Golf, in America, has two major advantages over tennis. First, it’s more popular to play, likely owing to its social nature and lower cardiovascular demands. Second, it has Tiger Woods.
I’d imagine this counterfactual was covered back in 2010, when the Tiger Woods scandal rocked the sporting world, but even if it was, 13 years is a long time. It’s worth revisiting. Where would golf be if golf never had Tiger Woods?
It’s ironic, but Tiger Woods’s greatness wasn’t built on the golf course. That’s where its foundation lies, of course, but Roger Federer was a more frequent major winner in tennis than Woods was in golf, and Federer does not compel in America the way Woods compels. Tiger Woods became the face of golf by winning, but he became one of the faces of American sports by being who he was. The red shirt on Sundays. The video game. The Nike commercials. The historic act of dominating the whitest sport as a Black man. Tiger Woods didn’t just dominate golf on the course. He dominated off the course, becoming an icon for an entire generation of American fans. Federer is an imperfect comparison, but the point stands: Tiger Woods transcended golf. By doing that, he carried golf upwards with him.
Where would golf be if golf never had Tiger Woods? It would likely still be more popular stateside than tennis, with three times the proportion of majors held on American soil and the premier global governing body United States-specific. It would still likely have a more popular premier event than tennis, with the Masters unique in its timelessness and either brilliantly or conveniently positioned at a dead zone in the global sports calendar. Yet, where would golf be? For an entire generation, Tiger Woods was all golf was for roughly fifteen years. That generation—my generation—is now taking over the coverage of sports. We tuned in as children to watch Tiger Woods, but the why doesn’t matter now. The important thing is that we tuned in. The important thing is that because we tuned in, golf wove itself into our sports world in a way tennis never did. The Masters leads sports coverage every year on the second Sunday in April. Tennis hardly ever does. That might not be the case without Tiger Woods.
Make the Whole Draft a Lottery
And make the odds for every team 1-in-30.
In the latest example of the NBA’s twisted incentives, the Mavericks appeared to successfully throw a game Friday night, avoiding the Play-In Tournament and increasing their chances of retaining their first round pick, which will be traded to the Knicks if it isn’t in the top ten. The NBA is reportedly investigating, but they’re the guy in the hot dog suit looking for the driver of the hot dog car: They’re the ones who just drove through a window.
The solution to tanking is clear, and it’s much fairer than the current system: Stop awarding draft picks based on regular season record at all. Start awarding them either randomly or in some sort of rotational order. If you stop rewarding intentional losses, teams will stop losing intentionally. If teams can’t compete for titles without a convoluted process involving intentional failure, those teams need new management. Rip off the band-aid. Get rid of this shit.
There’s hope that the NBA might actually reach this destination, because the NBA likes itself some televised gimmicks. There’s also hope that the NBA might actually reach this destination because tanking is a bigger problem in the NBA than it is in the NFL, the NHL, or Major League Baseball. We see football fans cheer for losses every year, but it’s usually only on the fringe. In hockey and baseball, draft picks bear fruit so far down the line that there’s more time for things to go wrong, so the payoff is lower. In basketball? The balance of competition and the value of draft picks dictates that the team which finishes with the worst record in basketball is closer to a championship in the long run than most playoff 8-seeds. Tanking doesn’t have to be a problem—it was rather exciting when the Sixers brought it so evidently out into the open—but it’s reached its critical mass, and the Play-In Tournament did not do it away.
It would be one thing if tanking was a problem isolated to itself. It isn’t isolated, though. It’s a loud part of a gigantic issue. The NBA’s rules have unintentionally built a world where the regular season is almost entirely meaningless, to the point where the association is pushing for a minimum number of games players must play to be MVP candidates, and that minimum is only 71% of the games in a season. There’s tanking, but there’s also load management, and there’s also an absence of consequence even if all the players are on the floor. There’s a reason player prop bets are so popular in the NBA gambling world: The games don’t matter. There’s a reason even Christmas games hardly beat the best cable-broadcast regular season college basketball*: The games don’t matter. When it only matters in marginal ways which teams win and lose, how are fans to be asked to care?
