True sacrifice marks this fan’s long-distance love of the game

August 17th, 2015

[the fan being, me; this originally ran on NBA.com] Mark Deeks is a 30-year-old Englishman who didn’t play basketball growing up, didn’t coach, didn’t scout and didn’t really follow the game at all. Yet over the last decade, Deeks has become among the most knowledgeable people on earth about the game and the league, through his expertise in understanding one of the NBA’s least understandable topics: the salary cap and Collective Bargaining Agreements. His website, ShamSports.com, has become among the go-to sites for anyone seeking down to the penny info on player contracts and the arcane yet necessary knowledge about the CBA (the site is currently being renovated). It was Deeks who discovered in 2012 that Zach Randolph’s contract extension with the Memphis Grizzlies and Tim Duncan’s with the San Antonio Spurs technically violated existing CBA rules, and needed to be changed to be legal. They were. Deeks also blogs about how teams put together rosters — the why as opposed to the how — and has strong opinions on team and player decisions. Mark has been kind enough to lead us off this week with his story. ******* The NBA is an increasingly global brand. With NBA games now played every season in Europe and Asia, plus ones last year in Brazil and last month in South Africa, the NBA has delivered its distinctly American product around the world. And of course, the league has used the greatest facilitator ever, the Internet, to cover games live and on-demand to pretty much anyone who wants it. As a result, there are hundreds of millions of basketball fans around the world, many of whom are quite new to it. To be a fan of basketball outside of the USA is to be a fan of the NBA — no matter how good your domestic league is, or how much like a religion […]