My wife has been a really good sport lately. That's not what I meant. Hey...
Audrey humored me by staying up late this week to watch the Mets get swept by the Dodgers, and has taken a genuine interest in this round of the NBA Playoffs. I've managed to cure her of her initial allegiance to Los Angeles sports teams, and she's picked up her own idiosyncratic likes and dislikes along the way. She loves Max Scherzer and LeBron. She despises Carlos Beltran and Pau Gasol. And she likes to call Fernando Tatis, "TAY-tis."
If ever there was a week to get into NBA basketball, this would be it. To be honest, I haven't really followed the NBA that closely since the Knicks became a Minor League hockey team, and with the exception of the glitz and gloss of last year's Lakers/Celtics match up, I generally find professional basketball unwatchable. I know that NBA purists say that the Spurs aren't a boring team to watch, but the Spurs are boring. The Mavericks are boring. In fact, all teams in any sport from Texas are boring. Except for the Cowboys. And they're not from Texas, they're from America.
What I've seen of the last four games between the Cavs, Magic, Lakers, and Nuggets has been truly entertaining. The game has so much more flow and rhythm and pace when the refs aren't calling a foul every ten seconds (I was going to write, "when the Knicks aren't playing."). Here's an idea for the NBA, officiate regular season games the way you officiate playoff games. Why are there two sets of rules? Why can players flop in the regular season, but not in the playoffs? It makes no sense.
Also, four teams from each conference should make the playoffs. The regular season is too long, all the games are meaningless because the strongest teams make the playoffs no matter how poorly they play, and you always know who's going to win in the first round, anyway.
Last night, the league's most marketable player did something truly extraordinary, something the NBA really needed him to do (I'm sure Daniel Stern and the networks were really psyched at the prospect of a possible Magic/Nuggets Final. No wait, they weren't).
I was a little boy when Michael Jordan hung in the air, and hit "The Shot." I was still little when, after the shot, he turned and did that arm throwing fist pump celebration that still stands as the single coolest reaction an athlete has ever had to anything. It was one of the first basketball games I ever watched on television, and my imagination was completely captured. Jordan had branded me, in one form or another, a fan for life; not Kenny "Sky" Walker, not Trent Tucker, not even Patrick Ewing (By the way, it's a little weird to see Ewing on the Magic bench, and eerie to see him once again bested by greatness).
I wonder how many little boys and little girls were reeled in by what LeBron did last night, and whether my Audrey was among them. He may have even branded her a fan for life, and bought me hours upon hours of guilt-free sports viewing. Either way LeBron, I, and the good people at the Disney Corporation, thank you.
Great call on the four teams per conference. The eight-team format renders the regular season meaningless… unless you’re a borderline playoff team fighting for the eighth seed, in which case your regular season will be rendered meaningless in four or five games in the first round.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the season is just too fucking long. People knock basketball players for not going all-out in the regular season – and there’s definitely some racism to that – but it seems more likely that basketball isn’t meant to played all-out for 82 games over five months. Any sport in which a team playing a back-to-back game on the road against a marginally inferior opponent is all but expected to lose is flawed. The 82-game season exists to generate revenue, and unlike the baseball season, has very little to do with the competitive integrity of the sport.
p.s. My cousin, a die-hard Bulls fan from Chicago, called "The Shot" "Nightmare on Ehlo Street."