AI, kinda. And Clippers-Blazers

Anyone catch Blazers-Clips last night? You didn’t? It was NBC’s national primetime game. C’mon guys. Deni Avdija, Kawhi, Ballmer, Scoot Henderson, Ty Lue, Timofey Mozgov. These are headliners! I caught the second quarter. Here’s how it all went down:

- The “Visit Rwanda” ad on the Clips jersey has to be the worst in the league. No shot across Rwanda’s bow, but the execution of this placement is abysmal. It’s just black font that says “Visit Rwanda”. Show don’t tell. Don’t tell me to Visit Rwanda. I know I should. Show my why I need to book plane tickets. Jokes aside, the jersey patch ad in the NBA is an embarrassment. Portland played last night without one (is that even allowed?) and their jerseys really do “look better”. Seeing a massive market team owned by a top 10 richest person in the world sport a Visit Rwanda jersey patch against a small market recently sold team without an ad is a tough look for Ballmer. I get it. Everyone should chase that dollar. No one from the players, to the coaches, to the owner really cares enough not to have an ad on their jersey. When people wonder what it is about these placements that upsets them, it’s this: 5yr old rec league basketball jerseys get local sponsors to buy the shirts for the kids. My son’s Tball jersey for instance is proudly supported by a local law firm. All good. Makes sense. But taken to the extreme, taken to the highest level of sport, seeing Kawhi’s jersey sponsored by Visit Rwanda kinda makes him look like a 5yr old rec league player.

- Allow me to age into another take….get rid of these goddamn highlighter shoes. I don’t remember when, but sometime in Adam Silver’s early years, the league started to allow players freedom over what color shoes they wanted to wear. Shoe color and jersey color became completely divorced in the name of personal expression. And the players (plus Nike) took that inch and ran a mile. I actually like the shoes, and the colors. I don’t like how the footwear clashes with the rest of uniform and I don’t like that players need shoes to feel adequate freedom of expression. Express yourself through the game. That’s what the stage is for. Like all things fashion, this too will go out of style. It will once again become stylish to perhaps coordinate footwear with the rest of the ensemble. Perhaps, it will become stylish to swallow an ounce of personality in exchange for matching your shoes with your team’s desired colorway. Someone’s feet will choose the team over the individual.

- Benedict Mathurin ran into Jimmy Goldstein diving for a loose ball. Outside of LA, Goldstein is lesser known, but he’s an absolute legend courtside at Lakers/Clippers games. Polarizing, sure, but a daring dresser, Goldstein’s lore is largely driven by the lack of information surrounding the man. In recent years, a proper Wikipedia has been spun up, and I encourage you to give it a read. The Wiki tells only 1/100th of his story, but for those that don’t know him, he was once described as “having the largest investment of any fan in America”. And who said that about him….David Stern!

KMARK is likely moving to a new casa. Movin up! No thanks to this outlet. The ink isn’t dry yet, but it had me thinking about sports, streaming, and my portfolio of content providers. Yes, I will ship over all the streamers to the new place. I know how Internet work! But, for a moment, I paused to consider how I get all my sports, what it costs, and if it could be better.

So let’s turn to ChatGPT for a breakdown. Here’s the prompt I started Chat with:

I'm a massive sports fan that doesn't want to miss a game. My favorites are: football (NCAA and NFL), baseball, basketball, golf, and hockey. Help me understand all the different streaming services and Youtube TV options available, so that I maximize games to watch, but don't spend inefficiently. Please place your findings in a grid format and calculate total costs.

You will get a strong breakdown of what’s available and you can work with Chat to customize. You will definitely NOT get an answer other than: buy a bunch of different streamers. The media landscape is so fragmented that buying Peacock, Paramount, ESPN+, Prime, Apple TV (for one Friday MLB Game ?) and YoutubeTV (NFL) is the only way to get total coverage. From my Research, I believe the daytime NFL games are gated to CBS/NBC and not available in the Paramount/Peacock apps. So in order to save big on YoutubeTV, you need some other means of getting network television.

None of the above truly tackles my local sports needs. Nor does it guarantee any significant savings. BUT. The power of AI should change that. I’ve spent all of 30 minutes tackling this exercise and I definitely haven’t spun up an agent to solve my problem. I will be doing that shortly and reporting back. Hold please. If you are more AI adept (and if you think you are, you most certainly are), please design the following service:

Build an AI agent that optimizes my streaming providers for my sporting tastes. This agent should add services if they’re in season (i.e. D2C regional networks) and remove/pause services if they’re not (i.e. YoutubeTV after football).

Off you go…fire up Claude Cowork. Find me a solution! So I can save like $100 bucks or something.