Retirement Announcement (…sort of)

https://youtu.be/RaecEPbhwwo

When I started DownToBuck, the goal was simple: to make the highlight videos that nobody else was making. To shine a spotlight on the role-players and scrubs who play important roles on every roster. To show the world that these lesser-known players can be just as entertaining and dynamic as the high-paid stars whose names adorn the front page of every website and newspaper. Over the past eight years, I can say with confidence that I accomplished that goal. But now, the time has come to take a step back.

I am retiring (sort of) from the daily grind of running my NBA highlights channel.

This is not the end of DownToBuck. I still plan to make highlight videos on occasion. But the nightly uploads of five, ten, or twenty videos will not be happening this season, or any season for the foreseeable future. This is not a full retirement, but more of a semi-retirement, where content is uploaded at my own pace, on my own terms.

There are several reasons I’m doing this, some personal, some technological. The NBA updating their League Pass video feeds with actual encryption was a major factor; if I were to write an OFFICIAL POWER RANKING of the reasons for my decision, that would be first in the ranking, for sure. Thanks to that change, I am faced with having to completely redo my highlight-making methods for this season.

Other factors were at play as well, but the rest of it boils down to the fact that I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep doing this forever. It was only a matter of knowing when the time was right to hang up the proverbial sneakers. And that time is now, before the gradually-building burn-out fully catches up to me.

I have to say, it will be a lot easier to enjoy watching the NBA when I’m not obsessively checking, and re-checking, box-scores to see which role-players are playing themselves into a highlight video. And it will be rather nice not to have to write so many dang video descriptions.

Of course, no semi-retirement announcement could happen without a sincere thank-you to all the people who watched my videos over the years. Whether you were a diehard subscriber reading every word of my video descriptions, or just a passer-through trying to gather intel on a player recently traded to your team, the fact that you enjoyed watching my videos was a great point of pride for me. When I think about the sheer amount of people who were enriched by my highlight videos, it staggers me. 100,000,000 views combined between my old channel and this one! It’s safe to say that nothing else I do in life will reach as many people as this endeavor did.

A special shout-out goes to all the people who donated to my Patreon. I am extremely grateful for your financial support of my efforts. I still need to figure out if the Patreon will continue or not; certainly, the value proposition isn’t the same as it once was, and I don’t blame anybody for retracting their pledges in light of my semi-retirement.

And one final acknowledgement needs to be made to the man who started it all. Of course, I am talking about the suave Argentine himself, Carlos Delfino. Without his back-to-back thirty-point games in March of 2011, of which neither was honored with a highlight video, the idea never would have been planted in a young DownToBuck’s brain: “If nobody is going to make Carlos Delfino highlight videos, then maybe I have to do it myself.” That simple thought would, a year and a half later, manifest itself as the first video uploaded to my (now defunct) first channel: Andrew Bogut making his Warriors debut with eight points and a block. (That video has been re-uploaded here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfEHXAQQWvc)

(OFFICIAL DTB BONUS SHOUT-OUT: my first ever subscriber, gameboy169. I will never forget you.)

Thanks again to every single person who watched my videos and especially those who left kind comments. Your support is what kept me going. I might not have been replying to many comments, but I was reading them all.

Now, it is with no small amount of relief that I can state unequivocally: I will never upload another Jeff Teague highlight video ever again. Or Will Barton. Or Dillon Brooks. But if Carlos Delfino ever decides to make a return to the NBA, he can have as many highlight videos as he wants.

(Oh, and by the way: DownToBuck is two people. It has always been two people. The amount of content we created, both text content and video content (and fan-fiction content), could never have been done by one person. There were nights where “DownToBuck” only got three hours of sleep. I’m a bit surprised at how few people picked up on this.)
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All clips property of the NBA. No copyright infringem-ah fuck it, I was infringing copyright this whole time.