The NBA released an FAQ for any fans that might have some questions about their new favorite sport. This is a good idea in theory, because it’ll allow people without much knowledge on the sport to quickly educate themselves so they can get right into the action when the season starts. Of course, not everything goes as well in practice as it does in theory. Here are some highlights.
The FAQ starts off with a very simple question. What is the NBA, and how many teams are there? Not only does the FAQ answer these perfectly, but it goes a step further by giving a list of every NBA team out there. This way new fans can jump right to the webpage of their new favorite team, or perhaps find the team geographically closest to them.
Unfortunately, things go off the rails quickly. The question “When was the NBA established” never actually gives a date or time as to when the NBA began. Sure, you learn a cool origin story about how the NBA started, but that doesn’t answer the question.
The NBA rebounded well however by jumping into how many playoff teams there are, and giving fans a section full of the greatest players to ever play the game. It’s not just a list full of names everybody’s heard of too like Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson. The list also includes guys like Tim Duncan, Steve Nash, John Havlicek, and a few other names that a new fan may have not heard before.
Unfortunately, it goes back into the disappointing by bringing up the NBA Replay Center, which every NBA fan in the world knows is in Secaucus, New Jersey! Why do all the NBA fans know this? Well every time there was a review last year the broadcast would inevitably cut to a shot of people watching games, and providing replays, without actually making any impact on the game. The FAQ of course doesn’t mention this in the next section, how do referee reviews work, and merely provides a link to an explanation on reviews.
The rest of the FAQ is fairly basic, and does what an FAQ should by explaining questions that fans may have. As far as an FAQ goes the NBA did a decent job, but there’s too many sections that, rather than provide a simple explanation, just give a link an to official explanation. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of an FAQ?
There’s also FAQ’s out there for the WNBA and the D-League. These are mostly the same, but there’s some key differences that make them a little more helpful.
Both FAQ’s provide a section on how to watch the D-Leauge, and WNBA, which is a much needed question. Finding games to watch isn’t as simple as flipping to ESPN every Friday evening during the season, and that goes double for the D-League. Both FAQ’s also provide places to follow them on social media making it easier than ever to keep pace with two relatively small leagues.
For the most part the WNBA and D-League FAQ’s are more helpful than the WNBA FAQ, but that might just due to them being not as big and therefore having more important questions to answer. Still, the NBA FAQ could probably use a few improvements, because while helpful, it leads a lot to be desired for fans that want to get deeper into the sport.