Oct
5

Lets be Honest : The NBA

Today I read Michael Rosenberg’s Inside the NBA piece on SI.com about the meaninglessness of the NBA regular season. About halfway in, he says this:

Joakim Noah of the Chicago Bulls with Commissioner Stern, the short one (Getty)

“I love pro basketball. Really, I do. I not only love the game, which is viscerally thrilling, but I love the league. The NBA knows what it is: competition wrapped up as entertainment.”

I’m sure Mr. Rosenberg is a respected NBA journalist, and knows the game quite well. After all, the NBA is viscerally thrilling. Of the major sports it has the most consistent showcasing of human athleticism and the most consistent flow. Baseball has lulls and swells, football is standing around punctuated by crazy collisions of massive men, but the NBA is back and forth, steady, more about flows than instances. That’s why I watch it too. But the other part of that statement Rosenberg made, about the NBA being competition wrapped up as entertainment? I call bullshit.

There’s no denying NBA players try to win games. They really want to, and they get bigger contracts the more games they win and how they dominate said games. But the main problem with the NBA, as Rosenberg intimates in his article, is that the playoffs are decided, the top six teams in each conference at least, before the season-opening tip. For 82 games superstar athletes go through the motions, not really going all out unless it’s a “statement game”. The Lakers playing in Boston, or an elite team playing in New York, they go hard because it gives the team swagger to have these wins against old rivals or on big stages. When the Cavaliers play the Heat this year, rest assured it will be a battle, because there’s so much animosity between Cleveland and their former favorite son, LeBron. That’s one of the reasons to watch too, NBA players get wrapped up in the moment more than baseball players or football players do. If you get all emotional in baseball, you’ll play worse, won’t be focused. In the NFL emotion will let you hit harder, but you might get a penalty. The venting of frustration or anger in the NBA looks like thunderous dunks or a dagger from long distance, meaning little or no physical contact. Even when there is, somebody flops or complains and the theatrics start. So they are competitive, no doubt. Otherwise players wouldn’t be where they are. But to say the NBA puts competition before entertainment is just dumb. Something as simple as when they start their games is a perfect example. In what real world do people go out and play basketball at 8 pm? That’s usually the time after you’ve been playing ball all day (note the word day) to shower up before you go out at night. Generally, I play basketball at like 3 in the afternoon. But whatever, baseball does that too, starting at 7 or 8 at night. Okay, let’s take a team like the Chicago Bulls. Who’s their best player, according to the media? Derek Rose, the slashing, Mario-ups having point guard with middling court vision. And yet, that team would be little worse without him, I believe. Sure, he draws attention so others aren’t guarded and the three is open and others can play in space, but he has almost no jump shot, his assist numbers for a point guard are rather low (7-ish) especially considering he doesn’t average 20 points a game. For my mind, their best player, or most important at least, is Joakim Noah. Defense, beast on the boards, intangibles. Rose is an alright defender, but probably could have used another year of college to prime that. Without Noah down low, especially this past year, the Bulls would have been screwed, a lottery team. The Bulls understand this, just the other day giving Noah a 5-year extension to keep the young man around. They know that his play is integral to the Bulls’ postseason success. And yet their marketing continues to trumpet Derek Rose as the face of the franchise. They aren’t alone. Save for the Lakers and Kobe Bryant, who is just a beast of a basketball player and simply indomitable, there are few teams that trumpet the most important player on their team. it’s because the sport is about entertainment first, and competition second. The Celtics front the Big 3 (until recently maybe) as the face of the team, but they wouldn’t have made it where they did without Rondo and Perkins, especially with a one-legged Kevin Garnett. There are other examples, take the Trailblazers. The most important person on their team was their big man, first Oden and then Pryzbilla. They went down and the team caved in. Andrew Bogut was more important to the success of the Bucks than Michael Redd or Brandon Jennings were, and proved it when Redd went down and there was no drop-off in success, then again when Bogut went down and there wasn’t anything Jennings could do in the playoffs.

These two guys, not as important as marketing tells you (David Liam Kyle / Getty)

Maybe all we’re discovering here is the importance of the big man. After all, most of the “most valuable” players I’ve listed are big men. And this is true, without the presence of them the skill players wouldn’t be able to do what they have to do. Still, the teams recognize this, and just don’t promote them as the reason to watch the game because with the exception of the hard-dunking Dwight Howard, they are just unsexy. But there it is, the sexiness is what puts butts in the seats. The focus of the game is on the performance of the stars, David Stern has even admitted it’s a star-driven league. This was shown when Michael retired and suddenly the league was adrift. Nobody knew what to watch, there was no focus of the league. The winning teams in the NBA, at least of late, have accepted a “team-first” mentality, but this goes against the grain of the league. Nobody wants to go to a game to see totally sick passes. Even a virtuoso like Steve Nash needed Amare Stoudemire to get people to watch. Stoudemire isn’t a superstar player, but he certainly got paid like one this offseason because of the performace of Nash these many years making him better.

So no, the NBA is entertainment first and last, and the “competition” is just an added bonus. The regular season is essentially meaningless, there should just be the playoffs and two lotteries, one for the bottom four seeds for the playoffs, and another for the first pick. Stupid idea? Maybe, but you know what else is stupid? The All-Star Weekend, and NBA basketball in mid-March. Meaningless and interminably about the show, the game doesn’t matter.