NBA - Main

Seeing as I’m from the future I’ll help you guys out:

We start to see interest in pro sports slightly decline across the board as young people begin to prefer using rapidly improving generative AI to entertain themselves rather than deal with ad-ridden and timeout-ridden basketball/football broadcasts. Older people still follow the league out of habit and more wealthy people begin to watch broadcasts in VR which has just gotten to the level where it can put you courtside in a way that finally feels somewhat immersive. However the league finds ways to inject ads into those VR broadcasts which are a dealbreaker for many. The league hasn’t yet realized the optimal solution to this, which is ultimately just charging a shitload of money for commercial-free VR experiences.

Sports medicine continues to improve as well. You see more guys playing longer and having longer primes than 2010s players. Injury recovery time is further reduced. Some guys who are 29-30 now are slightly more athletic and spry than they should be. Several guys among the Steph/Russ/PG/Kawhi/KD/Harden/Klay/Dame generation of players are weirdly still in the league.

The game itself is increasingly unsatisfying to watch as analytics continue to choke the spontaneity and creativity out of it and commercials continue to tax the patience of a consumer base that has very little patience for sitting thru commercials and can easily find something else to do. The players are more skilled and there’s even more talent and parity across the league.

Anthony Edwards is on the Lakers. Zion is much thinner due to advancements in GLP-1 receptor agonists. Wemby vs Chet is kind of a thing in the way Lebron vs Melo was kind of a thing but not really. Thunder are the team to beat in the west. Orlando is a good playoff team. Indiana is good. The Hawks are gradually becoming one of the worst teams in the league. There’s a new expansion team.

5 years is kind of a tricky amount of time in this era. It’s not like 2010-2015, but it’s also not like 2028-2033. That 5-year gap is where shit gets seriously different. Significant decline in pro sports interest among youth. League scrambling to keep you watching but only old heads care and even that is starting to take a real hit behind the scenes. It’s beginning to become a genuine niche activity. If you’re good at basketball irl you watch NBA basketball. If you’re not you don’t and you have nothing to do with the sport at all in your entire life. VR is now good enough that no one goes to regular season games beyond literal luddites stuck in the past. However there are lots of these people and ticket prices drop to fill the seats. Playoffs are still hopping, even if stadiums for bottom tier teams during the reg season are increasingly, eerily empty. Young people spend their time in the metaverse and use AI assistants to do anything involving this iteration of the web. They’re not on r/nba, which has become a wasteland because people can’t differentiate between a real person and a bot. Reddit tries to counter this by verifying identity, which predictably backfires because anonymity is the whole point. A few thousand stubborn people aged 30 and up remain on some bastardized version. It’s not pretty.

But keep in mind, to the average user on this sub right now, it doesn't feel as extreme as it really is, because so many older people are stuck in their ways and still dragging their families to cheap NBA games. You talk sports on some verified social media site with many of the same folks who are reading this today. It’s mostly business as usual. That said, you’re definitely reading articles on how the future of pro sports is in jeopardy. You’re noticing stuff. It feels different.

Ah, looks like I’ve gotta go back to 2150. I’d talk about that but post-humans are specifically instructed not to tell humans about anything that takes place after the singularity. Wiping my host’s memory now, have a good one and remember to take care of yourself, ie exercise and eat well. You don’t want to miss what’s coming.