When you miss the big game

How to get a feel for what mattered

BY DAVID THORPE with HENRY ABBOTT

The NBA preseason is usually around 100 games. The regular season is 1,230, plus whatever shenanigans happen with the In-Season Tournament. The playoffs are up to 105 games. If a game lasts an average of two-and-a-half hours, watching every game would be 3,600 hours, which is approaching two full-time jobs’ worth of time. There are people who have many televisions and watch it all. 

David Thorpe comes close. 

But the point is, everyone misses games. There’s no shame in it. It’s healthy, in fact.

 When I got the ESPN editor job, I asked a little collection of NBA GMs at some All-Star event: “What would you most like to have?” 

The consensus answer was that they needed a cheat sheet—a way to know what they missed without spending hours on it: “Everywhere we go, one of them said, everybody thinks we see every game. It’s anxiety-producing because it feels like the wrong answer to say: ‘I didn’t see that game.’”

On Tuesday, December 19, while I was sleeping, my …