I don’t particularly follow basketball but the 2020 NBA Season made a compelling case for me to do so.
For one, the Los Angeles Lakers made it back to the finals after a decade. The tragic death of Kobe Bryant and her daughter in a helicopter crash at the start of the year drew people’s attention to the retired legend’s team. Then there was the challenge that another NBA great, LeBron James, faced to clinch his fourth title this time under the Lakers, his third NBA team in the course of his career. Yesterday, the Lakers defeated the Miami Heat in six games and took their 17th championship trophy.
Despite the emotionally moving backdrop, it was not only the Lakers’ amazing performance and eventual triumph that made a non-fan of basketball like me pay attention to the NBA. The league’s comeback in July inside a “bubble,” after it suspended the season last March due to the pandemic, was a story of hope and resilience that to me was worth following.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, in his speech during the awarding ceremony, used the words “resilience” and “ingenuity.” The NBA found a way to work in a pandemic and keep everyone safe, Silver said. The 2020 NBA Bubble at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida faced head on the unprecedented challenge of having 22 teams compete for a title in a pandemic.
What amazed me was how the NBA displayed a proficiency in semiotics. The Bubble did not only provide a safe environment for all the remaining games of the disrupted season. Through the use of signs and symbols and understanding their relationship with reality, the Bubble succeeded in bringing the NBA’s audience back to the basketball court as nearly as they knew it pre-Covid. I am referring to the “spectators’ sound,” the digital logos and ads, the lighting effects, and the 17-foot-tall screens that wrap around three sides of the arena showing actual fans watching the live game from their couches.
Sportscasting.com reveals that the NBA used artificial intelligence to create interactivity. It wrote: “Tap-to-cheer app is combined with video technology to make fans feel like they are sitting court-side instead of on their couch. Viewers are encouraged to tap as often as they like. At the end of the game, the amount of cheers is tallied and put up on the scoreboard.” Microphones are also strategically placed beneath the court to pick up the sound of the ball bouncing and sneakers squeaking.
The canned crowd noise, of course, could never replicate the beautiful sound and the actual presence of thousands of people packed inside a stadium of the pre-Covid era, with critics describing the simulated fan cheers as weird. These technological applications in the bubble courts may never be able to replace the real thing, but their use is a testament of the ingenuity and fighting spirit of the sports world.
And that’s just what we need in these times. Sports is not only a celebration of our shared humanity; it is also a showcase of the human spirit to conquer life’s challenges and its multi-dimensions. Innovations in sports like the NBA Bubble are showing us the way out of our despair and stupor from this pandemic.
This pandemic may have upended our “normal” lives, but it has also pushed us to reimagine our traditional approach to many facets of our lives. When this is all over, maybe next year, we can definitely be better at rewriting the rules and adapting to any constraints that come our way.