When he was first hired as an intern for the New Jersey Nets in 1996, Bobby Marks was tasked with ferrying new head coach John Calipari around the team’s home base of East Rutherford. After proving his mettle with such menial jobs, Marks told me, he was eventually given a different but no less innocuous assignment: spend time brushing up on the NBA’s collective-bargaining agreement.

Commonly referred to as the CBA, the multi-hundred-page document is the bible that governs all aspects of the league, legislating major topics such as how the owners and players divide the league’s revenue, and continuing down to outlining punishment for minor infractions. When Marks entered the league, NBA franchises were lean organizations by modern standards, and keeping abreast of every clause and bylaw within the CBA wasn’t necessarily an in-house responsibility. Before giving the job to Marks, the Nets had simply outsourced this work to a law firm, he told me.

This scholarship would prove fortuitous when Marks, who eventually rose to the position of assistant general manager, left the Nets in 2015. He began posting regularly about basketball on X (then Twitter), leveraging his insider expertise to amass a small following, and worked his way up to a job discussing the NBA for ESPN, the largest sports-media organization in the world. Today, Marks’s face and voice are ubiquitous across the company’s coverage of the NBA. Where he once translated the financial intricacies of the NBA for executives inside the league, he now does so for those outside it. Marks is something of a pioneer, but he is far from alone—mainstream NBA analysis is now awash in breakdowns of how teams are handling their finances while maneuvering around the CBA’s gargantuan number of legal technicalities.

Why, exactly, does the basketball-adoring public need to hear from analysts whose specialty could reasonably be described as a form of code breaking? The easiest answer is that over the course of the past decade, NBA fandom has become strangely complicated. Closely following the sport now requires fans to have a passing knowledge of a 676-page labor agreement, an expansive vocabulary of business jargon, and a deep memory bank of contractual concepts. You can still enjoy the league passively, happily tuning in to big games and catching up on highlights through social media. But to love the NBA these days is to be drawn into a world where such simplicities, upon which sports fandom was founded, have begun to disappear.

To explain why a labor document has a stranglehold on the NBA, you would need to travel back to July 4, 2016, when Kevin Durant, one of the biggest names in the sport, announced that he was leaving the Oklahoma City Thunder and signing with the Golden State Warriors. This type of high-profile defection had happened before, in 2010, when LeBron James infamously left the Cleveland Cavaliers for “South Beach” (in actuality, the Miami Heat). But Durant’s switch went a step further. Unlike LeBron’s team in Cleveland, Durant’s Oklahoma City teammates were a group of young stars on the rise—and the Warriors were a loaded unit that, the season before Durant joined them, had won a record-breaking 73 games. Suddenly, the deck had been stacked in favor of one franchise, leaving fans across the country feeling like something was existentially wrong with pro basketball.

Whereas scorned supporters could protest Durant’s decision only by lighting his jersey on fire, the league’s owners were able to fight back as they and the players’ union renegotiated the CBA later in 2016. (Like many collective-bargaining agreements, the NBA’s is ratified for multiyear periods, and must be renegotiated before the current contract’s expiration.) The owners’ main goal was to ensure that if a team like the Thunder did end up drafting a player like Durant, they would have a built-in advantage when trying to keep him. In order to do this, they instituted a clause colloquially referred to as the “supermax,” which allows teams to offer a select number of their own players more money than their competitors. Because these deals can be signed years before a player’s current contract expires, this meant that nearly all of the NBA’s best players were taken off the open market.

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Instead, when attempting to acquire a household name, teams now must typically resort to trading for one. This can become a problem because the NBA employs a draconian set of rules surrounding trades, often turning the process of swapping a few players into the equivalent of sorting out a 1,000-piece puzzle set strewn across a table. The league does not allow a team to trade its first-round draft pick—which provides access to the most talented amateur players in a given year—in consecutive seasons. Modern-day franchises have figured out how to get around this stipulation by resorting to something called “pick swaps,” which allow a team to exchange its own pick with that of a team that ends up having a better one on draft night. Over time, teams have graduated to the practice of swapping swaps, essentially passing around the potential rights to possible future picks among one another. Chains of custody—simply knowing which teams control which draft picks—have become nearly impossible to follow.

