Is The NBA's Culture Being Flattened?

Accessibility vs. exclusivity, funnel drop-off, and why fans can't always support the home team

Alright, I’ve waited this long; I think I’m ready to throw my hat into the ring.

If you haven’t noticed, the past two to three weeks of NBA discourse has surrounded the fact that, despite a good Christmas Day, the league’s ratings continue to decline. In the process, writers of various outlets have posed reasonings for this effect, ranging from there being too many threes to the NBA having no true face of the league anymore — and it’s likely that many of them are individually right despite not getting the whole picture.

While I’ll talk about the above things as well, as they have merit, I think the NBA’s decline comes down to one thing:

The NBA’s culture is being flattened. And, if not tackled in a timely manner, could spell the decline of more than just the league’s ratings — for one of the few times in this publication, it’s time to get serious.

Cultural flattening isn’t yet a household term, though I suspect it’s one that many have referred to without knowing it. The term, while possibly not originally coined by him, should be attributed to Kyle Chayka, a writer for The Verge, The New Yorker, and author of Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. I recently read through Chayka’s book and it’s one of my favorite reads of the year — but first, let’s explain cultural flattening.

According to Chayka, social media algorithms (as well as other, more seemingly benign ones) have caused a strange phenomenon:

“…one quirk goes viral instantly — a new adaptation, a new aesthetic flourish, can go from one person doing it to 100,000 people doing it in a day, whether it’s a TikTok sound or a dance or whatever, and so I think there are these artistic innovations that happen. A stylist chooses to bring back low-hipped jeans or whatever or a musician packs so much sound into the first 10 seconds that no one’s ever thought of it, like 100 secs or something.

- Kyle Chayka

Of course, this isn’t necessarily new, as people have been following the masses for ages — the difference, though, is the speed at which it happens. It’s machine-guided curation, one that immediately thrusts viewers into specific groups of interests, telling them what is good and what is bad. On a grander scale, even ignoring social media — which we will get to later — it involves grand homogenization, with niches split off into hard-to-find corners of the internet.

So how does this apply to the NBA? Well, let’s take a look at the most contentious point for most: Three-point shooting and the NBA’s style of play.

Though not new to this season alone, many are discontent with the fact that teams are taking what could be seen as an obscene amount of three-pointers.

Neil Paine

recently argued that we’ve hit the point where the three-pointer has somehow become less efficient at generating points than the two-pointer due to the concerns of volume. The team taking the least amount of threes, the Nuggets, would rank 6th during the 2016-17 Stephen Curry Revolution, possibly leading credence to the theory that, leaguewide, things have become pure chaos. Possibly, one could call it a “quirk” that has, as Chayka noted, gone “viral instantly,” or, at least as instant as NBA teams can adjust to.

The question is, of course, how the NBA allowed for such a thing to happen. You would have thought that fans had realized quicker — and, in some ways, they did — and that the NBA would have adjusted accordingly. That theory would hold water, if not for the fact that the NBA has actively flattened its fans into a cohesive hive mind.

If there’s one stat the NBA loves to tout in relation to declining ratings, it’s this:

“We have more social media traffic than any time in our history.”

Commissioner Adam Silver continues to allude to social media traffic. Of course, it’s true, the NBA has more followers than ever:

Yet, this completely ignores the fact that said social media traffic may be exactly what’s killing the NBA’s brand.

At the time I am writing this, the past 7 social media posts with in-game clips on the NBA’s Twitter account are:

1. Wemby now holds the LONGEST streak of games with at least 1 BLK & 1 3PM

   (Highlights of threes and blocks)

2. It was a CAREER night for Jonathan Kuminga in LA (Highlights of threes, dunks, and layups)

3. IVICA ZUBAC REJECTION TO SEAL IT FOR LA (Highlight of Zubac’s block)

4. Cavs put on a SHOW on offense in tonight’s win! (Highlights of 23 three-pointers made and occasional layups)

5. Derrick Jones Jr. gets UP for this putback slam! (Derrick Jones Jr. dunk)

6. Jaren Jackson Jr. led another high-scoring victory for Memphis! (Highlight reel with an emphasis on 4 three-pointers made)

7. The Timberwolves STORMED back…Ant capped it with a clutch triple! (2-minute highlight reel of threes and layups)

As you can see, 5 of the 7 involve three-pointers quite heavily, and you could take that as a reflection of the league landscape or a reflection of how the NBA chooses to prevent itself. The reason I bring this up is this: The NBA tells its fans that three-pointers and layups are all that matters, so is it really surprising that we’ve gotten this far?

The reverse is also true; as league pundits, social media celebrities, and more have begun to trash the NBA’s three-point-heavy game, more and more fans have begun to echo that. It’s pure cultural flattening, one in which everyone has the same opinion, flip-flopping from loving the game to hating it, even if, in some ways, it’s justifiable.

Also of note: The NBA posts 2-minute highlight reels after most games, and I’d be shocked if they get the engagement they truly desire from them. Studies state that Gen Z viewers — the ones that the NBA is looking to engage via social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, and the generation I’m a part of — have an attention span of between 4 to 8 seconds, depending on the person. Two-minute highlight reels, therefore, are likely not only bad at getting viewers to actually watch games on television but are bad at getting viewers to watch at all. And if they do, there’s a worse effect: They begin to think that all teams play the same.

In a pre-Christmas article,

Jared Dubin

debunked the theory that all NBA teams play the same way. After looking through how players move, their shot selection, ball movement, and more, it was easy to conclude that, no, teams are not homogenous.

