From my perspective, the Big3 league has made one fatal error – being half court. I can’t take half court basketball seriously. Regardless of the talent I can’t shake the feeling I’m watching a bunch of guys get a lunch workout in at the YMCA. Every time someone takes the ball out I die a little bit. It makes me believe that I could play in the Big3 league.
The players are old. Old guys don’t like to run, I get that. I also get that people don’t like to watch old people compete at athletics.
Imagine if the Big3 was full court. I don’t mean played on a regulation size basketball court, that would be a disaster. The Big3’s court looks to be half of a regulation NBA court. That would be perfect, so this is an easy fix – put another hoop at the other end of the court and repaint the floor.
Now we have a product that is basically a real life NBA Jam, the funnest video game of all time. I honestly believe this league could compete with the NBA. You could basically get a rebound and then shoot at your hoop from underneath the other team’s basket.
A lot of the older guys would be replaced with younger super athletes that could catch alley-oops in transition, so the games would basically be dunks and three and four point shots. I would also propose that if you shoot the ball from the opposite key, that should be worth five points.
They should also get rid of the corny team names. 3’s Company, Ghost Ballers, Ball Hogs, they all sound like they were thought up by 40 year old guys wearing sweat pants, because they were. The team names should be super explicit and not family friendly, like The Pussy Hounds, or Gang Bang.
Also each team should have one rapper on the roster, and they shouldn’t have metal detectors at the door. This will encourage a lot of crime to go down in the stands, which will come in handy during an especially boring game.
Drug testing should obviously be off the table, and steroids should be provided in a giant punch bowl in each team’s locker room.
I’m not sure how it would work, but we may want to experiment with a supercharged trampoline about a foot in diameter being installed to be flush with the court and stationed five feet from the hoop.
Additionally, there is no reason whatsoever to have coaches in this league. What could they possibly be strategizing? Most of the coaches, like Gary Payton, don’t even pretend to be coaching and just look super bored. That would be with the exception of the Power coach Nancy Lieberman, who totes a clipboard and behaves she’s coaching the Bosnian National Team in a bout against their genocide committing rival Serbia. It’s somewhat embarrassing but you can’t knock her too much for being enthusiastic.
Apart from streamlining, not having coaches would encourage many arguments amongst teammates over strategy and playing time, and hopefully at some point they would get into fist fights and beat the shit out of each other. That would be incredibly entertaining.
The league may want to consider legalizing fighting and perhaps incorporating a penalty box, meaning certain habitual linestepping goons could be forced to sit out for a half a quarter, giving the other team a Power Play, which is one of the more interesting occurrences in American sports.
The league appears to be hemorrhaging money, so I would suggest they incorporate these changes soon, before it’s too late.