So you don’t subscribe to the idea that if you have a dominant team, more people would tune in—love them or hate them?

It’s fine to have dominant teams, as long as they’re dominant because they competed in a fair system, as opposed to because they had deeper pockets or more resources than the other team. Just look at the NFL. I mean, obviously they have a hard cap, but you have teams that have had real dominance, whether it’s skill, part luck, players not getting injured, or a player breaking through in a way that wasn’t expected. I think it’s wonderful. It’s very different if you have dynastic teams because they’re able to spend that much more than other teams. And there’s no doubt that it’s not a perfect correlation, but it correlates in terms of your ability to spend to cover over mistakes. So going into the season, I’m, number one, excited about the immense amount of competition we have around the league. What I’m most excited about now is that for a younger generation of fans, in our new national deals, every single game will be available on a streaming service—Amazon, Peacock, ESPN is direct to home now, including those ABC games. So for the convenience, it’s great that you’re carrying a television with you. You don’t have to get to a TV and you don’t have to subscribe to cable. Most importantly, I’m excited about the transformation we’re seeing of digital technology and A.I. technology, which is going to allow us to tell stories—what [Fox Sports C.E.O.] Eric Shanks is so good at, what Dick Ebersol was so good at—to tell better stories around these games, because we’re going to be able to offer the games in so many different ways.  Different permutations, customized games, more fields of information, shopping, chatting, betting, gaming—all those things that will create more engagement among the fans. It’s really early days on that. Amazon’s done some really interesting things around the NFL. Peacock did some amazing things around the Olympics. And, of course, Disney and ESPN.

Let’s talk about technology, which is coming so fast now. But it’s taken us a long time to get here.

When Andy Jassy was still head of AWS—he wasn’t our partner at the time, but he was a fan, and we were building a relationship—he essentially said, “If I look at all my clients at AWS, when I think of the ones who use their expertise to control the top of the stack from a technology standpoint, nobody is going to understand how to produce the NBA as well as you all will, and that you can do so in a way that maybe would’ve been cost-prohibitive when you entered into your relationship with Turner.” Tim Cook was making the same point to us. I remember roughly 20 years ago, for every new aspect of our website, somebody would come in and say, “Well, that’s another eight engineers, that’s another 12 engineers. You need a widget now—that’s six more engineers.” I was like, We can’t scale this for one website. We ended up partnering with Turner on that, and they invested enormous resources, because they had the scale, with their own sites. But essentially, what those two technologists were telling us five years ago is now, with maybe 100 people, you can do what used to take thousands of people, and then you can partner with large technology companies like us. What does that mean for viewers? I think it means, in essence, optionality. Let’s just use betting. I think 60 percent of the United States can place a legal bet on a basketball game. So it means that, number one, if you want to bet—on your phone, you can be following particular fields of information or multiple games at once. It also means if you don’t want anything to do with sports betting, if you have a youngster in your home and you don’t want them to see those fields, it could be password-protected. Click, click, all those fields are gone, and you don’t have to experience any sports betting ads or an announcer commenting on probabilities. If you’re watching Shai Gilgeous-Alexander—he’s known for his taste in fashion—and you see his outfit as he’s walking in the arena, and say, I like that tie, you can get that. Or if you like his shoes, or you want to learn more about him: He’s from Canada, where in Canada is he from? How did he end up in Oklahoma City? Oh, it turns out he was traded from the Clippers. Ways to better understand the players. You go to a game in an arena, some people are all in: Don’t talk to me. I just want to watch the game. In most cases, you have less information than a fan watching at home, because there you’re listening, you can see replays. But now, you see people with their phones out. I see people sitting in front of me and they’re often looking at replays. They’re following it. They may be betting, they may not be. This is sort of fascinating. Or, they may be doing things that have nothing to do with the game. They may be texting with their friend, or they may be on some other website, or maybe they’re sitting next to a colleague and they’re talking about work. So if you have an arena with 18,000 people, arguably, it’s 18,000 different experiences. And I think that’s the ultimate goal, when you ask what’s coming with streaming, is to say, I want my own experience. How is A.I. going to affect what you do at the NBA? My hunch is A.I. is going to change the sports experience. It’s going to happen fairly quickly. We’re going to see as much change in the next few years as you and I have seen—with maybe the exception of high-definition—in our television experience in our adult years. It’s going to be amazingly more engaging, and I think it’s one of the reasons that you’re seeing these valuations. The marketplace is saying there’s nothing like this premium, live content that people can experience. And as a result of A.I., people may have more leisure time, too, to engage in these activities.

On Peacock’s plan to put analysts next to the bench during NBA games: “I know it’s smaller $$$ in the grand scheme of things—but those NBC bench reporters are taking two courtside seats for each game?! How much do those seats go for? Depending on the city, matchup, etcetera—could be $1K, $2.5K, $5K, etcetera. That adds up over time!” —A D.C. lawyer

On saving college sports: “I finally saw a Cody Campbell commercial this weekend, and the first thing I noticed was the claim of ‘$4 billion to $7 billion,’ which is a huge range. I’m in construction. If we told a tech firm that their data center is going to cost $4 billion to $7 billion to build, we’d get laughed out of the room.” —A Varsity subscriber

Have a great weekend. See you Monday,

John