In July, for instance, the Brooklyn Nets completed a trade with the rival New York Knicks that was nominally about sending the star forward Mikal Bridges across town. But the trade had a secondary function for the Nets, in that it also allowed them to reacquire draft picks and draft swaps they had previously traded to the Houston Rockets. At The Athletic, the veteran writer John Hollinger, who previously worked as the vice president of basketball operations for the Memphis Grizzlies, could go only so far when dissecting the trade; his breakdown brought to mind crisscrossed threads connecting photos and Post-its plastered all over a police evidence board. “The Rockets exchanged a 2025 pick swap with the Nets for a more complicated (and less alluring, I should say) pick swap that likely will let them swap Oklahoma City’s 2025 first (which they already own) for Phoenix’s,” he wrote. After noting this “swap of swaps,” Hollinger asked his readers, in a parenthetical, “You following this?”—a rhetorical question, one assumes, because the one possible answer is “Well, not really.”

Such analysis, if you do want to know the context of why important moves in the NBA are being made, is vital. But it also carries a distinct air of absurdity, trapping the reader inside a hall of mirrors.

At ESPN, it is Marks’s job to play navigator not just for the network’s audience, but also for its journalists. One of his duties includes maintaining a spreadsheet with crucial information on each NBA franchise, such as an  accounting of player salaries spanning current and future years, and which draft picks are owned by—and owed to—each team. Marks compiles the document by talking to his contacts across the league; his sourcing is so strong, he told me, that he regularly publicizes information on contracts and trades before some teams become aware of what their competitors are up to.

“I’m able to have access to information that maybe other people don’t have,” he told me. “There’s some teams that say, I have somebody who works in our front office, who basically collects all of your tweets and your information, and we have a meeting about it.” He compared his position to an election analyst, someone like NBC’s Steve Kornacki. During hectic times of the NBA schedule—such as the beginning of the offseason, when players are first changing teams—Marks often appears on ESPN in front of a large touch screen, drilling down on a team’s balance sheet in the same way Kornacki might with a Wisconsin swing district.

Some on this beat, such as the ESPN reporter Tim Bontemps, believe that the broader landscape may be different in the new few years. In an interview, Bontemps stressed to me the degree to which the coronavirus pandemic affected team finances. Nearly all NBA contracts are based on built-in, year-to-year raises for players. This structure is meant to mirror the upward movement of the salary cap, which determines how much teams can spend before incurring financial penalties. The league’s revenue typically rises every year—and the salary cap, by design, increases along with it. But the pandemic halted this gravy train: ESPN has cited sources saying that the league lost more than $1 billion in the 2019–20 season, which depressed the salary cap in the following years. This meant that teams were paying their players more than they had been, while also having less money available to improve their rosters.

This untimely convergence of the pandemic with the latent desire, on the behalf of team owners, to crimp the flow of player movement around the league has “created a world where there hasn’t been a lot of free agency,” Bontemps told me. The question of whether cash flowing back into team coffers will act as a league-wide decongestant will “be one of the bigger long-term questions to watch” over the next few years. If free agency again becomes a viable method for players to move around the league, teams would be able to improve their rosters without resorting to the elaborate, and often desperate, machinations we’ve seen in recent headline trades.

In the short term, though, the NBA may only get more mystifying for fans, who are now watching star players be shuffled around the league because owners are afraid of their hefty longterm salaries. The latest CBA, ratified last April, features even tighter trade restrictions and its harshest-ever penalties for the biggest-spending teams, including the dreaded “second aprons” that have already started distorting the motivations of the NBA’s best teams. The Minnesota Timberwolves, coming off their best season in decades, traded Karl-Anthony Towns—a homegrown star they’d signed to a supermax in 2022—because his contract was suddenly going to become onerously expensive. The Dallas Mavericks recently shocked the sporting world by trading Luka Dončić, widely agreed to be one of the best young players the NBA has ever seen, in large part because of a belief that his poor conditioning made an impending $345 million contract extension untenable for the franchise. Bontemps was one of several commentators who pointed out that trading a player of Dončić’s caliber, in his mid-20s, mostly because of future financial concerns, had never happened in league history.

The NBA is far from the only sports league where owners are pressing their teams to do more with less. The concept of Moneyball—cribbed from Michael Lewis’s best seller about the cash-strapped and efficiency-obsessed Oakland A’s—has long since permeated pro sports. Still, the problem may be most acute when it comes to the modern NBA, which is nearing the end of a golden age fueled by megawatt personalities such as James, Durant, and Steph Curry. Winning teams with marketable stars are what captures the public’s imagination, yet the league is unintentionally kneecapping successful, and thus expensive, teams. It is doing so while engaged in an unprecedented fight for attention among not just competitor sports, but also emergent entertainment across various streaming platforms: not just TV shows and movies, but live sporting events like the Jake Paul and Mike Tyson fight. As the NBA fights this battle, it’s hard to stomach the notion that a player such as the Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards, one of basketball’s brightest young players, must stand by and watch his team be made worse purely for preemptive financial reasons.

