Courtside's The 4th Quarter: The Team Owner's Playbook for Content Creators

Total Hours In a Year: 8,760

Regular Season NBA Games: 82

Average Game Duration: ~2.5 Hours

Total Gameplay Content: 205 Hours

The standard NBA team produces primary content for only 2.3% of the year. That leaves 97.7% of the year – over 8,500 hours – as “white space.” Historically, this void was filled by third-party intermediaries: sports talk radio, newspapers, and 24-hour sports news networks. These entities monetized the white space by talking about the team, effectively renting the team’s relevance to sell ads. 

In the near future, content creators will be the new intermediaries. These individuals – ranging from food critics to fashion bloggers to gaming streamers – produce hyper-specific, culturally relevant content that occupies the feeds of Gen Z & Gen Alpha during that 97.7% of downtime. Leagues are realizing that they can’t occupy this white space with their institutional voice alone.

By partnering with creator collectives, leagues are subcontracting the occupation of this white space to those who hold attention on digital media best. They’re empowering creators to translate a team's IP into the vernaculars of fashion, food, gaming, and humor, retaining attention even when the team isn’t playing. This strategy transforms the team from an episodic content provider into an always-on lifestyle brand.

So while your team’s multi-billion dollar real estate proposal awaits local municipality approval, now’s the time to build a real content + creator strategy – meticulously assembling an in-house studio or “roster” of local content creators that will drive business for your team. 

Professional sports teams are going to become production & entertainment companies.

If you’re not actively building a content strategy flywheel, you’re falling behind.

Here are a few recent developments in the industry that back up our bold claim:

Attention is the scarcest resource for the next generation. 

Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s attention spans are declining (8 seconds vs. 12 for millennials) due to the rapid adoption of short-form digital content like Instagram & YouTube. Taste palates are rapidly changing because of the sheer velocity of content consumption, making it harder than ever to hold the cultural zeitgeist. To capture their attention, your team must not only be digitally native – it must be creatively progressive, moving the needle on culture, or risk failing behind.

Naturally, sports consumption habits will continue shifting towards digital media and away from 3-hour long broadcasts:

But we don’t exactly see eye-to-eye with this SBJ article that claims adding innovative technology to traditional sports broadcasting to make it more engaging is the correct solution – that alone won’t reverse a structurally ingrained habit for newer generations. Refusing to embrace digital media as a primary channel will cost your team fortunes down the road: by 2030, Gen Z is projected to control  $12T in global spending power. Their attention is becoming increasingly valuable.

Teams should ask themselves: if digital media content is cheaper to produce and captures the most attention, how do we occupy digital real estate 24/7, 365 days of the year?

Content studios are how teams stop being advertisers and start becoming media properties.

When teams build in-house studios and creator networks, they unlock the full media flywheel: the ability to acquire fans, retain them, and monetize them all on owned channels. Instead of renting attention through ads or outsourcing storytelling, teams become the distribution engine themselves.

During the offseason and natural downtime from the game, content keeps teams evergreen. It turns franchises into cultural centerpieces rather than logos that briefly appear during broadcasts. Teams already have loyal, installed audiences that want more than highlights. 

IP-adjacent content – creator-led shows, BTS access, and lifestyle storytelling – converts that demand into a hedge against seasonality.

The next generation doesn’t follow teams the way their parents did. They follow people and stories.

Static graphics and pure highlights no longer cut it. Gen Z and Gen Alpha gravitate toward faces, personalities, and narratives – not logos. Creators humanize the brand and create emotional entry points that institutional accounts can’t manufacture on their own.

Creator-led distribution is one of the most efficient ways to sell tickets & fandom today.

Influencers tap into net-new audiences with trusted followings already baked in. Selling the experience through individuals with loyal, niche followings will consistently outperform cold outbound and traditional ticket sales motions. It’s bottom-up marketing at internet scale.

Marketing is a permanent line item on the P&L. Vertically integrating content turns that spend into an asset, not an expense.

With in-house production, teams can:

Instead of funding one-off campaigns, teams compound value over time.

Studios create entirely new inventory to sell – sponsor integrations, branded segments, and creator collaborations – expanding monetization beyond scarce jersey patch real estate and prime venue placements.

