NBA To Sell Game Downloads For Three Bucks; I'm Toast.

This is the best thing the NBA has done in years, and it will involve some significant datalogging in addition to just selling the games. The New York Times reports:

For the moment, users cannot search the clips for, say, every Steve Nash assist, but that is coming. According to Steve Hellmuth, a senior vice president with the N.B.A., league employees are breaking down game films and logging events within each team’s possession.

For instance, if San Antonio’s Tim Duncan pulls down a rebound and then dunks, N.B.A. employees would tag the video with those two events; in the future, viewers searching for Duncan’s rebounds or dunks could quickly find that sequence.

There are about 500 such highlights in each game, and because only humans can log these events, the tagging process is labor intensive. Mr. Hellmuth said the league has about 40,000 games on tape in its archive, mostly from 1990 and later, and about 3,800 have been logged. Those games are already being used by coaches to scout other teams, as well as league executives who review the calls of game officials.

My first purchase, once they work their way backwards far enough, will be the 2003 Western Conference Finals, Game 6, where Dallas Mavericks' center Dirk Nowitzki lost it during the last tense minutes of the game and turned positively toxic, screaming at his teammates and literally attempting to beat the San Antonio Spurs himself despite his vomitous disgust for his poor teammates. Dirk, that was the day you became the first NBA star I truly love to hate! I have wished many times that I could revisit that game, and soon I will have that very pleasure.

From there I'll hop back to some millennial games to get my Speedy Claxton fix, and then I'll dig deeper to watch some stuff from the Dennis Rodman days to see if he was really all my wife claims he was or if she's just nostalgic. Yikes, I can feel my life slipping away as I write...