Some journalists appear to be concerned, at least on behalf of the sport’s fans. Last summer, at a press conference in Las Vegas, league commissioner Adam Silver was asked whether the new CBA, with all its attendant jargon, was making the league too difficult for the layman to follow. “Life is complicated, and the systems become inherently more complicated,” he said. “But we’re paying a lot of attention to it, and we’ll see.”

Sports fans seeking fewer complications in their life may choose to seek more easily digestible fun elsewhere. On a November episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast, Kirk Goldsberry, an NBA analyst at The Ringer who also spent years working for the San Antonio Spurs, lamented the CBA’s role in the Wolves’ trading of Towns, referring to the labor agreement as “the boring character” we’re stuck with in the ongoing “saga” that is the NBA. This character has always affected the league, but it is now hogging the spotlight, nudging established stars to the side of the stage. The question now is how long fans must wait until it’s put back in its rightful place: behind the curtain, unseen and unheard.

Photographs by Chris Hoare

Several stories below the British Library’s Magna Carta room, alongside a rumbling line of the London Underground, is a brightly lit labyrinth of rare and historic items. Past a series of antique rifles chained to a wall, past an intricate system of conveyor belts whisking books to the surface, the library stores an enormous collection of plays, manuscripts, and letters. Last spring, I checked my belongings at security and descended to sift through this archive—a record of correspondence between the producers and directors of British theater and a small team of censors who once worked for the Crown.

For centuries, these strict, dyspeptic, and sometimes unintentionally hilarious bureaucrats read and passed judgment on every public theatrical production in Britain, striking out references to sex, God, and politics, and forcing playwrights to, as one put it, cook their “conceptions to the taste of authority.” They reported to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which in 1737 became responsible for granting licenses to theaters and approving the texts of plays. “Examiners” made sure that no productions would offend the sovereign, blaspheme the Church, or stir audiences to political radicalism. An 1843 act expanded the department’s powers, calling upon it to block any play that threatened not just the “Public Peace” but “Decorum” and “good Manners.”

Hardly chosen for their artistic sensibilities or knowledge of theatrical history, the men hired by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office were mostly retired military officers from the upper-middle class. From the Victorian era on, they scrutinized plays for references to racial equality and sexuality—particularly homosexuality—vulgar language, and “offensive personalities,” as one guideline put it.

Twentieth-century English theater was, as a result of all this vigilance, “subject to more censorship than in the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I,” wrote the playwright and former theater critic Nicholas de Jongh in his 2000 survey of censorship, Politics, Prudery and Perversions. The censors suppressed or bowdlerized countless works of genius. As I thumbed through every play I could think of from the 1820s to the 1960s (earlier manuscripts, sold as part of an examiner’s private archive, can be seen in the Huntington Library in California), it became clear that the censors only got stricter—and more prudish—over time.

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“Do not come to me with Ibsen,” warned the examiner E. F. Smyth Pigott, nicely demonstrating the censors’ habitual tone. He had “studied Ibsen’s plays pretty carefully,” and determined that the characters were, to a man, “morally deranged.”

In cardboard boxes stacked on endless rows of metal shelving, string-tie binders hold the original versions of thousands of plays. The text of each is accompanied by a typewritten “Readers’ Report,” most of them several pages long, summarizing the plot and cataloging the work’s flaws as well as any redeeming qualities. That is followed, when available, by typed and handwritten correspondence between the censors and the applicants (usually the play’s hopeful and ingratiating producers).

These reports can at times be as entertaining as the plays themselves. On Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, one examiner wrote: “Omit the business and speeches about flybuttons”; on Sartre’s Huis Clos: “The play illustrates very well the difference between the French and English tastes. I don’t suppose that anyone would bat an eyelid over in Paris, but here we bar Lesbians on the stage”; on Camus’ Caligula: “This is the sort of play for which I have no liking at all”; on Tennessee Williams: “Neuroses grin through everything he writes”; and on Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun: “A good play about negroes in a Chicago slum, written with dignity, power and complete freedom from whimsy. The title is taken from a worthless piece of occasional verse about dreams deferred drying up like a raisin in the sun—or festering and exploding.”

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These bureaucrats were eager, as one of them wrote, to “lop off a few excrescent boughs” to save the tree. They were anti-Semitic (one successful compromise involved replacing a script’s use of “Fuck the Pope” with “The Pope’s a Jew”) and virulently homophobic. In response to Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, in 1958, one Lieutenant Colonel Vincent Troubridge noted: “There was a great fuss in New York about the references to cannibalism at the end of this play, but the Lord Chamberlain will find more objectionable the indications that the dead man was a homosexual.”

