NBA Twitter Doesn't Get It.

As I lay writing this with my newborn sitting and squirming a couple of feet over, I have to admit I’ve gotten a little discouraged by NBA Twitter.* 

Ok, I can see your eyes rolling… NBA Twitter always has had problems. Some of them are deep, and many of those are just microcosms of problems in the world we live in and the society said tweeters are from. But this problem was new. Or at least it feels new. 

Bradeaux (@bradeauxNBA) posted a video of 20-year-old Amen Thompson dunking from the Free Throw line. At 6’7”, with true point guard skills and generational speed and quickness, Thompson is a tremendous talent that looks like he will raise the ceiling of Houston’s future dramatically.

And at 20 years old, he’s dunking from the free-throw line in this video:

“6’7” PG’s aren’t supposed to have athleticism like this.” - Brad. 

Seems simple.** But NBA Twitter went into a full-on fit. The quote-tweets and replies were full of people actually trying to argue that dunking from the free throw line, at 6’7,” is common amongst NBA players. “He’s supposed to be doing that” or “I can find over 25 dudes that size that can do that” or “It’s the NBA they can all do that” filled up the timeline. 

I’ve never seen a bunch of dumber bunch of try-hard wannabes in my entire life. 

To start, that’s just emphatically untrue. NBA 2k, the video game, is far from an exact science… but they do allow you, online, to search and populate lists of players by attributes (including height). They list 55 contracted NBA players listed at 6’7,” and I have to say there are less than four players*** who I could begin to confidently say could dunk from the free throw line. 

But that wasn’t even necessarily the most egregious part. People on the internet are absolutely allowed to be wrong, and more often than not are.**** It was another “genre” of response that is even more troubling. Fans saw a 20-year-old kid, dunking from the free-throw line, and were indifferent. “Who cares?” “We’ve seen that” “He still can’t shoot” and the ilk all also filled the replies and quote tweets. 

If basketball “fans” can’t find enjoyment in watching a guy jump fifteen feet to dunk, what are they going to find enjoyment in?

The underlying ickiness of NBA Twitter is that an astounding amount of people on it don’t actually like, or at least don’t actually watch much, NBA basketball… or at least it looks like that. It’s not that “analytics dorks” are doing anything wrong, or “old heads” don’t think anyone will ever be better than Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, because “analytics dorks” and “old heads” exist in fans of every sport. “Fans” that spend their fandom hating each and everything about it don’t. 

This becomes somewhat more intertwined in basketball than other sports because of how homogenous the NBA brand of basketball has become. I call it the Mike D’Antoni seven-seconds-or-less innovation, and others lean into other creators of the phenomenon, but the space-and-pace brand of basketball, with a high value on jump shooting. A team shooting 15 three-pointers used to be shocking, but in 2022-23 the league average for 3-point-field-goal attempts as a team was 34.2. 

Wherever it’s from,, and however you identify it, teams largely run a handful of sets and actions with the majority of the players outside the three-point line, exploiting a one-on-one mismatch, often after a screen or series of them, and punishing collapsing/rotating defenses with long jump shots. Every team does this for large swaths of, if not all of, 48-minute games. 

Shooting threes as well as the average NBA guy does now is incredible, and the average skill level in the NBA has skyrocketed as defenses grow to take advantage of non-shooters. But are we losing the plot if we’re not excited to watch dunks? Further, how much is lost if we’re not even entertained by dunks that defy gravity? Dunk Contest TV ratings aren’t as bad as some media outlets***** want to act like they are, and Mac McClung put on an incredible show in 2022. But it’s hard to ignore that the lore around the Dunk Contest is not what it used to be. 

Are people bored with dunks? And if so, is that a bad thing?

Some would argue that it’s natural. Every generation of fans find something different about the sport they love, and some love certain sports more than others. My generation, for instance, is far less obsessed with boxing than two generations prior. The artistic side of the one-on-one battle that is boxing has been largely lost. But the violence of boxing? That’s filled with UFC, MMA, and, to some degree, football. In basketball, the shift may 

I would emphatically argue****** it is an awful thing. What makes basketball different from so many other sports is the grace required to play it at a high level. Further, I’m an “I like to watch dunks” guy and an “I like to watch cool passes” guy where there are a lot of “I like to watch jump shots” guys and “I like to watch defense” guys.

I already liked basketball, but I fell in love with basketball watching Steve Francis******* and Vince Carter have the most memorable dunk contest of all time. The leaping and twisting through the air was matched only by the power the ball spiked off the ground after being thrown through the hoop. 

It’s not that you have to watch basketball how I do, or how my brother does, or how my friends do. Part of the beauty of basketball is that there are so many different moving pieces and so many things that can happen in an instant. The in-stadium entertainment is playing Jaws music, Doris Burke is giving someone a hard time, and BOOM Giannis Antetokounmpo creates a highlight dunk that will live on YouTube for the rest of the history of the site. BOOM Steph Curry hits four shots in 37 seconds and erases a double-digit deficit. BOOM Nikola Jokic throws a no-look pass that takes the hair off of the ear of a defender looking that was the wrong direction for an assist.  

But if the future of basketball can’t enjoy something as athletically impressive as jumping to dunk a basketball from 15 feet away, is there hope to ever enjoy any of it?

When people stopped enjoying boxing, it’s not that it went away. Sure, it wasn’t the same… but Friday Night Fights was still on TV 50+ years after Ali was in the ring. Boxing’s fading to the background, while other violent sports have replaced their television time, was extremely gradual. I remember Pacquiao vs. Mayweather was must-watch pay-per-view television less than ten years ago, even if it was uniquely billed as a pair of GOATs. 

I don’t know if what has happened to basketball is a saturation of highlight reels, where the extraordinary feels commonplace because it’s so accessible. Maybe it’s that it’s mid-July and the dunk happened in an empty gym. Or maybe it’s that it has become more fun to sit on Twitter and be mad about basketball than it has to actually watch it for enjoyment. Hate-watching drives more viewership across tv networks than anything. See: argument television on sports channels and large news outlets. 

If it’s that, while that type of engagement doesn’t mean basketball is going anywhere anytime soon… I feel like it’s worse. 

—   —   — 

*Its Momma calls it Twitter, so I’mma call it Twitter 

** And true.

*** KJ Martin, Andrew Wiggins in his younger days, Jonathan Kuminga, and mayyyyybe OG Anunoby. Maybe. 

**** He said, after checking his screen time and seeing that he himself is on the internet entirely too much…

***** Certain outlets really like acting like the NBA is hurting for viewers, and that seemed to really ramp up when the NBA began leaning into social justice issues

****** And I will continue because it’s my substack. If you want to argue something else, comment or write your own.

******* I always include Steve Francis because people forget about his performance because Vince Carter won and his dunks were much better.