two crucial free throws or a
star suddenly sits out. out with back soreness
and you know they are under federal indictment
for gambling connections, how do you trust what
you're seeing? You can't. You start questioning
everything. How do you know that missed shot
wasn't on purpose to cover the spread? You can't.
And the terrible irony is the league is taking
sponsorship money from the betting companies
while its own employees are being arrested for
betting related crimes. It's a huge conflict.
That's the tension. Adam Silver wanted a regulated
market to protect the game. But when gambling
is everywhere, when it's normalized, when it's
on the jersey and on the TV screen, the line
between fan engagement and potential for corruption
gets incredibly blurry for everyone, apparently
even for the people on the court and on the bench.
And it's not just gambling, though. The NBA has
faced other headwinds recently. Viewership was
dropping pretty significantly for a while, right?
Yeah. Between about 2012 and 2019, they lost
somewhere around 40, 45 percent of their viewership
on traditional TV. And the 2020 finals in the
bubble had the lowest ratings ever recorded.
Why was that happening? It's a mix of things.
Chord cutting is the big obvious one. Younger
fans watch highlights on TikTok and YouTube.
They don't sit through a three -hour game with
commercials. There was also the load management
issue. A huge issue. players resting during nationally
televised games. If you buy an expensive ticket
to see the Bucks and Giannis sits out with a
sore ankle that nobody believes is real, you
feel cheated. And, you know, the political polarization
of the country played a role, too. The league
is very progressive. Players are very vocal.
And in a divided country, that unfortunately
did turn some viewers off. And speaking of politics,
there's this sports -watching critique, especially
regarding their international games. Right. The
preseason games in Abu Dhabi and the UAE. The
league has been going there since 2022, trying
to grow the game globally. But in 2024, there
was heavy criticism because of the UAE's human
rights record and their involvement in the Sudanese
civil war. Critics say the NBA is helping to
clean up the image of an authoritarian regime
in exchange for money. That's the argument. Human
Rights Watch wrote letters. Activists called
for the games to be canceled. The NBA stance
is usually that engagement is better than isolation.
But when you preach social justice at home and
then take oil money from regimes that suppress
it abroad, it can look like hypocrisy. It's just
the messy reality of being a massive global corporation
in 2026. OK, so let's pull back and look at the
league today in February 2026. Despite the scandals,
despite the chaotic parody. Is the league healthy?
Financially, yes. Absolutely. The new TV deal
secured the bag for the next decade. The apron
system, for all its complexity, has successfully
killed the super team, which means fans in places
like Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, and Indiana
actually have legitimate hope. And that is incredibly
valuable for the long -term health of the sport.
And the actual product on the court. The talent
level. It has never, ever been higher. The average
skill set of an NBA player today is just light
years ahead of where it was in the 90s. Everyone
can shoot. Everyone can dribble. We have seven
footers like Wemby and Chet Holmgren who play
like point guards. The product on the floor itself
is spectacular. So what does this all mean for
you, the person listening to this? It means we
are in completely uncharted territory. The era
of the guaranteed dynasty is over. If you're
a fan, your team, no matter where they are, has
a legitimate path to a title if they manage their
cap space and draft well. That's incredibly exciting.
But there's a flip side. There is. You also have
to watch with a more critical eye now. When you
see a weird foul call in the last two minutes
or a star player misses a key game, the shadow
of that 2025 gambling scandal is going to be
in the back of your mind. You can't unknow that.
Integrity is fragile. It's very fragile. The
NBA spent 80 years building it up from those
empty hockey arenas, and they could lose it a
lot faster than that if they aren't extremely
careful. Well, we've covered a lot of ground
today, from 1946 in Toronto to 2025 in Oklahoma
City, from the merger to, well, the mafia. The
NBA is nothing if not dramatic. It's the greatest
soap opera on earth, just played by the greatest
athletes on earth. I like that. Before we go,
here's a final thought for you to chew on. We
talked so much about the international players
taking over, Shai, Jokic, Luka, Giannis. The
NBA has always been seen as an American export.
It represents American culture to the world.
But if the very best players, the faces of the
league, are no longer American. Does the NBA
eventually stop being an American league and
just become a global league that happens to play
most of its games in the U .S.? And if so, does
that change how we as American fans connect with
it? That is the billion -dollar question. And
looking at the next generation of talent coming
up from all over the world, I think we might
already have our answer. Thanks for diving in
with us today. Keep watching the games, enjoy
this incredible parody era, but maybe keep one
eye on the news ticker, too. You never know what's
coming next in this lead. Catch you next time.