They also unlock first-party data. By keeping distribution in-house, teams can push viewers into email, app, and commerce funnels, owning the relationship instead of renting audiences.

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Most importantly, creator collectives give teams a low-cost way to experiment with content beyond gameplay –  without committing millions to building a full in-house studio from day one.

One of the earliest sports franchises that has built its own distinct Creator Collective is the Atlanta Hawks. To get some inspiration on how to build a community of creators, we spent 30 minutes picking the brain of Melissa Proctor – the Chief Marketing Officer of the Atlanta Hawks. She gave us an in-depth, holistic outlook at the Hawks Creator Collective – and we figured we’d share some sparknotes:

So how can you build your team’s own Creator Collective? Here’s what we think the formula should look like:

Step 1: Decide what you’re actually building

Pick one primary objective:

Output: KPI Targets, target audience, content thesis, success metrics, and boundaries

Step 2: Assign an exec sponsor or single owner

This cannot be run by “social.” It touches legal, analytics, comms, partnerships, security, ticketing, marketing, and ops. 

Output: Buy-in from departments and Responsibility Assignment Matrix created

Step 3: Build your creator persona framework

You’re not recruiting “creators.” You’re recruiting people who can speak to the different reasons fans come to games or connect with the team. 

Output: 1-page Persona Map + A Target Creator Mix Per Persona (ex: 5 creators per persona)

Step 4: Design the creator offer + program structure

This will serve as the operating bible and document for the program.

Output: A comprehensive Creator Collective overview document 

Step 5: Lock down legal, rights, and league compliance rails (before recruiting)

This creates the “rules of the road”

Output: A creator agreement & 1-page filming/compliance guide

Step 6: Build the recruitment funnel + selection scorecard

Source creators across digital platforms who produce content around arenas and events, city lifestyle, and your existing fanbase – as well as through sponsor referrals, agencies, and universities.

Output: Shortlist → final cohort selected

Step 7: Stand up game-night operations + placements

Ensures that creator logistics are optimized and no event bottlenecks

Output: Event operations system in place for rinse-and-repeat

Step 8: Productize sponsor inventory (sell while you build)

This ensures monetization from day one if desired

Output: 1-page sponsor sheet + sample Statement of Work document

Step 9: Measure, report, iterate, then scale

Ensures this entire operation is data driven

Output: Monthly exec memo of “what worked / what to sunset / what to scale”

To put all of this into perspective, here’s the lens we use to think about the future of content for sports teams. 

Sports teams should think about building creator networks the same way they think about building mixed-use real estate districts around their stadiums.

Ownership groups deeply understand something fundamental: sports is bigger than just “sports”. It’s a live, communal experience rooted in emotion, identity, and culture. But it’s inherently limited in production. There are only so many games each year – and only many hours when the stadium is “on”.

That constraint is exactly why teams are willing to spend billions of dollars developing mixed-use sports districts. By building restaurants, hotels, residential units, and retail anchored by the stadium, teams extend demand beyond game days and maintain foot traffic year-round.

The logic is simple. The team is the anchor that creates the initial draw. That draw makes surrounding land valuable to restaurants, hotels, and retail. In turn, the team captures wallet share not just from ticket sales, but from rent paid by ancillary businesses and fan spending before and after games. The stadium evolves from an episodic event space into an anchor for continuous neighborhood vitality and year-round revenue.

Content should be viewed the exact same way.

If sports is the connective tissue across social life, fashion, food, and culture – why shouldn’t a team’s content permeate those same pockets at scale, just like sports districts do with residential buildings, restaurants, and retail? 

Think about it this way. The "digital district" is the social media feed. The surrounding land is the time users spend scrolling on Instagram and YouTube. Then you have:

When a fan consumes content that isn’t directly tied to gameplay, the team can still sit at the center as the cultural anchor behind that creator’s content. It’s no different than a fan eating at a restaurant in The Battery and subconsciously associating that experience with the Atlanta Braves.

While the team may not be on the field or court, the brand is still actively capturing attention, relevance, and mindshare with its fans.

If reading this convinced you it’s time to invest seriously in a content and creator strategy, please reply to this email. We want to hear your thoughts – and help you turn your sports team (or emerging league) into a viral content company.