By Charlie Thaddeus | Pounding The Rock (PtR), 2025-12-03 16:41:39
我目前居住在伟大的田纳西州。我爱这里。乡村音乐酒吧、大雾山、烧烤、戴维·克罗克特，应有尽有。这是一个很棒的居住地，我过得非常开心。但问题是，我知道这是我个人独有的烦恼，和你们大多数人没什么关系——我目前在纳什维尔的住址被划为孟菲斯灰熊队的本地市场。原来孟菲斯也在田纳西州。谁能想到呢？！总之，你们大概能猜到我想说什么了。昨晚，当我肩负着为一场特定篮球赛撰写评论的崇高职责时，我发现自己陷入了彻头彻尾的媒体禁播，根本看不了那场该死的比赛。
于是，晚上7点，我面临着几个选择。选项一，紧急告诉我妻子，我需要抛下她和我们的孩子们，去找个能看这场比赛电视转播的地方。这个选项对我来说有很多明显的优势，因为这样我就能避免跟两个蹒跚学步的孩子在浴缸里搏斗，转而在一家小破馆的安逸与独处中，悠闲地喝上三四瓶米勒淡啤。我能想到的唯一真正的不利之处就是，等我回家时，我们家的门锁可能已经被换掉了，我得在外面找个地方睡上几个星期。
第二个选项是整点花活儿。我想，或许我能用那些花里胡哨的VPN伪装工具，骗过联盟通行证总部的那些家伙，让他们以为我其实在缅因州的班戈。我妻子在急着要看新一季的澳大利亚版《恋爱岛》时就是这么干的，所以我想这招对我可能也管用。唉，这些努力基本上都失败了。无论我怎么折腾VPN，它都把我的网速卡得要死，传来的视频模糊得一塌糊涂，我连比分都看不清。在某个瞬间，我似乎看到了几个像素点组成的德文·瓦塞尔 (Devin Vassell) 在弧顶投中了一个三分，但这感觉不是长久之计。
那一刻，我考虑过穿上风衣，戴上墨镜和大礼帽，潜入暗网的深处，找到那些大家私下里说的非法直播源。我知道我们 Pounding The Rock 网站的同仁们绝不会容忍这种行为，但当时情况紧急。我必须亲眼看到这场常规赛。这里面有宝贵的见解等待发掘，有关键的总结需要提炼，有量化的数据需要分析。朋友们，我跟你们说实话。我点的第一个链接弹出了大概八个广告，冻结了我的整个浏览器，把我吓得不轻，于是我像个懦夫一样放弃了非法途径。请别鄙视我。
我就这样束手无策。此时比赛已到中场休息。马刺以63-59领先灰熊，而NBA联盟通行证的那些家伙们，凭借他们那坦白说堪称中世纪水平的地理转播限制，至少以38-0领先于我查理。我感到恼火、沮丧，最后只能无奈放弃，打算第二天早上再看比赛，就此作罢。你说什么？联盟通行证在本地市场对这些比赛的禁播会持续整整三天？那些家伙正在我头上疯狂暴扣，而我却无能为力。我身处地狱。
这个故事没有激动人心的结局。没有人英勇地站出来拯救我。电视没有奇迹般地自己修好。我也没能破解系统找到直播源。什么都没有。我就那么坐着。我在推特上刷到一些零星的集锦。我刷新着比赛的文字直播，就像一个维多利亚时代的孩子把脸贴在面包店的橱窗玻璃上。我看着那些小数字在第三节我们建立领先后不断更新，然后又看着同样的数字在第四节被蚕食殆尽，直到最后我们才勉强扳了回来。这看起来像是一场有趣的比赛。我本希望能亲眼看到哈里森·巴恩斯 (Harrison Barnes) 砍下31分，而不是眼睁睁地看着“巴恩斯 后撤步跳投三分命中（29分）”这行冰冷、刻板的文字出现。我也很想亲眼目睹德阿隆·福克斯 (De’Aaron Fox) 延续他火热的状态，而不是像监控股票一样看着他的总得分数字向上跳动。看到这支年轻的球队在第三节顶住了孟菲斯那波疯狂的攻势，然后重新振作起来，这无疑会非常有趣——他们前几天在明尼苏达绝对没能做到这一点。我本想亲眼看到这一切。
听着，我“理解”为什么会有这些媒体禁播。转播权已经卖出去了。这是独家的！球队需要钱！收入来源！地方体育电视网！合同义务！诸如此类。每一种解释在表面上都显得合情合理，但每当有人开始为之辩护时，我的大脑就直接宕机，宁愿去做任何其他事情。我明白钱很重要，合同很重要，NBA的商业运作远比像我这样脑子不够用的小屁孩所能理解的要复杂得多。但最终的结果是，像我这样的付费客户——一个真金白银地把血汗钱交给美国国家篮球协会，购买了不止一个、两个、三个，而是四个不同产品，只为获得观看他们体育赛事的特权——最终却被告知：“实际上，如果你想看这一场，你需要订阅FanDuel东南体育频道，请再付二十美元。”
事情怎么会发展到这个地步？我如此努力地想要热爱这项愚蠢的运动，而它却一次次地将我的努力一脚踢到太阳上去。他们难道不明白，在这个十二月一个平平无奇的周二夜晚，居然有人渴望观看一场没有文班亚马的马刺对阵没有莫兰特的灰熊的比赛，这是多么幸运的一件事吗？我真的不认为他们明白。
NBA总裁亚当·萧华 (Adam Silver) 最近表示，那些负担不起所有流媒体服务的球迷至少可以在网上观看免费的NBA集锦。在同一个回答中，他将NBA描述为一项“集锦运动”，并指出篮球片段在社交媒体上的表现有多好。我们网站的玛丽琳·杜宾斯基 (Marilyn Dubinski) 在此事发生时在这里进行了详尽报道，她一针见血地指出，这是一个总裁能给出的最愚蠢的回应。
好吧，无论如何。谢谢您，总裁先生。我今天早上看的这15分钟精心剪辑的跳投镜头，完全满足了我作为一个球迷在情感和精神上的需求，我已经准备好继续以您认为合适的任何方式来消费这个产品。我就像个傻瓜一样坐在这里。刷新着文字直播。能得到什么算什么。
WWL赛后新闻发布会
– 唔，看来这次找观点可一点都不费劲。
– 是啊，无所谓了。听着，我也不想这样。人们不喜欢这些禁播，而且解决起来很复杂等等，这都不是什么新鲜或原创的观点。我没有在这里开辟新天地。我宁愿真的去聊聊比赛本身。
– 我就唱唱反调，你至少得承认，和二三十年前相比，你现在能接触到的NBA篮球比赛已经远超你当时的想象了吧？
– 当然，我承认。这很棒。我很高兴我想看活塞对黄蜂的比赛时就能看到。这很酷。我只是觉得，他们把某些“锦上添花”的东西变得唾手可得，却把像“能够观看你真正支持的球队比赛”这种至关重要的事情，变得要么不可能，要么极其昂贵，这太疯狂了。这逻辑我实在想不通。
– 你有没有想过，在联盟通行证这样的东西出现之前，如果你住在田纳西州，你根本就看不到马刺队的比赛？你只能等到他们巡回到像孟菲斯这样的本地市场时才能看上几眼。你现在抱怨的，在某种程度上似乎是一种天大的特权。
– 是的，我想过。当然。你知道如果我作为一个外地市场的球迷无法观看马刺队的比赛，会发生什么吗？我就不会再是他们的球迷了，不是吗？我不会为这个网站写稿。我不会买球队的周边商品。我根本不会在乎NBA。我可能会把马刺队当作一个美好的童年回忆，然后找点别的事情做。也许我会去看冰球。
– 感觉那可能不是亚当·萧华想要看到的结果。
– 我可不认为这是他想看到的。
由生成式人工智能翻译，译文内容可能不准确或不完整，以原文为准。
