How Fantasy Leagues Are Killing Fandom
While fans have always dreamed up trade scenarios, in recent years the business of sports sometimes feels like it will subsume the games entirely. NBA reporters gripe that the offseason, with its flurry of free agency rumours, has become busier than the season itself. After all, what basketball moment could ever match the absurd theatre of The Decision, Lebron James’s hour-long ESPN special built around a one-sentence announcement? And, a few years later, what single Cavaliers game could be a fraction as emotionally satisfying as the heart-string-pulling narrative of Lebron’s return to Cleveland?
There’s no single reason for this shift. As Will Leitch argued in a piece for New York Magazine, the rise of fantasy sports means we’ve become intimately familiar with the intricacies of roster construction. And the salary cap era in basketball and hockey has meant that barstool GMs musing about trades now need to have a certain knowledge about cap rules and contracts in order to flout their pie-in-the-sky trade scenarios.
More than that, while the game on the court or the ice can be predictably depressing (or, for Leafs fans, depressing in totally unpredictable ways), the game in the boardroom always holds a flicker of hope. For Blue Jays fans, few on-field moments in the last decade were as thrilling as what happened during the offseason of 2013, when a series of bold moves suddenly seemed to make the team relevant again. The possibility of landing a star free agent, the promise of a high draft pick—if you are a fan of one of the hopeless franchises of the world, these moments are your Super Bowl.
Perhaps the most obvious comparison to the shift in sports fandom is in the world of entertainment. Twenty years ago, Samuel L. Jackson’s Pulp Fiction hitman had to patiently explain the process of TV-production to John Travolta and, by proxy, the audience. “The way they pick the shows on TV is they make one show, and that show’s called a pilot,” he said.
It’s a scene that would never exist in 2015. Today, people casually talk about their favourite showrunners and discuss the merits of a 13-episode order. They read the industry gossip on Deadline and quote opening weekend box office numbers, as if a flick’s overseas gross has anything to do with your appreciation of the narrative onscreen. We live in a moment when showrunners like Dan Harmon or Matthew Weiner have become stars just as General Managers like Masai Ujiri or Rockets boss Darryl Morey have become cult celebrities.
