Clinton Yates helps Craig Hoffman try to figure out why the NBA is losing steam in the ratings

Clinton Yates’ weekly visit to Craig Hoffman came on Wednesday this week, as Craig is out Thursday and Friday, so NBA All-Star Weekend was still fairly fresh in the minds of many – as was how much of a not great event the whole thing was.

“The All-Star weekend thing is a problem, because the production on Sunday did not meet the level that it had been the previous two days. Friday and Saturday weren't that bad, but whatever that game was just completely sucked all the air out of the room,” Yates said. “I was not impressed. I had it on with no sound, and I never felt compelled to turn the sound on, and that's not a good sign. I saw too many people talking, too many performances, and I'm not some old fogey, I just didn't want that at that stage of the weekend. I was not in the mood for a full dim sum course, I wanted one meal.”

Craig was cool with some of the events if they were singular parts of an event, but there was so much non-basketball that it became more about the spectacle than the event itself.

And that’s fine for that, but in addition to that weekend being panned, ratings are down again, and Yates has a general idea of why the NBA is sort of in a bit of a tailspin there:

“As it relates to basketball as a whole, and I mean this honestly: there is a certain part of the American athlete that we have solved for the basketball player. Every player, effectively, is somewhere between 6-foot-5 and 7-foot, is long and rangy, handles, and can make a shot. The players themselves are all effectively the same guy,” Yates said. “It’s not 25 years ago when different body types, different styles of humans, were all a part of the mélange, but because of the development of the American athlete, we've been kind of making the same type of person. So now, in the NBA, the game is all the same type of shots and the same type of things, because all these guys are effectively the same NBA 2K Create-a-Player.”

Yates doesn’t blame the athletes, more so the system and the development of players at young ages.

“If you've watched basketball over the past 20 years at all levels, you could see this coming. There’s 50,000 dudes named Jaylen running around AAU gyms on a weekend, all with broccoli head haircuts – of course lots of those guys are making it to the league, they’re the only people playing basketball anymore, to some degree!” Yates said. “I don't mean that pejoratively, I'm just saying that what we're doing with specialization and the AAU-ification of basketball, this is what it leads to at the top level in this particular country, and globally, that is mimicked, and you see what you see. This is not that surprising to me, the question is whether or not the core NBA fan of still enjoys that, and I think that's a different question.”

Listen to Yates’ entire visit with Hoffman above!