Just as baseball reached a point of needing rule changes with pace of play and balls in play, the NBA needs to go to the toolbox to fix the disaster which is its regular season. This is just one tool, but with playoff contraction not an option, given how great the current NBA format is, both in terms of ratings and (the driver of ratings) entertainment value, this would at least constitute throwing the emperor a towel. A towel would help.
*The 2022 UNC-Duke regular season finale, Coach K’s last home game, averaged 4.0 million viewers on ESPN. The 2022 NBA Christmas games averaged 4.3 million viewers across ABC and ESPN. More people get network television than get cable television, and if the professional version of a sport is close to losing to the college version, there’s a major problem.
Could the Bulls Keep Their First Round Pick?
The Bulls’ 2023 first round draft pick, owed to the Orlando Magic from the Vucevic trade, is protected. Specifically, it’s top-four protected, which means that if it lands in the top four, the Bulls get to keep it, losing next year’s first round pick instead (that one’s top-three protected, so there’s a scenario where the Bulls keep their first-round picks in perpetuity and the Magic get two second-rounders in a few years in their place). What are the odds of that happening?
It depends a little on who emerges from the NBA Play-In Tournaments. At the moment, the Bulls are slated to be “Team 12” in the NBA’s lottery odds, which is accompanied by a 1.7% chance of winning the lottery in each iteration. If the Thunder make the playoffs, though, the Bulls will become Team 11, climbing to…1.8%. If the Bulls, meanwhile, can win a pair these next few nights, they’ll move out of the lottery and lose the pick no matter what.
To make things a little more exciting, that 1.7% chance isn’t as low as 1.7%. The way the lottery works is that as every pick in the top four is awarded, the team which receives it is removed from the possibilities for any remaining picks. Put more simply: Every team can only get one pick within the top four.
What this then means, mathematically, is that the Bulls’ chance of getting the first pick is 1.7%, but their shot at the second could be as high as 2.0%, and their shot at the third could be as high as 2.4%, and their shot at the fourth could be as high as 2.9%. Those odds aren’t good, but collectively, they could raise the Bulls’ chances by nearly a third.
Overall, if the Bulls do hold onto their status as Team 12 in the lottery, they’ll enter with an 8.0% chance of a top-four pick and a 92.0% chance of no first-round pick. If they move to Team 11, those numbers become 8.5% and 91.5%. Again, those aren’t good, but as the saying goes:
We’re saying there’s a chance.
A Good Start From the Starters
This is skewed, because Justin Steele and Marcus Stroman have started half the Cubs’ games to date, but entering tonight, Cubs starters are tenth in both FIP and fWAR. With the series victory over the Rangers, the Cubs are still at an even .500, and if .500 is the goal for the season, as .500 would show progress, that means they’ve effectively shortened their task from a 162-game challenge to 154, a not-meaningless step forward. They’ve lost a series to a playoff team, they’ve won a series against a team which might make the playoffs, and they’ve split a pair with the Reds. That’s not the worst you could see.
The real excitement surrounding Stroman and Steele lies in the possibility they could be a legitimately competitive 1–2 punch. They won’t be Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling (they probably won’t be Drew Rasmussen and Jeffrey Springs), but the problem for the Cubs hasn’t been, on paper, the rotation’s back end. The back end is volatile, but thanks to the youth movement, it has upside. The problem has been the front end, which makes what Stroman and Steele do a lot more important than what Jameson Taillon and Drew Smyly do (although Taillon does still have a 2.06 FIP and a 3.03 xERA, because Taillon has been unlucky so far).
We don’t believe in the Cubs to make these playoffs. That hasn’t changed. But if Stroman and Steele can both be top-25 pitchers, as they currently are, .500 becomes a reasonable hope. Nice opportunity this week to grab two wins against the Mariners, who are a little overvalued by public sentiment and only get to pitch Luis Castillo once.
