#hackashaq

I’d like to talk about sports and I have an angle.

Sports are vehicles driven by engines of game design.  They are collections of rules that are invented and designed and subsequently explored and evolved by the people who play and watch over time.  

My intent is to go under the hood and examine the underlying mechanisms of design -- the mechanics, the dynamics, and the aesthetics -- and discuss how they contribute to this wonderful, messy, and unpredictable element of culture that is sport. 

Particularly fascinating to me about sports is that they represent living game designs.  They undergo tremendous evolution.  They can be profoundly affected by innovations in technology or economics or cultural attitudes.  Real human beings -- one might call them game designers, though I often doubt they are actually game designers -- make decisions that have deep impacts on their sports, the way they are played, their tenor and rhythm and speed, their playability and their watchability.

Rules of sport are taken for granted.  Fans tune in and accept what they see on television as dogma.  But over long periods of time, sports often change forms so radically as to become almost entirely different sports.

Do you recognize this tennis court?  

Can you imagine basketball without dribbling or dunking?  

Do you remember tennis before Hawkeye removed almost all subjectivity from the sport?  

Rules in professional sports are tweaked and changed all the time.  It wasn’t all that long ago that the NBA started making some very significant but subtle rule changes to prohibit hand-checking and discourage fouling.

The intent was to make the game less physical, to increase scoring, to reduce the total number of fouls, and all of those things have happened in the intervening years.  In many ways, the game is aeshetically more beautiful, more pleasant to watch and experience, as the balance between the skill elements and physical elements inherent to the game design has been tilted towards skill -- shooting, passing, moving without the ball, running effective sets.  

And yet, in 2015, we witness games slowed literally to a halt as coaches and players elect to employ the “Hack-a-Shaq” tactic, intentionally fouling poor foul-shooters away from the ball.  A tactical cat-and-mouse game with all kinds of almost-interesting-on-paper side effects ensues: does the coach of the fouled player elect to remove the poor foul shooter from the game at the cost of whatever else that player brings to the table?  Does the dramatic change in pace afford one team or another a strategic advantage?  

But watching this tactical loophole executed during otherwise taut, exciting matches of great importance, between teams of players who possess elite levels of talent and ability...  is in my mind, inexcusable.  There is no excuse for this kind of shitshow to continue when there are obvious and simple rule changes that would improve the game in every conceivable way.

So it is with great dismay that I read about NBA commissioner Adam Silver reciting jock pablum like “guys gotta make their free throws” or Blazers GM Neil Olshey suggesting that “to legislate against a player having issues with one specific skill, it’s a slippery slope.”

I think both of these individuals are looking at the issue from the wrong perspective, and it saddens me, because they are the ones who make the decisions.

You are the shepherds of a beautiful sport, a sport that, at its highest level of play, is an orchestra of moving parts, the worlds’ finest athletes operating in concert, a game driven by otherworldly talents and teamwork and improvisation.

And you guys are OK with crap like this being part of your game?  Where is the basketball in that picture?  Why is the tall man grimacing?  Why does one of the best and most passionate NBA sportswriters of today call the Houston Rockets “Team DVR”, and shouldn’t we perhaps be concerned when the sports’ biggest fans don’t want to watch in real time?

For the record, I’m not single-issue when it comes to this stuff, in spite of the name of this blog.  Intentional off-ball fouling is just one issue, and one that I’ll examine in more detail later, but basketball is rife with fascinating rules that could be tweaked or changed or enforced to change the game for the better (off the top of my head:  clear path fouls, offensive interference, the number of time-outs assigned to a team during overtime, the use of video to review calls, the way draft pick ordering is determined, etcetera etcetera).  

All sports are composed this way:  complex game designs with tons of moving parts.  Rules don’t exist in a vacuum, changing a rule can have ripple effects, unintended consequences.  I’d like to look at all of this stuff, where these sports have come from and where they are headed.