After wasting 2.5 hours of my life watching WW84, I needed something to bring me back, something to make me laugh, and think about anything at all other than how much WW84 sucked. And if there’s one good thing remaining about the NBA, it’s that they know no boundaries of how much to suck to the amusement of old man purists like myself who still think the 90s were the best era ever and that there’s no sports theme greater than the NBA on NBC theme, in history.
So when the Dallas Mavericks blew the LA Clippers out by 51 points, my interest was immediately piqued, because it always fascinates me just how pathetic the NBA gets year after year and that there’s basically no more pride and this defeatist mentality that pervades in all the players of today that allows for all of this to happen.
Like, back in my day, it was pretty rare to see a 20-point blowout, and those were pretty rare to begin with. Shit, the most bonkers game I’d seen in my life at that time was this one Knicks vs. Bulls game where Derek Harper had the NBA Jam fire code going and the vaunted ‘96 Bulls got blown out by 30 points.
But it was literal decades before I saw a game where a team got blown out by 40+ much less 50 points. Ironically, this isn’t even the worst blowout that I’d ever seen, as I’d actually brogged about it in the past when the Memphis Grizzlies somehow got blown out by 61 points a few years ago.
The thing is, when I was really into League of Legends, and the professional scene specifically, I used to make tons of analogies about how basketball strategies translated very well in League of Legends, most notably when at the 2015 Mid-Season Invitational that mythical then-gf and I went to, Edward Gaming employed the MJ strategy against SK Telecom, let Faker have LeBlanc and do whatever he wanted, but built their team around stomping the shit out of all of Faker’s teammates, en route to a critical game 5 win.
However, this is a scenario where the tables have turned, and it’s about time we applied some League of Legends, or competitive gaming logic, to the NBA. Primarily the idea that NBA games occasionally go full tilt, and the players ultimately end up griefing, intentionally feeding, and just plain forfeiting, regardless of if the fact that games don’t actually allow for unconditional surrenders, no matter how much the players probably wished they did, like when the Clippers were down 50 points at halftime.
Needless to say, the Clippers phoned it in super early, as if Luka Doncic got two early kills, and the Clippers basically decided that there was no more point in playing the rest of the game because he was fed and was going to snowball and dominate. And as much as I find ironic amusement in the ownage the Clippers suffered, really it’s still no good for the NBA that teams phone it in and don’t seem to care that they’re allow themselves to be humiliated like such.
The funny thing is, this too, isn’t even the first time that I’ve written about how to combat NBA teams from tanking so much. In spite of how much I claim to hate the NBA, there’s still another part of me that recognizes my love of basketball from my childhood days to always have an ear to it no matter what. I’d love to watch a more watchable product, but it’s going to be along ways from now, because throughout the last two decades, the players have become bigger than the game, and the basketball itself has become something of an afterthought compared to the grandstanding self-promoting that the players tend to do for themselves.
But anyway, the last time I touched this subject, I basically said, bench all the players who have given up, and swap out the team for their G-league* developmental team, because I was pretty sure that a developmental squad probably wouldn’t lose a game by 51-61 points.
*I was always curious to know why it was called the G-League but the logo says it all: they’re sponsored by Gatorade, so the G in G-League is literally the Gatorade G logo
The swap with the G-League team is still in play for this most recent line of thinking, but there were two other ideas that I came up with to perhaps combat tanking in the NBA.
No food stipends until next win. One of the more outlandish things in professional sports is that professional athletes who already make egregious amounts of money to play children’s games, literally get a food allowance from their teams to feed themselves with. The NBA’s league minimum is supposedly around $800,000 a season, and these players still get an envelope per game with like $200 in it so they can go feed themselves.
You’d think that professional athletes wouldn’t give two shits about not getting chump change, and would just dive into their professional athlete salaries to cover their own damn food, but you’d be surprised at how many professional athlete millionaires are still colossal cheapskates and completely greedily stingy about every dollar in their possession.
Plus, the guys on the team that are on pro-rated salaries or 10-day contracts, who don’t make $800K+ a year probably really actually need those food stipends. And when a team that’s getting blown out by 50 points pulls all their primadonna starters, maybe the guys on the bench who want to keep getting food stipends, can dig the team out of the hole to a point where it’s not quite such an embarrassing loss.
But the newest and greatest idea I came up with, and I’m fairly certain that it would work 100% of the time, to at least prevent such embarrassing blowouts, if not turn a team into the 96 Bulls or the whatever year Warriors that bettered them is quite simple:
Suspension of Twitter and Instagram Accounts until next win. Without question, the possessions that NBA players care more about than money are their social media accounts. The players of today are all so obsessed with their social media accounts, that the threat of them being taken away from them should be more than adequate of lighting a fire the size of Vesuvius underneath their narcissistic, attention-hungry asses. Whether it means they can’t throw shade and try to start drama so Sports Illustrated or ESPN can pick it up, or they can’t thirst on hoochies on Instagram, if an NBA player had to choose to keep on trying in spite of a blowout or lose their social media accounts, we’d probably see entire teams of players scoring more points than Michael Jordan in 1987.
I guarantee if the social media ban rule were in place, every single game where a team is getting mopped up at halftime, would emerge from the locker room and be doing helicopter and windmill dunks, like that scene from Van Wilder, and we wouldn’t see a single 25+ blowout ever again.
