The smart, honest (and a little snarky) sphere of Jared Dubin

The folks at Pocket interviewed me for their series of interesting conversations with interesting people. I take this to mean that I am interesting. My parents would be proud to know.

Here’s an excerpt:

What NBA rules would you like to see changed?

I’d like to see the NBA eliminate the age limit and let players enter the league whenever they want. It’d also be nice if the owners stopped trying to “fix” the “problem” of stars leaving their home team. They get these guys under team control for 5–9 years guaranteed. If they want to leave after that, they should be allowed to do so. Also, every “solution” the owners come up with always backfires. In the 2011 CBA, they accidentally eliminated the motivation for any star-caliber player to sign an extension, which guaranteed they’d hit unrestricted free agency. And we’re already seeing the effect the new super-max contracts from the 2016 CBA are having.

There are a lot of sports out there that get little to no coverage. What sport, in your opinion, is the most underappreciated?

It boggles my mind how little coverage soccer gets relative to how popular it is.

What teams do you most admire, be it NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, etc. and why?

The Spurs and the Patriots are the best-run organizations in sports and it’s not all that close. Both have stability at the owner, coach, and management levels; and the people in those jobs all have humility, flexibility, and a willingness to accept new ideas. As a rule, they seek out inefficiencies in the market, value development at every level of the organization, appropriately balance present and the future contention, and operate with an apparent knowledge of the fact that they don’t actually know everything.

Read the full interview here.