Ballers Bawling over New Ball
31st December 2006
If you follow the NBA you know that the league is using a new basketball this season. David Stern, the commissioner of the league, made this decision as part of a marketing agreement with a basketball manufacturer, Spaulding. A new brand of ball will probably sell like hotcakes because who wants to play streetball with the “old” one when there’s a “new” one, right? You’d also assume that this marketing agreement brings benefits to the players as part of the overall profit sharing that goes on between the owners and the players. So, everyone is happy.
Except everyone isn’t happy. The players have been complaining all season about this lousy new ball. Early predictions were uniformly negative. Most people expected scoring to go down and turnovers to go up because the damn ball is no damn good.
Except a couple of months into the season, “. . . statistically there has been an improvement in shooting, scoring, and ball-related turnovers . . .” according to Commissioner Stern. Yet because the players remain unhappy about having this new ball forced upon them, the league is going back to the “old” ball.
What’s going on here? Listen to a player for a clue.
“For the league to be successful, obviously the players have to be happy. The basketball is the most important thing to us,” said LeBron James, one of several NBA All-Stars who criticized the new ball. “Like I said before, you can change the dress code, you can make our shorts shorter, but when you take our basketball away from us, that’s not a transition we handle.”
“. . . but when you take our basketball away from us . . .” Bingo! That sounds like players perceived an unfair restriction upon their behavior and responded with classic reactance. While this situation is clearly not a carefully controlled experiment, the combination of player resistance and statistics of better oncourt performance with the new ball leads me to see this as an entirely preventable circumstance. On a rational basis, the new ball functions at least as well if not better than the old ball on key criteria like scoring and turnovers. But players are still upset, so something else is going on.
Whatever Mr. Stern did during the development of the new ball and its use in the league, he clearly did not communicate with the players enough to make them believe they were truly consulted.
I do not believe for one minute that Mr. Stern arbitarily and autocratically jammed this new policy on the players. I’m sure that many of them knew about the coming change and participated in its development. However, their participation in their eyes at least was not sufficient to preclude that sense of unfair restriction.
This leads us to the art of persuasion. Even if you don’t know the term, “reactance,” you still realize that people will get ornery if they think you’re messing with their freedom. How do you get the new ball in play without starting a revolution? It would be interesting to know whether Mr. Stern received any formal public committment for the new ball from any players prior to implementing the new policy. My guess is that he did not. (Or if he did those players were perceived as willing confederates to the commissioner and hence were not perceived as “real” representatives.) When people participate in the planning of activities that affect their perceived freedom, they tend to accept restrictions as fair.
Of course, this tactic requires that you know how to manage the participation in a way that leads you to where you want to go rather than in some other direction. But, that’s a persuasion problem for another post.