The NBA's image problem

Here's what I wanna know...this thug image seems to only have come in the last 10 years, so I don't think it's a race thing.

Up until the 80's and 90's, no one thought of the NBA as being full of thugs, and the league was full of black people.

So why, within the last 10 years, has the league adopted a thug image?

Originally posted by pantstickle:

Originally posted by blizzuntz:

Originally posted by pantstickle:

Originally posted by blizzuntz:

Originally posted by crzy:

Originally posted by StOnEy333:
The difference in the amount of players in the different sports is something not to be ignored, IMO. There are more players on one NFL team than 4 1/2 NBA teams.

It doesn't matter, there are still more criminals in the NFL.

Crzy, you aren't going to persuade someone who has basic statistics knowledge.

Your argument is like me saying the Bronx is safer than the rest of the united states bc there are less criminals in the Bronx than the rest of the USA.

Well, it's not like we're talking about Bronx versus Sheboygan here.

I now know where that is but don't see the point

The percentage of criminals (I'm assuming that's your point about the Bronx) isn't significantly different between the two leagues.

So while you're right that he can't compare the total number of criminals, due to the NFL having a lot more players, you can't really say it's like comparing the safety of Bronx to the entire country.

At what point do statistics become statistically significant? Is this quantifiable? Edit: I'm thinking there's something out there..

Does anybody have the numbers, preferably with a link?

-9fA

[ Edited by 9erfanAUS on May 2, 2010 at 19:57:38 ]

Originally posted by YourHuckleberry:
Here's what I wanna know...this thug image seems to only have come in the last 10 years, so I don't think it's a race thing.

Up until the 80's and 90's, no one thought of the NBA as being full of thugs, and the league was full of black people.

So why, within the last 10 years, has the league adopted a thug image?

When the fans embraced Allen Iverson as the most popular player

Originally posted by blizzuntz:

Originally posted by YourHuckleberry:
Here's what I wanna know...this thug image seems to only have come in the last 10 years, so I don't think it's a race thing.

Up until the 80's and 90's, no one thought of the NBA as being full of thugs, and the league was full of black people.

So why, within the last 10 years, has the league adopted a thug image?

When the fans embraced Allen Iverson as the most popular player

bingo

Originally posted by YourHuckleberry:
So why, within the last 10 years, has the league adopted a thug image?

The more accurate answer is when hip hop culture started to infuse with the NBA to the point where "NBA" and "hip hop" became interchangeable in the minds of many Americans.

Allen Iverson is largely responsible for this. That's pretty much his legacy. He's the most copied NBA player of all time. Just look at how many players wear the arm sleeve that he popularized.

You could argue that no one person had a greater impact on urban black culture (for better or for worse) than the Answer.

[ Edited by crzy on May 2, 2010 at 21:15:22 ]

Originally posted by GameOver:
Btw, I had this discussion with some friends last year and one was searchin the internet for other's opinions and emailed us all this, I don't know if this is his own words or he just found this off the internet (he also supplied me the definition for thug above^ so yeah) and copy pasted it to us but I think it pretty much sums up the situation rather well...

Quote:
What it comes down to is this: NBA players are highly visible – more visible than any other professional athletes in America. They don’t play with any sort of equipment obscuring their faces, and the uniforms are fairly revealing. And postgame press conferences and interviews are frequent and relatively intimate. So the NBA experience is fairly revealing, compared to other leagues.

So everyone sees these guys’ tattoos, they hear them speak, and they see the way they dress and interact, and all of these things are highly influenced by black culture (the “PC” term seems to be “hip-hop culture,” but that’s highly misleading for a variety of reasons), and so the NBA gets the full force of the public’s stereotypes and assumptions brought to bear against them. People associate black culture with the ghettos, with crime, with prison culture, etc. and they make the immediate connection between NBA players and “thugs.”

Now, this should be obviously problematic for anyone with half a brain, but very few people in the mainstream media have that.

But no one makes these connections between, say, Lance Berkman and country music and negative imagery of “rednecks.” Nobody looks around the MLB and says that baseball’s steroid problems are intimately related to rural white culture’s problem with meth, or with latin-american “machismo” or something. Nobody worries about those leagues having crime problems. We don’t do that, because most of us understand that this would be pretty f**king stupid.

For the majority of Americans (or, more simply, the majority of the NBA’s primarily white, middle-class target audience), African-American culture is something relatively alien – known largely through media representations. Those representations make the (false, I would contend) connection between being “black” with being a “thug” clear, and so the only way people know how to relate young black men with tattoos, rap music, etc. is through being a criminal. And thus we create the perception that the NBA has a “thug” problem.

Stern’s mistake is to think he can combat this through the dress code or draft age restrictions. It’s something that is self-fulfilling, and the only way to change it is to combat it at its source: media representations of black culture. I have no idea how that can be solved in the media, however, since this connection is not entirely imagined (there is an obvious fascination in “hip-hop culture” with criminality, though the relationship is complex and shouldn’t be boiled down to infatuation/endorsement/imitation), and is necessarily a product of the environment that creates it. So either more middle-class white Americans have to somehow recognize that “hip-hop culture” doesn’t equate to criminality, or the society that produces that culture has to change enough that criminality is no longer such a major problem for young black men.

Wow. That pretty much sums up exactly how I feel.

Originally posted by crzy:

Originally posted by YourHuckleberry:
So why, within the last 10 years, has the league adopted a thug image?

The more accurate answer is when hip hop culture started to infuse with the NBA to the point where "NBA" and "hip hop" became interchangeable in the minds of many Americans.

Allen Iverson is largely responsible for this. That's pretty much his legacy. He's the most copied NBA player of all time. Just look at how many players wear the arm sleeve that he popularized.