But the censors could also, occasionally, aspire to the level of pointed and biting literary criticism. “This is a piece of incoherence in the manner of Samuel Beckett,” the report for a 1960 production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker begins, “though it has not that author’s vein of nihilistic pessimism, and each individual sentence is comprehensible if irrelevant.” One gets the impression that, like the characters from a Bolaño novel, at least some of these men were themselves failed artists and intellectuals, drawn to such authoritarian work from a place of bruised and envious ego.

Indeed, one examiner, Geoffrey Dearmer, considered among the more flexible, had written poetry during the Great War. He reported to the Lord Chamberlain alongside the tyrannical Charles Heriot, who had studied theater at university and worked on a production of Macbeth before moving, still as a young man, into advertising, journalism, and book publishing. He was known, de Jongh wrote, for being “gratuitously abusive.” (Heriot on Edward Bond’s 1965 Saved: “A revolting amateur play … about a bunch of brainless, ape-like yobs,” including a “brainless slut of twenty-three living with her sluttish parents.”) Another examiner, George Alexander Redford, was a bank manager chosen primarily because he was friends with the man he succeeded. When asked about the criteria he used in his decision making, Redford answered, “I have no critical view on plays.” He was “simply bringing to bear an official point of view and keeping up a standard. … There are no principles that can be defined. I follow precedent.”

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticAn examiner’s notes on Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

The director Peter Hall, writing in The Guardian in 2002 about his experiences with the censors, said that the office “was largely staffed by retired naval officers with extraordinarily filthy minds. They were so alert to filth that they often found it when none was intended.” Once, he called to ask why some lines had been cut from a play he was directing:

“We all know what’s going on here, Hall, don’t we?” said the retired naval officer angrily. “It’s up periscopes.” “Up periscopes?” I queried. “Buggery, Hall, buggery!” Actually, it wasn’t.

As comic as these men seem now, they wielded enormous, unexamined power. The correspondence filed alongside the manuscripts reveals the extent to which the pressures of censorship warped manuscripts long before they even arrived on the censors’ desks. Managers and production companies checked scripts and suggested changes in anticipation of scrutiny. In a 1967 letter, a representative of a dramatic society eager to stage Waiting for Godot writes, “On page 81 Estragon says ‘Who farted?’ The director and myself are concerned as to whether, during a public presentation, this might offend the laws of censorship. Awaiting your advice.” Presumably, the answer was affirmative.

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticAn examiner’s report on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Playwrights also performed their own “pre-pre-censorship”—limiting the scope of their subject matter before and during the writing process. According to the 2004 book The Lord Chamberlain Regrets … A History of British Theatre Censorship, as far back as 1866, the comptroller of the LCO, Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, “explicitly commended examiners for operating this ‘indirect system of censorship’ because it enabled the Office to keep the number of prohibited plays to a minimum and forestall concerns about repression.”

Some plays made it past the censors only as a result of human error. When I met Kate Dossett, a professor at the University of Leeds who specializes in Black-theater history, she told me that the case of the playwright Una Marson is an example of what “gets hidden in this collection.” Marson’s 1932 play, At What a Price, depicts a young Black woman from the Jamaican countryside who moves to Kingston and takes a job as a stenographer. Her white employer seduces—or, in today’s understanding, sexually harasses—and impregnates her. The drama is a subtle exploration of miscegenation, one of the core taboos that the LCO often clamped down on. But the play was approved because the examiner—confused by the protagonist’s class markers and education—didn’t realize that she was Black.

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticThe script of Una Marson’s At What a Price

“This play is to be produced by the League of Coloured Peoples but it seems to have no particular relation to the objects of that institution except that the scene is in Jamaica and some of the minor characters are coloured and speak a more or less diverting dialect,” the report states. “The main story is presumably about English people and is an old-fashioned artless affair.”

From the beginning, some prominent figures fought against the system of censorship. Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa bears the distinction of having been the first British play banned under the Licensing Act of 1737. The work, ostensibly about the Swedish liberator Gustav I, was interpreted as a thinly veiled attack on Prime Minister Robert Walpole. Responding to the ban in a satirical defense of the censors, Samuel Johnson wrote that the government should go further, and make it a “felony to teach to read without a license from the lord chamberlain.” Only then would citizens be able to rest, in “ignorance and peace,” and the government be safe from “the insults of the poets.”

Universal History Archive / GettyA cartoon from 1874 satirized the Lord Chamberlain’s attempts to clean up the stage.

