How Few Make It to the Top
In any given year there are more than 500,000 American boys playing on almost 20,000 high school basketball teams, and fewer than 2% of them will make it to March Madness. Only 60 young men get drafted by an NBA team each summer, and in the most recent draft a third of those spots went to international players.
The numbers suggest the funnel from the Amateur Athletic Union into the NBA is one of the narrowest in all of sports. And fans used to talk about the game with the reverence that exclusivity implies. The numbers are how All Stars and Hall of Famers are decided. The numbers are how greatness is determined — or debated.
From Storytelling to Sports Betting
Gambling and cheating scandals are not the only threats to sports. Because of the economic gravity of fantasy sports leagues and legal gambling, the numbers most people hear about these days have more to do with bettors making money than with players making shots.
Bill James — the godfather of baseball analytics, who coined the phrase sabermetric in the late 1970s — did not revolutionize the way the sports industry looked at data so fans could have more prop bets. The first fantasy baseball league was not started in a New York restaurant back in 1980 to beat Las Vegas. The numbers were initially about the love of the game.
But ever since sports media personalities decided to embrace faux debates for ratings — at the expense of pure fandom — disingenuous hot takes have set programming agendas, and the numbers that used to tell fans something about players are cynically used to win vacuous arguments. And after states began to legalize sports betting, athletes went from being the focus to being props for parlays.
Gambling Scandals Old and New
That’s not to say gambling wasn’t there before. In fact, while James and others were revolutionizing the way fans — and front offices — evaluated players, the Boston College point-shaving scandal was unfolding in the shadows.
The current gambling scandal surrounding Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, who pleaded not guilty to charges alleging a role in a poker-fixing scheme, is not unprecedented. It is just recent.
What Changed in the Conversation
What is new is how people talk about the numbers.
The whole idea of fantasy sports leagues was to enable fans to be their own general managers — not to make money, but because they cared about the game so much. When every game, every half, every quarter and even every shot is attached to gambling odds, good old-fashioned storytelling gets choked out. Instead of learning about players and using numbers to describe them, fans hear numbers the way private equity firms see a target’s holdings.
Nothing personal, just the data.
Why the Personal Stories Still Matter
The whole point about loving sports used to be that it was personal. Favorite players weren’t just about outcomes. They were 1 out of 500,000 who made it. Each had a backstory, and the way they got there was a big part of the connection fans felt with them.
This is why the Billups saga hits the NBA community emotionally. Drafted in 1997, the Colorado native played for four teams in his first five years before becoming an All Star and a Finals MVP. His numbers aren’t what defined him — even though those numbers were good enough to get him into the Hall of Fame. It was the resilience and character he demonstrated while trying to make it that fans admired.
In his early-career struggles, fans were reminded that making it in the NBA is hard and that everyone in the league beat the odds. It is something everyone knows, but when broadcasters come out of commercial breaks showing the betting lines before the score, it is easy to forget.
Thanksgiving, Sports and a Different Vice
Thanksgiving is a big sports weekend and thus a big gambling weekend. Fans may eat irresponsibly, but it is the other vice that raises concern in this column.
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