You could argue that no one person had a greater impact on urban black culture (for better or for worse) than the Answer.

I think AI wore the sleeve because he had some tattoo that the league didnt like so they told him to cover up.

Honestly, I think it's due to the large fact that around the nation, gangsters, thugs whatever you want, a large black population plays the sport versus all the other sports which are dominated by whites (minus soccer). But I feel that people have the idea that playing the sport has a sense of infused culture in it. Most basketball players collect basketball shoes as well as listen to hip hop. It so happens that a large population of those are blacks and this is where the stereotype begins IMO.

I just asked my wife this. "out of the 3 major sports, MLB, NBA and NFL which one does she think has the most "thugs" in it?" sh answered the NBA. and i asked her why she thought that and she said because all the tattoos.

Originally posted by crzy:
The more accurate answer is when hip hop culture started to infuse with the NBA to the point where "NBA" and "hip hop" became interchangeable in the minds of many Americans.

Allen Iverson is largely responsible for this. That's pretty much his legacy. He's the most copied NBA player of all time. Just look at how many players wear the arm sleeve that he popularized.

You could argue that no one person had a greater impact on urban black culture (for better or for worse) than the Answer.

If I had to point to the most influential people in terms of making the NBA "hip hop", I'd point to the Fab Five before I pointed to Iverson. They were HUGELY influential on the styles and fashions of future college players, and on basketball courts across America. I think that's where it changed, not AI.

Originally posted by valrod33:
I just asked my wife this. "out of the 3 major sports, MLB, NBA and NFL which one does she think has the most "thugs" in it?" sh answered the NBA. and i asked her why she thought that and she said because all the tattoos.

That's an honest response.

I know even I'm biased against tattoos. I was annoyed when Monta went from this



to this





The fact that he was suddenly making $11 million per year, crashing mopeds, and saying he couldn't play with a rookie Stephen Curry were bigger factors.....but the tattoos annoyed me.

Originally posted by LA9erFan:

Originally posted by crzy:
The more accurate answer is when hip hop culture started to infuse with the NBA to the point where "NBA" and "hip hop" became interchangeable in the minds of many Americans.

Allen Iverson is largely responsible for this. That's pretty much his legacy. He's the most copied NBA player of all time. Just look at how many players wear the arm sleeve that he popularized.

You could argue that no one person had a greater impact on urban black culture (for better or for worse) than the Answer.

If I had to point to the most influential people in terms of making the NBA "hip hop", I'd point to the Fab Five before I pointed to Iverson. They were HUGELY influential on the styles and fashions of future college players, and on basketball courts across America. I think that's where it changed, not AI.

The Fab Five started it with the shorts and swagger yes. But Iverson took it to a whole nother level.

Originally posted by crzy:

Originally posted by GameOver:
Btw, I had this discussion with some friends last year and one was searchin the internet for other's opinions and emailed us all this, I don't know if this is his own words or he just found this off the internet (he also supplied me the definition for thug above^ so yeah) and copy pasted it to us but I think it pretty much sums up the situation rather well...

Quote:
What it comes down to is this: NBA players are highly visible – more visible than any other professional athletes in America. They don’t play with any sort of equipment obscuring their faces, and the uniforms are fairly revealing. And postgame press conferences and interviews are frequent and relatively intimate. So the NBA experience is fairly revealing, compared to other leagues.

So everyone sees these guys’ tattoos, they hear them speak, and they see the way they dress and interact, and all of these things are highly influenced by black culture (the “PC” term seems to be “hip-hop culture,” but that’s highly misleading for a variety of reasons), and so the NBA gets the full force of the public’s stereotypes and assumptions brought to bear against them. People associate black culture with the ghettos, with crime, with prison culture, etc. and they make the immediate connection between NBA players and “thugs.”

Now, this should be obviously problematic for anyone with half a brain, but very few people in the mainstream media have that.

But no one makes these connections between, say, Lance Berkman and country music and negative imagery of “rednecks.” Nobody looks around the MLB and says that baseball’s steroid problems are intimately related to rural white culture’s problem with meth, or with latin-american “machismo” or something. Nobody worries about those leagues having crime problems. We don’t do that, because most of us understand that this would be pretty f**king stupid.

For the majority of Americans (or, more simply, the majority of the NBA’s primarily white, middle-class target audience), African-American culture is something relatively alien – known largely through media representations. Those representations make the (false, I would contend) connection between being “black” with being a “thug” clear, and so the only way people know how to relate young black men with tattoos, rap music, etc. is through being a criminal. And thus we create the perception that the NBA has a “thug” problem.

Stern’s mistake is to think he can combat this through the dress code or draft age restrictions. It’s something that is self-fulfilling, and the only way to change it is to combat it at its source: media representations of black culture. I have no idea how that can be solved in the media, however, since this connection is not entirely imagined (there is an obvious fascination in “hip-hop culture” with criminality, though the relationship is complex and shouldn’t be boiled down to infatuation/endorsement/imitation), and is necessarily a product of the environment that creates it. So either more middle-class white Americans have to somehow recognize that “hip-hop culture” doesn’t equate to criminality, or the society that produces that culture has to change enough that criminality is no longer such a major problem for young black men.

Wow. That pretty much sums up exactly how I feel.

that was a great read

I'm sure it has something to do with the "thug" image. I'm betting some guys present a thug-like image whether they actually are or not doesn't matter. Football players are covered, I really think it might be that simple. I love basketball too much to care about whether or not a guy is a thug, I might however root against someone I don't like because of his "image." But that won't stop me from watching.

Why do people always bring up fighting in NHL as if it was some kind of thuggish behavior?

People are such babies now days. There is nothing wrong with a good clean fight.