点击查看原文：What We Learned from the Spurs Win over the Grizzlies
What We Learned from the Spurs Win over the Grizzlies
I currently reside in the great state of Tennessee. I love it here. Honky tonks, the Smoky Mountains, BBQ, Davey Crockett, the whole deal. It’s a wonderful place to live and I am having a great time. The thing is, and I know this is a uniquely me problem and not especially relevant to most of you, my current location in Nashville is considered a local market for the Memphis Grizzlies. It turns out Memphis is also in Tennessee. Who knew?!? Anyway, you can probably see where I am going with this. Last night, in a situation where I had taken on the noble responsibility of writing about a specific basketball game, I found myself dropped into a complete and total media blackout with regards to actually watching the damn thing.
So there I was at 7:00 PM, and I was faced with a couple of choices. Option number one was to urgently tell my wife that I needed to abandon her and our kids in order to find somewhere that had this game on television. This option had many distinct advantages for me in that it would’ve allowed me to avoid wrestling two toddlers in and out of the bath in favor of nursing around three to four Miller Lites in the solitude and comfort of a dive bar. The only true downside I could find was that by the time I got home, the locks to our house would’ve been changed and I’d have needed a new place to sleep for a few weeks.
The second option was to get wonky with it. I figured maybe I could use one of those fancy VPN scramblers to fool the goons over at League Pass headquarters into thinking I was actually in Bangor, Maine. This is what my wife does when she desperately needs to watch a new episode of Love Island Australia, so I figured it might also work for me. Alas, these efforts were largely foiled. Whatever I was doing with the VPN choked out my internet so badly that the video coming in was hyper blurry to the point that I couldn’t even read the score. Somewhere in there I think I saw a few pixels of Devin Vassell hit a three from the top of the arc, but this didn’t feel like a long-term solution.
At that point I considered slipping on a trench coat, sunglasses, and a big hat. I could head into the deep recesses of the dark web and find one of those illegal streams everyone whispers about. I know that’s not something anyone here at Pounding The Rock dot com would condone, but these were desperate times. I simply had to get eyeballs on this regular season basketball game. There were valuable insights to be gleaned. Takeaways to be took. Quantitatives to be analyzed. I’ll be honest with you here, my friends. The first link I clicked generated like eight pop up ads, froze my entire browser, and freaked me out enough that I backed out of the illegal option like a coward. Please don’t judge me.
