and it's got nothing to do with the games. Paying to watch an NBA game, in person or on a screen, has never been worse value for money.
It's not even because of the absurd surplus of elite talent that the league is currently enjoying, although it is astonishing how good human beings have become at basketball.
No, the reason that 2024 is the best time to get in to NBA basketball is because there are finally some really accessible and engaging ways to develop your understanding of the game beyond the fundamentals of rules and positions. We are blessed with a perfect balance between two YouTube basketball channels; although both of them are exceptional educational resources, they could not be more different in tone.
At one end, we have the Mind the Game Podcast, where millionaire superstars LeBron James and JJ Redick sip prestige wines and banter with big smiles and relentless polished positivity.
At the other, we have Awful Coaching, a guy howling into a webcam and audibly slamming his stylus into his screen as he telestrates game clips.
I've been watching both for the past month and I have learned more about basketball than I did putting 300 hours into NBA 2K. For all their slick production and ego fluffing, JJ and LeBron have both clearly spent enough time explaining their understanding of basketball to other people (idiots) to get really good at it, and for all that he is doing the oldest bit in the history of the internet, the Awful Coaching guy is really good at breaking down film and conveying basic tactical concepts (and he does the bit well enough, for what it's worth).
See it's thanks to Awful Coaching that I turned on Caitlin Clark's debut WNBA game and my immediate reaction was "wow both teams are way more organized on defense than I'm used to seeing"