Bubble Sports

Credit: Ninaras

You can’t force something to be something it is not. During this pandemic, people are learning this the hard way (wear a mask!). Counterintuitive as it may seem, the sooner we embrace the reality we are in, the sooner we can get back to “normal” and perhaps enjoy the journey a bit more. 


Take sports for instance. There are all these plans to “restart” professional sports, none more extreme than the NBA Bubble Plan. As hard as it will be to pull off, why should the NBA spend all this energy to make a worse, literal version of itself? There’s always going to be an asterisk on the winning team anyway, so why not reinvent yourself? This is the perfect time to try something new and break out of the boring, old, repetitive basketball season.


If you were given four months and the complete attention of superstar athletes with nowhere else to go, would your best idea be a summer basketball league? If I were a content strategist for the NBA, I would be jumping out of my seat with ideas for the bubble season:


  1. A Hard Knocks show for every team in the league, simultaneously. It’s like Red Zone for reality TV.

  2. 1-on-1 tournaments, 3-on-3 tournaments, skills tournaments (like the NFL combine or All Star contests). Let’s put some GOAT questions to rest. 

  3. Heck, video game tournaments and chess tournaments. What other skills can these players put on display?

  4. Reality TV shows with superstars: cooking, lifestyle, business, fitness, coaching. Why do a peloton workout when you can get worked by Lebron James? Take a master class from the NBA elite.

  5. “Life in the Bubble” - A Big Brother show with NBA superstars, and learn what it takes to run a professional sports league.

  6. Many seasons for the price of one. You can move from live sports to programmed sports, by playing four seasons in quick succession and airing them at later dates. This allows for more relevant, scripted shows around the seasons, with in-game commentary from the players themselves, and more suspense (the NBA loves dragging out series).

  7. Experiment with different rules: Get rid of the TV timeout, no free throws, no charges or blocking fouls, eliminate all non-flagrant fouls, etc.

  8. Allow the fans to pick matchups, playoff formats, and even the teams. 

  9. Superfan game shows, where winners get the option to quarantine and hang out with their sports heroes for a week in the bubble.


You would need to go through contract negotiations and a lot of other hoops to make this happen, but any one of these would pique my interest, as a casual basketball fan, way more than a compressed season. 


It can take just a little creativity to adapt to the new reality.

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