Basketball’s Eye of Providence

The NBA is highlights-based league; the NBA is a league with full games worth watching.

The Eye of Providence, in its Western origins, is a symbol of surveillance. The all-seeing eye of god within a triangle, symbol of the holy trinity, a reminder that everything people say, do and think is being monitored — and the Western world, for the most part, has built its own contemporary systems and comforts upon that belief.

In its current form, the icon on the American $1 bill, the Eye first appeared in Pontormo’s renaissance painting Supper at Emmaus. It hangs, slightly left of centre, in a wash of divine gold light over the head of Christ, who’s seated at a small, circular table blessing a loaf of bread. It was commissioned in 1525 by the prior of a Florence monastery to hang in the dining room. A few years earlier Pontormo had sought refuge from the plague in the same monastery. Besides that fact, my favourite thing about the painting are the two cats and one small dog blinking out from between the bare feet and pooling robes of guests at the table. All three animals look a bit over it.

From there the Eye went on to stare unblinking out from blueprints for the English jurist Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison, and France’s post-revolution document The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen as a symbol of paternalistic reason (“citizen” referred exclusively to men and not to women, or slaves, who were prominent in France’s many colonies).

The origins of the Eye are debated, but one source are the Egyptians and either the Eye of Horus or a similar hieroglyphic symbol used in writing. Early scholars, especially Renaissance scholars who were obsessed with Roman and Egyptian symbols and ideology, had dicey interpretations of what hieroglyphics meant. Not unlike us, they imparted a lot of their current cultural backdrop onto what they studied. Awash in mysticism and religion, an eye hieroglyph suddenly became infused with the Christian divine, translating literally to “god”.

---

There was an answer Adam Silver gave earlier this week after the NBA’s Board of Governors meeting that made a lot of people angry. Angry, I think, because the initial and then most aggregated read into the answer came from a feeling of fear, and that fear from a sense of scarcity.

To get to the question you have to parse the framing of the question, which to me was lost in the part of Silver’s answer most people getting angry had isolated and clung to.

Tania Ganguli of The New York Times started her question by pointing out how expensive it’s gotten to watch the NBA as a fan — both going in person to games, and subscribing to various streaming services in order to watch games at home. This goes beyond the act of watching, though, and is really how fans interact with and interpret the NBA. Ganguli pointed out there were other entry points, like social media, especially for younger fans.

The question that came was: How much do you think about that, and how it will shape the next generation of fans?

Silver was immediate, “I think about it a lot,” he said. Silver referenced a cost breakdown the Times did (this isn’t it because it was published post-presser, but it gives most of the same numbers) but looked at things differently based on the understanding that most people could only “consume so many games.” He said to the extent that people were willing to put antennas on their televisions, there were something like 75 games fans could watch for free “in the marketplace” given the league’s new broadcast deals. Seven short of the full 82-game season slate.

The next part was what I’d seen clipped, and where the outrage and umbrage stemmed from.

“In addition to that, and this is an ongoing issue for the league, there’s a huge amount of our content that people can essentially consume for free. This is very much a highlights-based sport,” Silver said.

“Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, you name it,” Silver motioned to Ganguli, allowing himself a chuckle, “The New York Times, for that matter, to the extent that content is not behind a paid firewall. There’s enormous amount of content out there. YouTube, another example that is advertising-based.”

I think this is a new world now of streaming media. I think we’re paying a lot of attention to that. It was one of the discussions we had with our media partners, not just the cost of the games — and I think most people are conditioned to paying a certain amount for high-value content — but also the discovery of those games.

Again, I’m a fan of many different sports. I think we’ve all had that experience where you’re going to Google to find the game you want to watch because the world has changed it’s not just automatically in the place you thought it would be.

But ultimately, I’ll talk about it in terms of reach and how you reach your consumers. It’s interesting — because of the disruption in the regional sports network business, I never would have predicted this was coming 10 years ago, but a lot of our local games are moving back to broadcast television. In fact, we have more games on broadcast television locally than we’ve had anytime in recent history.

We’re continuing to look at it. But the ultimate answer is we think a lot about it. We know where we have mass appeal. On a global basis, we’re literally reaching billions of people. We don’t want to disenfranchise people by working with partners that are creating price points that make it inaccessible to them.

The two pain points that would result from Silver’s remarks started together, then diverged.

The first was disappointment in Silver flagging that the NBA is a highlights-based sport. The read into the comment, what seemed to turn it so toxic, was that Silver was devaluing games. And not just games, but the importance of the regular season, even the individual efforts of athletes and coaches, player personnel and media, that went into each game.

Silver never said any of that. It may have been blunt, the way he chose to point out what has emerged as perhaps the most prevalent way NBA basketball is presented, but that presentation — the proliferation of social media as new media engine, voracious in appetite, clipping content shorter and shorter, endlessly aggregating — wasn’t an onus the league or Silver set out to create. Certainly they participate in it, they cut highlight reels and interview clips for their social accounts, but so do most if not all of the major digital outlets for NBA basketball — and most of them do it before the NBA. I’ll see clips on Complex, or Bleacher Report’s Instagram feeds first, and if I want to find them again good luck to me for how quickly that one clip gets bumped down the grid by all the others succeeding it.

