It’s hard to fathom how the NBA can continue to be right about basically everything. Progressive. Thinking long-term. Seeing around corners. Through walls. All of that.

No hyperbole here. The league is so far ahead on so many issues – big and small – that it’s amazing to me other leagues don’t just do what they do.

The NBA was the first cancel games in March (honestly, a week too late in my opinion… but still the first).

Adam Silver wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on sports betting like six years ago.

The league embraced social media and the web long before it was cool (or even a good business strategy).


Their partnership with Microsoft to create a tailored streaming experience more akin to Netflix than ESPN feels like it will define sports consumption for years.

And now, the first – and frankly only – league to create a real bubble and finish their season the right way, the NBA has re-thought how games will look:

The biggest shock to the system for sports fans these next six months will be watching sports in empty, cavernous arenas and stadiums. Creep-ass life-size cutouts (I’ll still probably get one) will do little to offset that awkwardness. Using video game sounds for ambient noise will only call further attention to the emptiness, even if it will help a bit.

But the NBA had a blank slate in Disney. And they delivered:

https://youtu.be/mGtoYpbVeqI

While Major League Baseball and Gary Bettman’s hockey league will play to literal echos, the NBA is concluding their season in an e-sports stadium… and it’s perfect.

What they’ve done here is create a TV studio, not an arena.

It’s obvious when you think about it. But old-world paradigms persist, particularly in professional sports, and same-minded thinkers running the other leagues have thus far shrugged their collective shoulders and just I don’t know, do what we always do, right?

The NBA, meanwhile, embraced the absurdity of it all, set up shop in a luxurious-ish bubble, and crafted the first ever live sports studio. Lights, camera, action.

Visually, the games will look different, but perhaps better.

Nothing will replace crowd noise and the excitement that goes with it. But the NBA knows their league is now fully a TV show – if it wasn’t already – and so they owned it.

Kudos. Again.

Can’t wait to see 62-year-old scouts in bucket hats behind home plate during Phillies games.

Side note: Some on Twitter have noted that The Basketball Tournament did this sort of thing first. Fair. But the comparison here is largely against other major pro leagues that can’t see the future if it hit them in the face with a global pandemic.