Roadmap Rumblings 🗺
Featuring NBA Season Predictions, Deal or No Deal w/ LG, A Series 4 Announcement, Sorare Scoops & More
Good Morning, B&B Squad! Cheers to the weekend (the final one before the NBA season)!
With tipoff just around the corner, it feels like a good time for some awards predictions for the 2022-23 NBA season:
NBA Champion: Golden State Warriors over Milwaukee Bucks
Not worried about the Draymond Green drama. Steph stays great, Klay is even better another year removed from injury, Poole continues to develop and big contributions from Jonathan Kuminga and James Wiseman make the Warriors the class of the league once again.
MVP: Giannis Antetokounmpo
I really wanted to go with Luka Doncic here, but the durability of Giannis combined with what I think will be another Finals run for Milwaukee put Giannis just a hair above him.
Rookie of the Year: Keegan Murray
I am buying into the Summer League + Preseason hype with Murray, who should have plenty of opportunities to contribute immediately on an odd Kings team. Honorable mention to Bennedict Mathurin, who looks great and had a nasty in-game windmill this week.
Sixth Man of the Year: Bones Hyland
Defensive Player of the Year: Rudy Gobert
Most Improved Player: Tyrese Haliburton
Excited to revisit how wrong these are in June! Let’s get into all the action from the last few days:
Tip-Off Tune-In 📺
Ready for the season? Get even more hyped by tuning into Team Hold’s mega-stream, featuring some fun and games with LG’s stash (of packs, not his mustache):
✨DEAL OR NO DEAL | CONTEST✨ Next week, we'll be hosting DEAL OR NO DEAL on the @TeamHoldNFT Tip Off Stream📺 Up for grabs - @LgDoucet private stash of UNOPENED PACKS📦📦 And we want YOU to come up and play🏆 Here's how it works🔻
Want to play? Sign up to be a contestant here, and join us and Team Hold! on Tuesday for a chance to win some awesome NBA Top Shot packs.
Roadmap Rumblings 🗺
Top Shot’s Series 4 Roadmap is coming on Monday, with the much anticipated plan coming just in time for Tuesday’s regular season tipoff:
What we can likely expect:
Burning initiatives (hopefully an absurd amount — please burn it all)
Scarcity counts (hopefully backing off to Series 1 supply or lower)
Flexibility — Top Shot needs the ability to pivot and react, and have previously taken heat for every statement or promise broken. I anticipate more guidelines and less set-in-stone information to allow for wiggle room to add/remove things if necessary as the series evolves.
With user sentiment, active users and the market on a downward trend heading into the season, this truly feels like a make-or-break series for the platform. And Monday’s roadmap should give a good look into the team’s plans — and will undoubtedly be heavily scrutinized from all angles by the community.
A nice roadmap ode to Top Shot past here from OTM’s TJ Laessig, reminiscing on some truly wild times on the platform:
The Scoop on Sorare 🔎
Speaking of information coming just before tipoff…
We had Sorare content creator John Nellis in our TFM Discord for a live chat on Thursday, spilling alpha on how the other platforms (football/soccer, baseball) operate and what we might be able to expect on the upcoming NBA version.
There is still virtually no info out regarding the NBA platform, though a Tuesday community even with former player Jay Williams should give us some more insights:
And as we’ve seen from the sports NFT charts, the company has some serious volume on its flagship product:
Some things I took away from the conversation with John that made me super excited for the fantasy platform to break into the NBA:
Strategy — it sounds like speculation and strategy are a big part of being successful on Sorare — two things everyone in the NFT space loves. Making conviction plays on sleepers, unproven rookies, or bounce-back candidates could play much more of a factor given the gamification, and the fantasy element gives yet another reason to tune into live NBA action.
ETH! — just hearing that rewards are in ETH makes me excited. Actual monetary prizes aside, being on the Ethereum blockchain opens up the project to the most liquidity right now in the NFT space — which is even more important given the global financial situation and current bear market.
Supply — with player cards instead of highlights, it sounds significantly easier to keep away oversupply issues, which is a thorn in nearly every other sports NFT’s side.
Also — I didn’t even realize it at the time (probably because I was too busy looking at Victor Wembanyama) but nice shirt from Rudy Gobert, who is an investor in the company:
I plan to hopefully dive into the platform pretty heavily, so next week should be exciting — and you’ll be hearing about the platform regularly on here.
As I mentioned on Twitter, I love team-building games like FIFA Ultimate Team and NBA 2K MyTeam — but I HATE the lack of asset ownership and payoff. Sorare sounds like it checks a lot of these same boxes, so I am super excited for them to get the ball rolling!
Around The First Mint 🗣
🎧 The Future of Ownership (Feat. Jess Sloss)
🎧 How Premint is Making NFTs Less Painful (Feat. Brenden Mulligan)
🎧 Is NFL All Day the Answer to Sports NFTs? (Feat. Dave Feldman)
Thanks for reading! — Zach @ The First Mint
Follow Zach on Twitter at @GhostOfGregOden.
**This is not financial advice. Nothing in this newsletter, podcast, or publication should be considered financial or trading advice of any kind. Please do your own thorough research and make your own trading decisions. This is not advice.”
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