Three Reasons We Love FIBA Basketball
Full disclosure: I’m an NBA guy. I don’t watch college basketball, I catch a little bit of WNBA and, at best, I dabble in Australia’s NBL despite living in Melbourne. My heart belongs to NBA basketball. Yet when the Olympics roll around I’m hooked on international basketball for two straight weeks. This August I was all-in on our Boomers and may or may not have fought back a tear or two watching Joe Ingles and Patty Mills receive their Bronze Medals.
Despite my allegiance to NBA fandom and general belief that the NBA product is far superior, it was striking just how enjoyable the FIBA Basketball viewing experience was. So much so that I had to ask myself: is it possible that the experience is actually… significantly better?
Sure, watching fringe NBA role players deliver GOAT performances for their respective national teams makes for an incredibly good time (Patty Thrills, anyone!?) but there’s a number of other things that NBA decision-makers genuinely need to have a real look at…
THE PHYSICALITY
The most immediate and obvious difference between NBA basketball and the international game is the physicality; something FIBA has a long-standing reputation for. I have to admit, the refereeing overall was objectively worse than NBA officiating, but the difference in ideology around what constitutes a foul was refreshing to say the least. This was most evident in Team USA’s clunky start to the tournament as befuddled superstars stared down referees one no-call after another. As it turns out, FIBA referees simply refuse to buy into players going out of their way to draw fouls. The result should be enormously encouraging for the NBA in light of recent announcements around officials targeting “non-basketball moves” by offensive players next season. Why? Because of how quickly players made the adjustment. Once it was apparent that running into a defender and throwing your hands in the air (and the ball out of bounds in the process) didn’t result in a trip to the charity stripe, players simply stopped doing it and got on with playing basketball. Simple.
THE PURITY
Protecting the defender equally, or perhaps even more so than the offensive player serves to protect the purity of the game and highlights just how much the NBA’s bias toward rewarding scoring has distorted over time. Lead by the example of particularly egregious players like James Harden, the league has become overwhelmed with players focused on competing to get calls as much, if not more, than competing to actually outplay an opponent at basketball. It’s as much about who can get a call as it is who can get a bucket (queue footage of me going ballistic as yet another player falls over like they’ve been shot when someone has the audacity to close out on their jump shot and maybe, almost, nearly brush up against them).
In an international format where referees refuse to bow to the pressure of superstars milking contact, players are left with no other option than to go toe-to-toe with their opponent in good, honest competition and focus on just playing basketball. As a viewer, watching teams get up and down for a few uninterrupted minutes at a time is a dream compared to NBA games that so often feel stunted by a myriad of ticky-tack foul calls, reviews, challenges and timeouts.
A QUICK GAME’S A GOOD GAME
I never thought I’d be the one making a case for less basketball, but it’s hard not to admit that 10 minute quarters feel really nice. Like…really nice. Of course, the NBA will never consider moving in this direction for a range of perfectly valid reasons, but it does highlight just how enjoyable the game is when it moves quickly. As it stands, the NBA feels to have reached breaking point with public frustration around late game delays. Most notable was Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals where a great matchup was marred by the final 90 seconds of game time taking a disastrous 33 real-time minutes.
FIBA, on top of the shorter game format overall, simply seem to have a better knack for keeping things moving. Officials are far less inclined to review a decision, and the reviews and challenges that are completed are executed quickly and efficiently, as opposed to NBA reviews that routinely take an exorbitant amount of time and suck the life out of the game’s biggest moments. All involved are obliged to make peace with the fact that officials are human, they might get a couple of calls wrong, and the game keeps moving and we all get over it.
Then there’s the simple fact that the NBA is a business, driven by vastly different motivators than the Olympics. Despite the NBA’s efforts to refine the regulations around Timeouts, they remain a blatant play to generate advertising dollars and simply take far too long. Not only is this proven by how much quicker TO’s are completed at the FIBA level, but by NBA broadcasts routinely returning from commercial to show players and coaches mulling around clearly long-finished with any basketball reasons for a timeout and just waiting for the advertising to be finished before play can re-commence. The result, at least for me (and likely anyone else under 35), is that the game stops so often and for so long that I regularly find myself scrolling socials on my phone waiting for play to restart. Sure enough, I proceed to get a tad distracted and miss the first minute of gameplay and only catch a couple of minutes of basketball before another stoppage and…you know it….back to my phone. It’s simply not a good way to consume sports. And whilst, granted, that’s partly on me for having the attention span of a coked-up squirrel, the NBA needs to take some of the blame for delivering a product that has more waiting than it does basketball.
Sitting down to watch Olympic basketball, phone to the side and drink in hand, was incredibly refreshing if not eye-opening. The NBA remains the premier basketball league for a long list of reasons and there’s nothing to suggest that will ever change. But all the things that fans hate most about the games — long timeouts, coaches’ challenges, endless reviews — were conspicuously absent from the international format. As a league that prides itself on evolving and adapting to continually improve their product, it would serve NBA decision-makers well to have a long, hard look at some of these issues and focus on the experience of the fans who’re keeping the game alive instead of pleasing the advertisers pouring more money in their pockets! That advertising money, of course, is what keeps the product alive…but that only matters if it’s fuelling a product that people actually want to watch.
