What makes basketball so special a sport

[GOATcards]

In thinking about what makes the sport so appealing, by way of comparison/contrast to other major American team sports (namely football and baseball).

In basketball, all the starters can be on the court at once, as both offense and defense. Contrast with football (where the player who is often MVP - the quarterback - is out there about half of the time), or baseball, where only one team at a time can be beating and the other fielding. Nowadays that means you can hide pitcher weakness with a DH.

In basketball either team can score at just about any time; steals along with conversions on the other end happen often enough in basketball that they are close to being part of the normal rhythm of the sport, as to where it could happen at any moment really.

In basketball, the scoring over the course of a game shows more relative team strengths in that game than in many baseball (e.g., 9 to 2) or football (e.g., 34-7) games. The other game formats seem to be more subject to fluke/chance (e.g., a HOF QB throwing 0 TD and 5 INT in a game in football, vs. the usual 2-and-1, or a 3-homer game vs. Bonds at his hulked-up 2000s stats peak going 0-for-21 (which happened in his 73-HR season! , also he had some awful HR drought from #39 (around mid to late June of that season) till the next one, was it like zero in 17 games and 6 for the month of July or something?). How about hitting a HR in 6 games straight (which is rare enough), but doing it twice, and in the same season? That happened for Bonds in '01, too.

Anyway, I was going to get to another difference between the sports. As good as Bonds' numbers in '01 were, they could only add so many wins to the Giants W-L record, and in football being that much of a numbers-outlier makes you MVP material (often formally recognized the most times for top QBs like Brady, Manning, Rogers, Montana). A MVP QB can often lead teams on Super Bowl runs. That just can't be done by one player in baseball.

In basketball, the top players can be from any number of the 5 positions and can also make a bunch of difference on their own, but as the likes of Russell, MJ and LeBron all know, to succeed in basketball you have to succeed as a team no matter how good any single player is. (Those decrying Russell as not much of an offensive player don't seem to get what difference his on-court presence and BBIQ made, he won the last 2 titles as player-coach ffs.)

Also presence on defense is that one thing that a basketball player has to be responsible for in all minutes on the court, as contrasted with the 3 other team sports. (We haven't the faintest what Tom Brady is like on defense, and it doesn't make much difference whether Mike Trout's fielding is Gold Glove-level as long as he produces 1000 or better OPS while filling the fielding position decently.)

In basketball, coaching might make the biggest difference out of any of the 3 major sports. Phil Jackson arguably added a number of championship contentions as head coach for the '00s Lakers squads.

In basketball, serious injuries do happen more often than in baseball but less often than in football (some of which are career-ending then and there).

Over time, my interest has gone first and foremost from football ca. 1986 (and basketball 2nd - Lakers/Celts/MJ) and then to baseball ca. 1989 (Griffey, Bo Jackson - remember him?), and then to basketball from after 1990 due mainly to MJ (and the younger slimmer Bonds getting his 2nd straight MVP and 3rd in 4 years in '93 just didn't seem to have the same oomph as MJ leading the Bulls to a championship 3-peat.

As for interest in the major sports since the MJ days, I'd say that baseball in more recent times has produced fewer "legends" outside of Mike Trout and Miguel Cabrera, and the game has become more straightforwardly numbers-oriented; it is the Moneyball era, for better or worse. Tom Brady has dominated the scene more than anyone else in football (disclosure: I have a small-time UD Brady RC, which makes up like 80% of my football collection lol) and the presence of stars and QBs at his level (today we're talking Rodgers, Mahomes, Josh Allen, possibly others) keeps my interest levels in football reasonably high.

But football outside of TB12 still seems to be now to be like a distant 2nd to my interest in basketball. The legend-level players we have right now - LeBron, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Giannis, Nikola Jokic, perhaps Kawhi and Embiid and with Luka on an arc toward that level - makes the on-court action so much more fun to observe and analyze. No, we haven't the faintest how good Brady is on defense, but it makes a big difference to your influence on the game of basketball how good you are at defense.

In terms of playing surface area and 2-way goal format, the obvious competitors to basketball - soccer and hockey - should be mentioned for their similarities (but differences). You kick the ball in basketball, it's a throw-in for the other team, etc. Those sports are also low-scoring affairs, sometimes 2-nil, often in the 4-6 range, but like the other 2 sports (baseball and football) the scoring can often be lopsided as a result.

Anyway, I would say that after basketball and then football, my interest these days would go next to soccer and then some baseball and strangely enough almost no hockey at all. (Ovechkin, I've heard of.)

[cms11]

I think you left off a very important one - players appearing to defy gravity. Basketball is more of vertical sport than any other. I can tell myself that I could do what Brady did, but I could never do that about dunking from the free throw line.

[Tallboy]

Love the topic. From the jump:

1. Small teams - easier to play.
2. Open field spot - lots of action, and lots of action for each player.
3. Can be played in an indoor gym - perfect for winter in the country.
4. Small court, cheap materials - great for cities.
5. Lets every player make use of their hands - what makes humans special.
6. Tiring enough not to be boring, not so much that you can't play that often.
7. Regular intermixing between opposing teams - more action, more excitement.

All of that was there from the beginning, and I think gave it an advantage over all existing major team sports. Not every sport needs to play this way of course, but in terms of finding a niche, these advantages really helped.

Then there are the characteristics that helped later, along with the changes in the game that made it more entertaining:

1. Really allows one individual to do amazing things.
2. The vertical & aerial nature of the game.
3. The capacity for tricks - because hands.
4. The decision to use officiating to make the game less like rugby/gridiron football and more like association football (soccer).
5. The decision to stop having jump balls after ever score, to give more action.
6. The decision to disallow goaltending once it became an issue, which would have otherwise utterly killed the watchability of the game at elite levels.
7. The decision to disallow zones (beginning of illegal team defense) in the time before the 3-point shot, which encouraged more individual action.
8. Widening the key (along with 3-in-the-key type rules), for reasons similar to goaltending.
9. Adding the shot clock to prevent extreme stalling practices.
10. Adding the 3-point shot, and then getting rid of illegal defense - really in hindsight should have done this in the '40s when they first experimented with the 3 instead of making zones illegal, but making the latter change when they did (2001), solved a ton of problems that were getting worse by the year. This combination is what resulted in the pace & space game we have today.

All that pertains to why basketball is my favorite - with a heavy nod to it being my favorite to play when I was younger - but I will note one big issue that's affecting the NBA right now:

Referee manipulation by the players made possible by the specific data-based incentive and focus the NBA makes modern refs use.

I was glad when the NBA really tried some new stuff to curtail this last year, but I think we saw that as we got further along with the season it still wasn't working well enough.

I think what we really need is a philosophical shift where refs are less focused on call accuracy and more focused on encouraging "real basketball play".

Basic rules:

1. Call the fouls you explicitly see, and that's it. If a player's flopping makes you unsure about whether he was fouled, don't call it. Players will be very frustrated with this at first - and understandably so because they've essentially been trained to play like this for years - but if you hold the course, they'll adapt.

2. Get rid of instant replay. It's not working and it's slowing the end game down.

(I'll also shout out the upcoming changes to Take Fouls. Anything we can do to disincentivize strategic fouling by the defense is good.)

[hxcmilkshake]

From a youth/parent perspective, baseball > basketball. Height makes a huge difference in basketball, no ball hogs in baseball...you always get a chance mano y mano as a batter.

But basketball is easier to practice, less equipment

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