Post #9: The NBA is a soap opera

The NBA is the premiere professional basketball league on earth, but it’s also the longest running soap operas on earth.

I’ve heard it said that what many NBA fans desire most out of a game, season, or player’s career is a good story. Beyond the Xs and Os of the game, fans want underlying narratives that give greater meaning to what is ultimately a trivial game where large men try to put a ball through a round hole and try to prevent other large men from putting a ball through a different round hole. Without a good story, people wouldn’t care nearly as much about the league as they do. While the games themselves are undoubtedly entertaining, it’s the expansive dramatic narratives that we create around players, teams, and other NBA-related figures that give the league it’s real allure.

While a pro sports league and soap operas might not seem to have much in common at first glance, there are many shared elements between the two mediums. At the core of the league is its players (characters). There’ve been some larger than life personalities in the NBA, and they can hold fans’ attention in the same way that a beloved television character can. Additionally, seasons of basketball and seasons of television are both similarly delineated separations of the chapters of the overarching grand narrative. Over the course of these seasons, fans obsess over player (character) development, plot twists, betrayals (a la Kevin Durant to the warriors), scheming, secrets, rumors (Woj bombs), and many other elements that you might find in your average soap opera.

There are new episodes almost every night, making it a consistent and reliable form of entertainment that gives people a sense of comfort and dependability. There are also long running characters that become mainstays on the “show”. Major characters like Lebron, MJ, and Shaq become familiar to the audience, while lesser known characters stick around for a couple seasons, but are quickly forgotten. But even the most central characters eventually give way to a new generation of characters to take their place.

Just the sheer length of the NBA’s history is another draw for fans looking for a good story. There’s over 75 years of detailed, well documented “reruns” of all the past characters and teams that can be used to reference and compare the stories being told today. This extensive recorded archive gives the leagues a sense of permanence, as if it has always been around and it always will be.

The culture that fans have built around the NBA has also added to the grand metanarrative of the basketball world, blurring the lines between audience and performer. Fans, particularly famous ones, sometimes become a part of NBA lore themselves. Spike Lee, Jack Nicholson, Obama, Drake, and Billy Crystal are all examples of pop culture and political figures that became part of the soap opera, usually by interacting with players from their court-side seats or hanging out with them off the court.

The NBA has a tendency to seemingly intersect and collide with politics, popular culture, and social issues more than any other sports league in America (particularly over the last 15 to 20 years or so). These intersections have further asserted the NBA’s dominance as the most popular and compelling live action soap opera of the past century.

The NBA is a seemingly never ending story that has been going on for nearly 80 years, with a constantly rotating cast of players, coaches, executives, and other basketball adjacent figures. It is these people and their stories, on and off the court, that ultimately attract basketball fans and keep them coming back decade after decade.