The end of a basketball game feels almost completely unwatchable for me when they devolve into constant fouling, stopping the game every couple of seconds.

There are possessions where the defense has the sole objective of ignoring everything other than fouling as fast as possible, which feels boring and can stretch 30 seconds of in game clock time to 5+ minutes of back to back stoppage. I get that it might be the mathematical best play because it forces the winning team to take free throws and then turn the ball over without taking any clock time, but they could architect the rules to avoid it.

I totally agree with the block call being a coin flip.... I'd extend it to almost every other call. NBA reffing seems like it absolutely sucks for such a large scale professional league. Basketball is a fast paced game so I know they can't catch everything, but when you're watching on TV you see so many things that are so inconsistently called. Those calls end up changing the outcome of the game when one team has 20 more ft chances than the other.

> (1) intentional fouling to get an advantage. It’s the only major sport where fouling can often work to your advantage.

nitpick: This happens in soccer as well. Oftentimes it's late in the game and you see the opponent has a counterattack that has a high probability of scoring. In that case, it's better for you to tactically foul them by taking them down before they reach your box and take the yellow card.

The defense was much more on point back in the ‘90s because the defenders were allowed to be more physical without fouls getting called left and right. Nowadays it’s all a travesty, you’ve got scoresheets like 145-135 and nobody blinks an eye about it.

Horrible defense? You're kidding, right? Check out the mid-80's - 90's - early 2000's Bulls, Knicks, Celtics, 76'ers, and Pistons, or basically any team east of the Mississippi. The 95-96 Bulls were the best defensive team in NBA history. No one's played defense in the NBA for 20 years at least. And yeah, the 3 has completely changed the game into something more resembling NBA 2K1, which is exactly what the league wants.

Completely agree, but I would add the incessant need for counting, 3 seconds, 8 seconds, 24 seconds. But the current fouling situation really needs to be fixed urgently.

besides 7-footers chucking 3’s what “skills” do these new nba players have? there are maybe 10 that have any skills, the rest can shoot and that’s about fucking it.

90% of today’s players would play in D league two decades ago