“Welcome! Welcome everybody to the Late Show with KMARK. We got an amazing show tonight featuring the NEW World Champs, the Oklahoma City Thunder! [Crowd CLAPS]

Awesome, awesome SGA… thank you for coming, quick question, why is everyone here more excited than you were to be the new champ…?”

What an absolute dud of a Game 7. We’ll unpack it below, but that game featured all the intensity of the NBA’s Commissioner Cup. That was a Super Bowl? Please.

Elsewhere in the Sports World, PGA Frisco was largely panned by players. The extreme heat and winds sapped scoring, the course didn’t thrill, and the broadcast seemed to misunderstand the architecture altogether. WOOPS. Overall, players seemed to gripe that out of position tee shots presented limited to no recovery options because approaches wouldn’t hold the green. Frisco features radically wide fairways, but depending on the pin location, a fairway drive isn’t always in prime position. Isn’t that the damn point of a major? What are we talking about here?

Kevin Durant is now a Rocket. Desmond Bane was traded for two rotation players and 4 first round picks. Durant fetched a bloated contract (and I’m actually higher than most on Jalen Green), Dillon Brooks (gross), and one first. He’s a great fit in Houston. He wants to be there. All that said, watching Durant (and Lebron) repeatedly play GM of their Career has been a disaster. Durant is now on team 5. He left Sam Presti. He left Steph. Can he make a Finals in Houston (no).

I could not be more ready for this NBA season to be over, and I believe the NBA needs a hard, hard reset in its marketing. Does marketing matter? 10000% yes. It’s an entertainment product, so how it’s presented makes a world of difference. For years, baseball and Rob Manfried obliterated the game’s image. It caught up to them. Baseball is squarely the bronze medalist of American sport. Before we tackle the NBA, a quick MLB rundown:

- mid 2000’s: Steroids, ARod, Congress, etc…

- 2010’s: dead ball era, Tommy John’s, painfully slow games, shifts, never stealing, analytics breaking the sport

- Late 2010’s: weirdly juicing the ball for one year, the Astros, letting the Astro’s off the fucking hook, disintegrating local TV deals

-2020’s: signs of life (more steals, faster games), Shohei, Judge

There’s rebound to be had. Baseball is trending up (attendance, ratings, national conversation). The NBA is hopefully starting to take babysteps towards their own progress. Where should they start and what is already happening?

- Injuries: we just watched Haliburton, Tatum, and Lilliard blow out their Achilles. When the NBA switched to 7 game playoff series, they effectively killed true off days in favor of travel days. These games are too packed together in the playoffs. Fix this. Shorten the regular season and use the excess days to lengthen the playoffs.

- TV Partners: ESPN has absolutely blown the Finals. Good news: NBC is coming back. While they won’t air Finals games, they should push ESPN towards a better presentation. Amazon is also entering the scene. They’ve done a fantastic job with Thursday Night Football and I suspect they’re pushing similar investment into basketball.

- Player Movement: I’m a massive proponent of keeping teams together. I believe it creates a competitive advantage to teams (Lakers) assembled on the fly. For now, it appears teams are eager to break things up in order to avoid paying the Second Apron. That’s fair. My hope: we see fewer trades like the Desmond Bane deal, draft picks actually become more valuable, and teams treat the draft as their only lifeline for sustained success. Why is player movement bad? See: above (Durant). The NBA has long supported superstars jumping from team to team, but I’d caution if that’s good for fans. Is Brooklyn really a deeper basketball city because Kyrie and KD showed up 5 years ago? No. The deepest basketball cultures are defined by teams with transcendent stars that stick around (or are kept around).

Here’s where I bring it all together. To my last point, the NBA is suffering from a weird, annoying discourse surrounding its players. Some guys don’t play enough. Some guys are lazy. Some guys aren’t elite. Whatever it might be. The players spent all year whining about the coverage. Those players insulated most from it are the guys that stick in a city and deliver (Jokic, Ant, Haliburton, Brunson, Tatum). Just about every other star catches the brunt of the media and public. The more attachment players and teams can generate from local fans, the better the discourse in the national media. Basketball can move beyond the whining. Let’s all take a deep breath, wait two days, and then watch the Draft.