What Jared does not ask, however, is why everybody seems to have this assumption in the first place. And, once again, we can return to our topic of the day to explain it.

The article that arguably brought Chayka’s cultural flattening concept into the limelight was his piece for The Verge, titled “Welcome to AirSpace.” Chayka talks about how, even in August of 2016, coffee shops were beginning to all look the same on the surface due to the fact that social media presented them as “appealing” and “algorithm-friendly.” Instead of showing viewers the cultural cornerstones and unique cafes, Instagram and its cohorts chose to show the classic white subway-tiled ones. As a result, everyone began to follow the trend, turning every precious coffee-smelling space into AirSpace:

“This confluence of style is being accelerated by companies that foster a sense of placelessness, using technology to break down geography. Airbnb is a prominent example. Even as it markets unique places as consumable goods, it helps its users travel without actually having to change their environment, or leave the warm embrace of AirSpace.”

- Kyle Chayka

As I noted above, the NBA has so precariously placed a focus on three-point shooting and layups (and dunks) in their social media videos, and that’s been going on for a few years now. Social media viewers, who are in it for a quick hit of dopamine and not in it for careful analysis of the game, do not get the chance to notice the nuances of how teams utilize handoffs, how the Grizzlies don’t run pick and rolls, and teams create unique offensive sets. This is instead traded for so-called engagement, with viewers seeing three after three fall into the net — or, alternatively, dunk after dunk go through the middle of the rim.

The side effect of this, of course, is obvious. Viewers, who we know aren’t watching on television as much as they used to, are only seeing the things that the NBA thinks they want, and for many years they’ve exuded such a desire. And if they only see what the NBA thinks they want, they begin to think that the NBA has become homogenous. Stars’ personalities are thrown out the window, the nuance of the mid-range game is often ignored in lieu of downtown snipers, and games are watered down into so-called highlight reels that only highlight the fact that we’ve all become incredibly stupid in the way that which we watch the NBA.

There is no differentiation anymore. Likes and eyeballs rule all for the league, yet chasing after said likes and eyeballs has resulted in fewer of those ocular orbs placing their ganders on the league’s actual games on television. That’s only been exacerbated by the fact that, should you want to watch your local team, you can’t do it through League Pass due to blackout restrictions. No cable? You likely don’t get the local station to even watch your team.

The Problem of Locality and Team Fervor

Here in Houston, where Space City Home Network is only provided through Xfinity, DirectTV, and not on Sling TV or League Pass, I can’t watch the Rockets in any way, shape, or form — at least, not live. The time it then takes to go back and watch said local team is exactly what would draw viewers away from even engaging with the product; after every click, the chances of the potential superfan dropping off grow exponentially. In businesses, this is often related to funnel drop-off, in which making somebody jump through too many hoops or go through multiple steps will result in more customers dropping off after going through each one.

Even for non-local teams, the league somehow expects fans — who often get their NBA fix solely from a single social media platform or two — to pay for League Pass, have ESPN, NBA TV, get TNT, and, in the coming years, have a combination of NBC, Peacock, ESPN, and Amazon Prime just to have the privilege of tasting all that the NBA has to offer. What that results in, then, is it becoming much harder to latch onto a team for the sake of the team itself. If it is too difficult to watch your team play every single game, you simply won’t, and instead of following the team, you follow the players.

Yet, the players move on, and then you’re back at square one in which the smaller markets of the league will begin to suffer further for their so-called transgressions that have actually manifested themselves as a result of the league’s choice to flatten itself culturally. Rivalries are dead, resulting in even less team pride manifesting itself. Team pride, as a concept, seems far lower in recent years than it was just half a decade ago. In the 1990s, fans rallied around the Bulls, Jazz, Supersonics, Suns, and more, first because of the players — MJ, John Stockton, Gary Payton, and the like — but then because they wanted to be a part of the team. Still, to this day, the Bulls rank among the top 3 in nightly attendance, while the Jazz are far above the average of most bad small-market teams as well. Heck, the Supersonics aren’t even a team and people still represent them in public! Today, though, there is no latching onto the team, because it’s about the players. It isn’t player-empowerment; it’s team-agnosticism.

Is that bad? For sure, but it’s made worse by the fact that the NBA only shows the end result of the player’s actions, not the in-progress parts. Instead of showing the true nature of the play, they skip to the action so as to appeal to an attention-starved generation. For example, I continue to be confused as to why this clip of Anthony Edwards’ incredibly clutch three-pointer starts almost immediately as he gets the ball instead of the many seconds that come before it, effectively removing the setup of the play and the actual pressure involved:

You could call this the curse of both exclusivity and accessibility, where a league has made its most curated highlights available to all while hiding the real beauty of the game behind various paywalls. The commodity of the NBA is no longer as scarce as it once was. The only part of it that is scarce, in fact, is the part that makes people want to watch it.

In other words, the league made the bed itself, and now it has to sleep in it. It likely won’t be too concerned, since the next media deal is already locked up. Yet, the real issue at hand doesn’t appear to be the three-pointer alone, but the way the NBA has marketed it and cultivated a culture of flatness. Now, it’s coming back to bite them, as everyone is flattening toward the flip side of disliking the league’s play. Rivalries are irrelevant, teams no longer create fans for life, and the NBA’s social media strategy has stunted its growth on television and in sports in general.

I don’t quite have a magic fix here, but I do know this: If the NBA doesn’t stop its culture from being flattened, it might end up flatlining.