As I was writing this blog, my beloved LA Lakers closed a huge trade. Anthony Davis, arguably the best center in the NBA will join LeBron James on the Lakers roster next season. The trade immediately makes the Lakers a contender for the 2020 NBA Championship. Good news for Lakers fans…but to be honest, I don’t love it. The NBA has evolved into a league where the most important part of the season is not the playoffs or the regular season, it’s the offseason when trades and free agency deals happen. Free agency allows players to form super teams and it turns the league of 30 teams into a competition between 5 or 6 contenders at most. Next season the Lakers will likely have only one player who was drafted by the team (Kyle Kuzma). Will I root for the Lakers? Sure, this is after all the reality of the game today, but a Lakers championship provided by LeBron James and Anthony Davis feels a bit vacant. That said, the New Orleans Pelicans fared pretty well in trading Davis. They got Lonzo Ball, Brandon Ingram, Josh Hart and four first-round draft picks. A few weeks ago, they drafted Zion Williamson, perhaps the most exciting NBA prospect in more than a decade. The Pelicans are a young team with a very high ceiling. I only hope they give their young stars a chance to develop into the champions I think they have the potential to become – but I doubt it.
I once read that sports are a universal language. Regardless of ethnicity or what language you speak, almost everyone speaks sports. No place has that been more evident than the Olympics, where every four years, we are moved by images of athletic rivals from around the world shaking hands and embracing each other in moving displays of sportsmanship.
The NFL markets its brand as well as any enterprise in the world. I heard a comedian once say that the NFL is so popular, it has its own day. NFL football is huge. Each NFL franchise brings in approximately $400M a year in revenue; almost double the annual revenue of NBA teams and 2 ½ times as much as MLB clubs.