Lost Opportunity: NBA Recap Videos

I'm a big NBA fan (go Spurs!).

I'd love to watch all 82 Spurs games in a season but its practically impossible. Instead, I end up watching ~15% of their regular season games in full (~12 games of the 82 game season) and catch the back-half of another 15%. For the remaining 58 games, I'm left reading articles and watching recap videos to see how my Spurs played.

Each recap video the NBA makes is a 1-2 minute summary of the game. The videos are filled with dunks, steals, 3 pointers and buzzer beaters from the game. While this is better than nothing, I think the NBA is missing out on a big opportuniy by not producing more in depth recaps.

Lets take a look -- I'll use the Spurs recent win over the Suns as our sample video.

Seconds 0-15: Setting the stage for the video by telling us which players are back from injury. No actual gameplay footage.

Second 16-29: The first actual gameplay here. After skipping over the first 7 minutes of the game, we see a sick block by Kawhi that leads to a fast break dunk.

Second 30-44: Also taking place in the first quarter, a three by Kawhi.

Seconds 45-54: Final section of the recap shows Boban Marjanovic (the hot Spur flavor the week) making a layup at minute 11:11 in the 2nd quarter.

To recap the recap, the NBA has taken a 48 minute game and trimmed it down to 39 seconds and 3 plays. We only actually see gameplay that happened between 5:21 in the first and 11:11 in the second -- nothing at all from the second half of the game.

To be fair, the game was a blowout (go Spurs!) so I understand that it wasn't the most exciting game to recap. In fact, this recap is perfectly adequate for a casual NBA fan that wants to quickly see what happened in yesterday's games. For serious fans however, its nothing more than a cursory overview of what happened in a game.

I'd happily watch a 6-8 minute video that shows what happened throughout the game. I want to see where the Spurs did well and where they did poorly. I want to see more than just dunks, steals and 3-pointers. I want to see the flow of the game, all the way from minute 1 to 48. To top it off, I'm willing to pay to see this.

How could this work? The NBA could charge $20 a year for in depth recaps of up to 5 teams or $1 per game on an � la carte basis. It'd be great for fans to stay closer with the teams they love and a great way for the NBA to capitalize on footage that otherwise just sits on the shelf.

What do you think? Would you pay for more in depth NBA recaps?