I think it is just literally the usual decline of a large sub. You always get low effort and drama bubbling to the top as the userbase grows.

r/nba has been pretty bad as long as I can remember. Every thread has always been low effort jokes like LeSomething.

I’m mostly a nobody but it has been clear to me that most people can’t or don’t have any incentive on starting discussions or threads on r/nba. Over the last few years, the only thing that has appeared on the “hot” sorted posts are memes, robot posts, parody posts, etc.

The worst are those posts that are just attempts to garner upvotes, like statistical analysis of weird things like players going to strip clubs.

Then came r/nbadiscussion and even that wasn’t much better.

In the end, I think it’s just a matter of numbers. Having a discussion on r/nba or any other popular subreddit is like having a discussion in a noisy auditorium filled with thousands of kids, teenagers, adults, old people, trolls, etc.

The most enjoyable interactions I had on Reddit were via smaller niche communities where there were only a few thousand posters, max.