This is the digital media ecosystem not just of sports, but all facets of entertainment. A part of me still feels my shoulders tense every time I hear or see the word “BookTok” because books and reading, to me, was the one small island left where digital consumption had no bridge or bearing. But like the rest, that’s over.

I understand intimately the sense of scarcity that led to so many getting their own backs up from inference into Silver pointing out that yes, many people, and many of them younger, consume the NBA via bite-sized highlights. In the past year I’ve been let go from two NBA-related writing jobs. First was Dime, where the higher-ups fired our editor-in-chief, then two writers (one was me), and the last two people in editorial left for other jobs because the walls were crumbling, the site being demo’d by the wrecking ball of new ownership and the now-ubiquitous but always presented as "renegade" practice of slashing-for-profit in media. Second was the Locked On NBA newsletter that didn’t slowly trickle away but outright stopped one day in the middle of the playoffs, the news of which I got while abroad (though still waking up at 5 a.m. in Europe to write my daily league-at-large stories).

I’m not unique in losing work or the spaces in which to work. Anyone who stays in media long enough has felt some variation of the pinch, squeeze or rug abruptly gone out from under them. The nerve that Silver touched in his answer is the belief that the prevalence of short-form digital content means traditional forms of coverage will die, and their authors with them.

This feeling has borne out to be fact — to a degree.

All existing outlets that once offered long-form writing, or writing only, have adopted more diverse digital tools and footprints. This very newsletter, hosted on a “new media” (now already dated) platform that sprung out of the aforementioned digital editorial clear-cut, is its own small, proud proof. Its readers — you! — want to read and choose to support writing that is long, largely esoteric, and a varying mix of reporting, criticism and personal narrative. It's recently been selected to an anthology because of that same writing. It is strange to feel the professional walls closing in within basketball media and still have a space like this to stretch, but then the only way I’ve managed to survive in freelance work rooted in basketball writing has been with duality (or quadrality, more realistically).

All to say I get the appeal of pinning another L on Silver, especially when the version of the league he helms has so often, and so recently, gotten it so badly wrong.

The second part of Silver’s answer that got the same, if delayed, level of pushback was the inference that he was calling fans broke, and that people who wanted to watch full games but couldn’t afford to should be satisfied with what they could scavenge in the highlight ecosystem. Or even that those fans had a hand in creating said-ecosystem.

Where the NBA is complicit is in the confusing broadcast landscape it has shaped. That there are ostensibly so many streaming and broadcast partners the games themselves are divvied up in ways that often make as much sense as the league’s media partners sitting down and drawing straws. In Canada, for example, the 82-game season is split between two major broadcasters, each in turn owned by one of the country’s two telecommunications behemoths (one, Rogers, also owns the company that owns the Raptors). If you are an NBA League Pass subscriber in Canada you can only watch non-Raptors games through the service. So it’s frustrating, in that light, to hear Silver’s innocuous suggestion that fans acquire (affectionate term intentional, I’m sure) “rabbit ears” to watch what he considers free games, to jump through another hoop after navigating several up to now. Part of this, too, is technology fatigue. The sense that shouldn’t all of this be getting easier, more streamlined, instead of further fractured?

Again, the NBA participates directly in this ecosystem, profits greatly from it, perhaps did not have a clear plan for how to give its fans affordable access as we all boiled slowly, frogs in the constantly inflating consumer spending spectrum — but I don’t think Silver was calling anybody cheap. Plus, the quickest way to get a person to stop spending money is by implying they don’t have any.

If you watch the NBA then you also probably consume highlights. You’ve also probably streamed a game through a shadowy website here and there. One form doesn’t hold an inherently more noble value. Some fans don’t watch anything but still talk about the NBA with the confidence of close study (some analysts, I suspect, do too). Some fans watch entire games, and lots of them; some can’t watch games so catch up via highlights, podcasts, or discussion after the fact. Most do a little of everything while strictly sticking to nothing. Life, not the league or its broadcast partners, tends to determine the habits of fandom.

What was so interesting to me, and this is true whenever Silver speaks, is the prism he’s expected to be. Less an Oz than a mirror, and even with our trepidation toward corporate powers and systems, the ulterior motives therein, we want him to reflect back to us — in acknowledgement, assurance, and solution — every possible read and perspective. Basketball’s Eye of Providence. It’s our interpretations that stay largely singular; one thing at a time.

Silver is the NBA’s authority via position, not because he grasps every nuance the league presents. To assign him ultimate power over our perception is to back out of being our own authorities of it, to hand our critical selves over even, ironically, when we are being critical. I don’t expect him to fix the collapsing media ecosystem, the sense of scarcity it propagates. Thus far the NBA hasn’t suffered from less outlets if it has the last few majors carrying most of its water.

When we pull at one thread it limits understanding. It also tends to narrow the sense of ourselves in the world. We rush headlong not realizing we’re just running down a chute, penned in and determined toward one outcome decided in the moment, probably by fear.

---

The Egyptians made their hieroglyphics to be changeable, interpreted by the beholder rather than by a fixed linguistic system. Meanings were intentionally myriad. Purpose-built to confound or comfort, in equal measure.

In this way they could be returned to and reread; different endings, new beginnings. To read them as set, singular, would be to miss out on infinite possibilities. The eye looked in, not out.