We really gotta talk about highlight quality in the sub. Game winning shots have no replays or crowd reaction. Highlights that barely show the actual action with no context. It's no good.

Now let me preface this by saying I brought this up a couple of years ago and some mods got really mad and threatened to ban me. So I'm just saying, mods, this is not a criticism of y'all, and it's different than my original suggestions (more limited in scope). It's also been 2 years so cut me some slack.

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Let's look at two top highlights from the last week:

1. Lauri shooting what seemed like a potential game-winner (was ruled too late) - last night (thread)

2. Luka's legendary shot to tie the game with the Knicks (thread - 40k points, top of r/all).

The replays/alternative angle comment does not work in practice. It might be a nice idea in theory, but in reality, it doesn't work. People don't post there, or post very late to it, when it doesn't matter anymore. The vast, vast majority of people just get to languish with shit replays.

Compare it with this:

• Kyrie's putback dunk (thread)

While the first two were game-clinching shots, they got no context, no crowd reaction, no replay. Meanwhile Kyrie's shot has joyous Yuta in it, replay, the whole deal.

The reason this happens is a race-to-the-bottom among uploaders. Since the first one - and always the first one - gets to keep their version, r/nba incentivizes uploaders to give us the shortest, most crappy version possible. Any extra 10 seconds left for recording means someone beats you to it.

A lot of the prolific uploaders (it's a small group) said again and again they have no problem uploading quality highlights with replays - but it's not worth it.

My suggestion is simple - any game-winning or game tying shot, or for that matter any highlight in the last 1 minute of the game, must be at least 30 seconds long.

I'm not even telling the mods to enforce a "must have replay" rule (which is the superior option imo). Just have a strong, technical limit on these posts, that can be completely automated to enforce - literally ZERO WORK for the mods except coding it in. You can have a new tag [Endgame Highlight] for those, and any post with the [Endgame Highlight] tag must be 30 seconds or longer, just like all highlights are already auto-forced to be 720p and higher.

I think this very minimal, hyper-specific, easy to implement, zero maintenance suggestion is pretty reasonable - so I petition the mods to consider it, to improve all of ours highlight quality.

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edit: I can't believe the first link was (by mistake), a link to a wholesome comic pic from this page and NOT a highlight, and still I got someone who said "That highlight is perfectly fine!" lmaooo