So there I was. It was halftime at this point. The Spurs were up 63-59 over the Grizzlies, and the goons over at NBA League Pass with their frankly Medieval geographic broadcast restrictions were up at least 38-0 over Charlie. I was annoyed. I was frustrated. I was resigned to giving up, watching the game in the morning, and calling it a day. What was that you said? League Pass keeps these games blacked out locally for three full days after the game? The goons were dunking on my head and there was nothing I could do about it. I was in hell.
I don’t have an exciting conclusion to this story. No one valiantly jumped in to save the day. The TV didn’t magically fix itself. I never hacked the system to find a stream. Nothing. I just sat there. I caught the odd highlight on Twitter. I refreshed the box score like a Victorian child pressing his face against the glass of a bakery window. I watched the little numbers update as we built a lead in the 3rd, and then I watched those same numbers bleed away in the 4th before we scratched it back at the end. It seemed like a fun time. I would’ve loved to actually see Harrison Barnes go for 31 instead of seeing “Barnes 3PT Step Back Jump Shot (29 PTS)” appear in cold, clinical text. It would’ve been cool to watch De’Aaron Fox keep up his blistering pace instead of watching his point total tick upward like I was monitoring a stock. It certainly would’ve been interesting to see this young team absorb that wild Memphis surge in the third and then pull themselves together in a way they definitely didn’t the other night in Minnesota. I would’ve loved all that.
Look, I “understand” why these media blackouts exist. The broadcast rights have been sold. They’re exclusive! The team needs the money! Revenue streams! RSNs! Contractual obligations! Or whatever. Every explanation feels perfectly rational on a surface level, but the moment someone starts arguing in favor of it my brain just sorta taps out and wants to be doing literally anything else. I get that the money matters, and the contracts matter, and that the business of the NBA is sooooo much more complicated than a feeble-brained little boy like me could possibly come to terms with, but the end result is that someone like me, a paying customer, a customer who has quite literally handed his own hard-earned money to the National Basketball Association across not one, not two, not three, but FOUR different products in order to gain the privilege of access to watch their sport, ends up being told, “actually, if you want to watch this one you’re gonna need FanDuel Sports Southeast, that’ll be another twenty dollars please.”
How is this where we’re at with things? I’m trying so hard to love this stupid sport, and it keeps taking that effort and punting it into the sun. Do they even understand how lucky they are that someone out there is DESPERATE to watch the Wembanyama-less Spurs face the Morant-less Grizzlies on a random Tuesday night in December? I really don’t think they do.
Adam Silver recently said that fans who can’t afford all the streaming services can at least watch free NBA highlights online. In the same answer he described the NBA as a “highlight sport” pointing to the way basketball clips perform on social media. Our very own Marilyn Dubinski thoroughly covered it here when it happened and she beautifully hit it on the head right from the jump by calling it the dumbest response a commissioner has ever given.
Well, anyway. Thank you, Sir. The 15 minutes of tightly edited jump shot footage I watched this morning completely satisfied my emotional and spiritual needs as a fan and I am ready to continue on consuming this product in whatever way you deem fit to present it to me. I’ll just be sitting here like a sucker. Refreshing box scores. Taking what I can get it.
WWL Post Game Press Conference
– Well. Certainly didn’t have to look too hard for a take on this one.
– Sure, it’s whatever. Look, I don’t want to be doing this. It’s not a new or original take that people don’t like these blackouts and that it’s complicated to fix them, etc. I’m not breaking new ground here. I would much rather just actually talk about the game.
– Just to play devil’s advocate for a second, can you at least acknowledge that, compared to 20 or 30 years ago, you have more access to NBA basketball than you could’ve possibly dreamed of?
– Sure, I’ll acknowledge it. It’s great. I love that I can watch Pistons-Hornets if I want to. That’s groovy. I just think it’s insane that they make certain things that are “nice to haves” easy, and they make crucial things like “being able to watch the team you’re actually a fan of” somewhere between impossible or expensive. That just doesn’t track for me.
– Is there any part of you that thinks about the fact that, you know, before something like League Pass existed, you wouldn’t have been able to watch the Spurs at all if you lived in Tennessee? You’d be relegated to ONLY catching them when they rolled through a local market like Memphis. You’re sort of complaining a lot about something that seems like an insane privilege.
– Yea, I think about it. Sure. You know what would happen if I didn’t have the ability to watch the Spurs as an out of market fan? I wouldn’t really be a fan any more would I? I wouldn’t write for this website. I wouldn’t buy the merch. I wouldn’t really care about the NBA at all. I’d probably just think of the Spurs as a fond childhood memory and find something else to do. Maybe I’d watch hockey.
– Feels like that probably isn’t the outcome Adam Silver is looking for.
– Can’t imagine it is.
By Charlie Thaddeus, via Pounding The Rock