Henry James, in his day, spoke out in defense of the English playwright, who “has less dignity—thanks to the censor’s arbitrary rights upon his work—than that of any other man of letters in Europe.” So, too, did George Bernard Shaw. “It is a frightful thing to see the greatest thinkers, poets and authors of modern Europe, men like Ibsen,” Shaw wrote, “delivered helplessly into the vulgar hands of such a noodle as this despised and incapable old official.”

By the time the Theatres Act of 1968 abolished the censorship of plays, social attitudes were changing. The influx of workers from Jamaica and other countries in the Commonwealth in the 1950s challenged the stability of racial dynamics; sex between men was decriminalized in England and Wales in 1967; divorce became more common; and the rock-and-roll era destigmatized drugs. For years, theaters had been taking advantage of a loophole: Because the LCO’s jurisdiction applied only to public performances, theaters could charge patrons a nominal membership fee, thereby transforming themselves into private subscription clubs out of the censors’ reach.

It must have gotten lonely, trying to stand so long against the changing times. “I don’t understand this,” Heriot wrote, plaintively, about Hair. The American musical was banned three times for extolling “dirt, anti-establishment views, homosexuality and free love,” but in the end, one gets the impression that the censors just gave up. Alexander Lock, a curator at the library, pointed me to Heriot’s report on the final version of the musical. The pain of defeat in his voice is almost palpable: “A curiously half-hearted attempt to vet the script” had been made, he wrote, but many offenses were left intact.

Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in September 1968. That month, by royal assent, no new plays required approval from the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which was left to devote its attention to the planning of royal weddings, funerals, and garden parties.

Some may be tempted to dismiss the censors’ legacy as limited to, as a 1967 article in The Times of London had it, “the trivia of indecency.” But the damage was far deeper. The censors, de Jongh wrote, stunted English theater, kept it frivolous and parochial, and prevented it from dealing with “the greatest issues and anguishes of this violent century.” No playwrights addressed “the fascist regimes of the 1930s, the process that led to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ghastliness perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin, or the tyrannies experienced in China and under other totalitarian leaderships. No wonder. Their plays would have been disallowed. In the 1930s you could not win licences for plays that might offend Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin.” Shakespeare never “had to put up with” censorship so “rigorous and narrow-minded,” Peter Hall wrote. His “richest plays and his finest lines, packed with erotic double meanings, would have been smartly excised by the Lord Chamberlain’s watchdogs.”

[From the January 1930 issue: Edward Weeks on the practice of censorship]

These practices may strike us today as outlandish and anachronistic. Many of us take for granted creative license and the freedom of expression that undergirds it. But the foundation upon which these rights—as we think of them—are situated is far less immutable than we would like to imagine. As recent trends in the United States and elsewhere have shown, advances toward greater tolerance are reversible.

Indeed, many Americans on both the right and the left correctly sense this, even if they do not always understand what genuine censorship looks like. Activists on college campuses have confused the ability to occupy and disrupt physical space for the right to dissent verbally. Meanwhile, Elon Musk warns that “wokeness” will stifle free speech even as he uses the social-media site he owns to manipulate public debate.

Perusing the plays in the Lord Chamberlain’s archive is, among other things, a reminder of what censorship really is: government power applied to speech to either limit or compel it. And it is also a reminder that in the long term, many such attempts backfire. They reveal, as Sir Roly Keating, who was chief executive of the library from 2012 until the beginning of this year, told me, more about the censors’ own “fears, paranoias, obsessions” than they ever succeed in concealing.

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticInside the archive 

There is also the sheer fact of what Keating called “this extraordinary imposition of bureaucracy.” Just as the Stasi archive provides unparalleled insight into the interplay of art and politics in postwar East German society, and the Hoover-era FBI’s copious files on Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, and other Black American luminaries amount to a valuable cultural repository, the Lord Chamberlain’s archive can now be seen as one of the preeminent collections of Black and queer theater in the English-speaking world. It includes not just the plays that were staged, but also those that were rejected, and in some cases multiple drafts of them. These are precisely the kinds of works that, without the backing of institutions that have the resources to protect their own archive, might have been lost to history.

“Theater’s an ephemeral medium,” Keating told me. “Early drafts of plays change all the time; many don’t get published at all.” Among the many ramifications of censorship, I had not adequately considered this one: the degree to which methodical suppression can create the most meticulous collection. It is a deeply satisfying justice—even a form of revenge—that the hapless bureaucrats who endeavored so relentlessly to squelch and block independent thought have instead so painstakingly preserved it for future generations.

Support for this article was provided by the British Library’s Eccles Institute for the Americas & Oceania Phil Davies Fellowship. It appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “All the King’s Censors.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.