I’m working on a reply to the T-Mac the franchise player Q – it’s a complicated question, and I’ve been paying attention to the latest games in consideration.

I wasn’t making the point that traditional media is a necessary evil, however. Rather, I was saying that it is a media on the way out as the internet takes over, and traditional media senses the attack. Knowing that it is an indefensible position (I’m sure everyone would love it if you could stream games from Yahoo!), it locks down those contracts pretty hardcore to ensure that does not happen, and adds further steps to ensure a steady income.
Team Owners are perfectly content to let this happen because it makes them more money, and gives them more control of the presentation of their teams. The current media distribution scheme is too ingrained for things to change too hastily (as well as the contracts being signed for 5+ years; it’s not a fast-paced business model).
Internet-based media, however, will get continuously more sophisticated at a faster pace as it is community-supported. It’ll take a few maverick owners to see the potential profit available and to try to tap that (by licensing their games to Yahoo! or another website with similar aspirations – or even on their own web site). Teams control a unique, sellable demographic, and advertisers can take control. Further supplanting this is the fact that basketball is quickly becoming an international game – and the easiest way to reach en masse the spectrum of basketball fans is to use the internet as a distribution mechanism. What would advertisers pay more for? A game limited to cable suscribers in the US, or one in which billions of possible tuners have access to? Now, of course this is forestalled while broadband access spreads (and don’t be fooled, asia, the middle east and now africa are wiring up like you wouldn’t believe – the US is 25th in broadband penetration), but my bet is that the NBA is salivating over the prospect of offering different advertising packages: buy advertisements for regions, countries, for the World – let the entire demographic worldwide see your message.
That is power, and as the old adage goes: money is power, so we can just vice-versa the literal to understand why David Stern is so eager to spread the game to Europe and beyond.

The flip side to this, is of course that large media organizations aren’t going to like being played with in such a way, and will likely seek to offset these occurences – primarily through a) owning the patents that’ll let this happen, b) paying lucrative contracts and putting restrictions so the league doesn’t shift it’s media distribution patterns, c) diverting investment from such endeavors. These are strong factors, and they will definitely slow and offset the change in distribution and economic models that sport leagues live on.
However, personally I see that there are two processes working together that’ll eventually (and I’m talking 15-25-50 years eventually) decimate mainstream media: a) community-generated content vested by people who are passionate sets up a much more capitalist “economy” of content creators that allows the best to lead and become the respected providers, and b) a switch to more easily available distribution sources and an increased distribution of information to take advantage of the attention (both public and private) being paid to the providers mentioned in (a). They will work with each other: the NBA sees content creators that it could support by allowing access to their media in exchange for selling advertising on their pages, and this increased support allows those content creators to get better, which increases the League’s openness, and so on and so forth. Since the internet is the tool that makes this easiest and most economical (and scales most readily), the content creators are those frequently termed “bloggers” – which includes the guys at ballhype, hoops-hype, sports-reference, etc. along with the abbotts and zillers.
So, practically speaking, say basketball-reference reaches its ambitions and becomes the de facto source for NBA statistics. The NBA can note this, and sets up a deal with basketball-reference: access to the entire History of gametape for statistical analysis, in exchange the NBA gets to sell stuff on basketball-reference.com. If implemented well, both sides will benefit greatly – and it’s easy to see why. Now, what’ll stop this? Traditional media that lives on being the only source of this information (ESPN with it’s massive archives) – I’m sure Disney’s next $750 million contract will set up certain cases to prevent this. The question then, is whether League execs will see value in sacrificing initial value (the guaranteed money they’d get just to show games), in order to sell more of their own content again to fans. It’ll be a gamble – one that can easily fail [I am by no means arguing that these more open distribution schemes will guarantee larger profits at first inception – in fact, if I was to guess, I’d say they’d lose lots and lots of money initially] – and that fact will create a large amount of hesitation (and hence why the current media distribution culture won’t change for quite awhile).
That, less metaphorically and more logically, was my attempted point. The dissatisfaction with traditional media, and thus the publics turn of attention to content creators on the internet is what will create the scenario for big execs to take the gamble (since the “capitalist economy of thought” that I dubbed above^ allows the best to succeed easily, since good writers are easily rewarded with increased attention – that is how the blogosphere is set up). When the NBA sees people pay more attention to TrueHoop^ than to Sportscenter when it comes to basketball, they will “reward” TrueHoop with increased content access (which only draws more attention to the NBA – it’s a win-win). Now, while this won’t happen in immediacy, I think this trend will continue and increase, and somebody’s going to take a gamble that’ll pay-off big.

My excessive metaphorism and ridiculous epicness was an attempt to make aware the scale of these shifts, as the small changes now (viewers looking at blogs for game recaps rather than sitting in front of the tube for thirty seconds of Sportscenter’s terrible analysis) will continue, increase, and have huge repurcussions (the NBA changing it’s distribution mechanism and greatly damaging the profits of large media – if Disney loses ESPN profit, then down goes ABC – a very influential news source).

Thanks for the questions, and sorry for the late reply – the schedule got hectic (I post again at 6 am, and no, I’m not just waking up).

^ [sidenote: I’m not an econ major, there is probably a real word for this, if somebody knows please let me know]
^^I use TrueHoop as an example, because it is a clear example of the policies I’m describing happening in the here and now. Think about it: what happened? A good writer started a blog, it became popular; a big content provider recognized its increased viewership, sensed a potential profit, and engaged in a mutually beneficial relationship that not only increases profits for both sides, but allowed the content readers even better content. Amazing – previously, would a writer be able to dictate to media bosses that they must be allowed to write without editor dictating what content gets headlined? No: that is a HUGE change.

in the recommended section?

He’s an obnoxious overbearing jerkoff asshole on the air. When he’s written things I’ve caught over the year’s, he’s usually a fair balanced lucid individual who expresses himself well. It’s a shame he’s let on the air as much as he is.