🏀Scottie Pippen Diagnoses One of the Major Problems of Today's NBA 🏀

Scottie Pippen, the former NBA great who famously won six championships with the Chicago Bulls, showed some serious criticism of today's NBA in a short video clip (see below).

In this clip, Pippen suggests that these days, the players seem to have built a wall of hostility between themselves and the fans. What he is saying is that players feel more entitled and thus lack any kind of work ethic, as he suggests that too many players make a point of playing only 50 games in a season of 82 games, but want to make sure to get paid for all 82 games. Pippen points out how unfair this is in an age when ticket prices are, frankly, astronomical.

He might have a point. 

From my admittedly limited perspective, the NBA felt very exciting in the golden era of the late 1980's and especially throughout the 1990's, when Pippen and Michael Jordan and those mighty Chicago Bulls dominated. And it feels like today's NBA does frankly pale by way of comparison. 

It seems that a lot of people feel that way. Some of it is on me, because sports just is nowhere near as important as it once was. Yet, it is more than that. The lack of any real defense these days, how high-scoring the games tend to be, and the way that many of the best defenders simply step aside and too frequently allow opposing players to score easy buckets, feels like the main thing that is different from that golden era. And that means that it is difficult to really to appreciate the records being set offensively, in terms of scoring for players or teams. After all, today's NBA teams and players are not facing the challenges and physicality of defenses of the 1990's.

When I was a kid, I remember wondering if any team would ever score 200 points. Surely, that would be a huge deal.

Then there was an NBA All-Star Game where East NBA All-Stars scored 211 points. Again, however, what I saw seemed to be a shooting contest. It sure seemed like there was no presence of any defensive effort whatsoever. So it felt like a buzzkill. Yes, technically, here was a "team" that did indeed manage to score 200 points. Yet, the game was, frankly, boring. A snooze fest. It felt more like an exhibition than an actual game.

There are other problems, as well. I heard Magic Johnson suggest - with some validity - that there is an absence of any real intense rivalries in today's NBA. He mentioned the Lakers and Celtics in the 1980's, or the Bulls versus the Pistons or the Pacers and Knicks. And I began to think that he had a point. Another problem with today's NBA. There are plenty of others, too, some of which I am frankly not qualified to talk about. But the numbers don't lie, because television views have been going down significantly as of late for the NBA. 

Add to that the seeming antagonism that players have for the fans - who nevertheless pay the players their extraordinary salaries for playing a game - and you have a mess.

It makes me wonder if and when the NBA will actually be honest enough to acknowledge this and, most importantly, fix it. 

Let's see.

Players no longer respect NBA fans

https://youtube.com/shorts/KCPiCYQwp5o?si=4XakKwJFVWno0pyn