Steve Nash Regrets Not Shooting More 3s | Bill Simmons’s Book of Basketball 2.0 | The Ringer
Early experiments with unorthodox ideas are rarely taken seriously. At best they are considered frivolous. Apple marketed its first PCs as a children’s toy. At worst, they are considered crazy, even damaging. The first umbrellas were thought “detestable, effeminate;” a coach driver tried to run over the first Londoner to carry one.
Sometimes it is the innovators themselves who do not take their own ideas seriously enough.
Michael Jordan retired from the Chicago Bulls in 1998. The next nine NBA champions played methodically relying on dominant interior players. It seemed crazy then to play at a fast pace, shoot lots of 3s, and start post players the size of small forwards. Yet toward the end of this stretch, the Phoenix Suns thrived tacking against that very norm. Playing a quick-shooting style nicknamed :07 seconds or less, they won three straight division titles and made two consecutive Western Conference Finals.
The Suns’ style was so promising that the entire league has since leaned even more heavily into it than the Suns ever did. Phoenix led the NBA in pace two straight times and in 3-point shooting frequency three straight times. But their rates would have ranked dead last in those categories by a wide margin in the 2022 NBA. No wonder Steve Nash, then the Suns’ star point guard and now an NBA head coach, wishes he had pushed the Suns’ style more aggressively when he had the chance.
As crypto market capitalization in particular continues to plummet from its late-2021 all-time highs, skeptics have gleefully dunked (no pun intended) on certain personalities’ struggles to articulate differentiated use cases for “Web3.” And fairly so in a sense – the Suns, after all, never made the Finals. Do these missteps mean that early-Web3 thinking is full of it, or not crazy enough?
Professional investors tend to conclude the former, partly out of habit. Founders are often advised to characterize their startups as an “X of Y.” “Uber for dogwalking” fits the mold, as does even “the unbundling of LinkedIn.” That sort of framing makes young companies easier to understand. And if both X and Y are big enough, the opportunities they chase are easier to get excited about. But transformative companies can dwarf known X’s and augur unprecedented Y’s. Even if you were excited about “MySpace for college” in 2004, would you have foreseen its potential to inaugurate and globally scale social networking (i.e., Z)?
Constraining analogies are especially misleading at the outset of S-curves for new technology adoption. There, Y’s are most in flux. Current activity around certain Web3 buzzwords is making that mistake. Take “ownership.” Open protocols enable new parties to earn or receive proprietary controls of assets that have long been spoken for on legacy platforms. But particularly when acquisition costs are high, the fullest ambition of ownership should be to develop an asset exponentially, not simply to control it. And while novel, open technology can facilitate both, the former is far more lucrative and impactful.
Krause House may be the most hyped sports DAO to date. Its tagline is: “We’re a community of hoop fanatics just crazy enough to buy an NBA team.” That may be crazy-infeasible because of finance and league rules. But it’s not crazy-ambitious. How much does the world change if someone crowdfunds a single membership in a tightly controlled business consortium? And why does that require, or even benefit from, open web architecture?
The opportunity cost of not pushing innovation beyond legacy analogy is especially high in sports entertainment. FIBA estimates 450 million people in the world play basketball. 450 of them – 0.0001% – play in the NBA. They are nearly 100% of the best 450, but hardly the largest repository of commercial and cultural value that remains untapped in the gargantuan world of basketball.
Krause House has diversified its efforts since launch. Its well-attended events at last month’s NFT NYC brought out a real, energized following. But the instincts of their tagline persist. Two of the DAO’s first accelerator startups aim to own established pro teams (in F1 and MLB). And Krause House’s biggest splash to date was buying a Big3 franchise. Two months later, reports surfaced that the Big3 was preparing for a financial shutdown.
The next NBA-scale basketball equity opportunity isn’t a franchised league headlined by pro retirees. It will instead engage the 449,999,955 worst players at a unique angle – one that only (or firstly) new technology can unlock. The operative task for early-sports-Web3 is not to play-owner as quickly as possible, but to capture a deeply undervalued spot in the global sports ecosystem as dynamically as possible.
This month, LeBron James played in a Drew League game for the first time in 11 years. The standing-room only crowd packed almost twice the host high school gym’s official capacity. (Having failed miserably to get into a Goodman League game to watch Kevin Durant also 11 years ago, I empathize with those who arrived too late.) And it streamed to over 100,000 concurrent viewers on the NBA app.
The Drew League isn’t franchised. It’s not professionalized. And while it’s nominally a league, its roots and substance are a community service calling. Nike and now Adidas have dabbled in sponsoring the Drew League through the years, just as the NBA dabbles in lending media production now. But these corporate ties have been neither deeply ingrained nor prioritized by the larger partners.
There are a few other such sports communities around the country, as well as the world. They have real, differentiated brands that exert meaningful influence even on people who are familiar with the pro ranks. What they lack are the infrastructure, tools, and authenticated strategic discipline to scale that influence into real commercial value that their wide bases of amateur hobbyists and supporters can participate in. That is where the opportunity to transform ownership with frontier technology lies.
Sufficiently imaginative Web3 ownership should aim to create and control the next behemoth franchises, not buy fringe memberships in mature legacy properties. It would be crazy not to try.