Note from Ray: This is a legacy post from my personal archives (pre-2024).
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I used to love NBA basketball... or at least the idea of it. Not anymore....in fact...honestly plenty of times it bores me to tears.
What happened to the game I loved?
For awhile I've been considering why the league that I used to be so passionate about in my youth, means so little to me now. I've come to the conclusion that the game is killing itself....and it's hard to watch. The N.B.A has become a ridiculous circus..... complete with clowns, fruitless high fly acts, and sideshow barkers.
Here are five reasons off the top of my head why the N.B.A. is now my least favorite professional sport.
5. The working class can't sit up close!
One may think it's cool to see Jack Nicholson or Leonardo DiCaprio sitting in the front row cheering the players on, but I think it's the perfect analogy of why the NBA is ridiculous, and out of touch. In Major League Baseball the working class can get great seats on any given night. (Except, of course, in New York and Boston.) NHL Hockey, the same thing. NFL Football? Are you kidding me? That's all one sees out in the stands.
So what makes the NBA such an elitist, un-fan friendly experience, where only the super rich and celebrities can get to sit up-close to the action? God knows the action isn't anything special....at least what I can see of it....from the nose bleed seats. Isn't it sad that the only way that a father can take his son to an N.B.A. game, and get up close to the action is if his job lands him corporate seats...or he puts out a second mortgage on his house.
Why is that?
Why can't a normal Joe sit up close to the action, to witness the athletic excellence of elite athletes. Does the NBA even care about the working class fan?
4. Players Foul Out!
I finally fork over the 80 dollars to sit in the nose bleed seats to watch Shaquille O'Neal play, and two minutes into the game, he gets three meaningless fouls, and he sits for the rest of the half....not only that...when he does get into the game, he has to play "careful"..... in a meaningless.... regular season game.....
Are you serious?
What the HELL am I paying for then?
To watch his back-up, or worse a no name bench player run up and down the court while my favorite team loses because the best player in the league can't play. Why is basketball the only game that forces players to play less hard? Defense is now defined as a team's ability to make their opponent foul them.
Whole defensive schemes are now designed to get the elite players of a team in foul trouble, and out of the game.
We're supposed to enjoy watching that?
It didn't used to be that way. It used to be that a player got five fouls....and then they had to practically murder someone on the court to get the sixth foul from a ref.
Not anymore.
Surely there are other ways to punish teams then to kick their best players out of the game. What about a technical foul after every sixth foul? Is that so unreasonable?
Imagine if a rule allowed Vlad Guerrero to lose an at-bat? Or LaDainian Tomlinson wasn't able to play in the second quarter because of some silly rule ? How fun would that be ?
Why are fans forced to accept this while watching N.B.A. basketball ?
3. Games were fixed.....& nobody noticed!
Are you kidding me?
Nobody cares about this? Why aren't fans tearing down arenas asking for their money back? The N.B.A. had a referee who was changing the outcomes of games as he saw fit. Not only that on TNT the other night, I saw that Jeff Van Gundy, the former coach of the Houston Rockets said that he knew something was fishy with some games, someone even asked him who he thought it was that was fixing games, before it was announced, and he guessed Tim Donaghy.
Are you telling me that he was the only person that suspected it....and nobody else did?
I doubt it. Did anybody in the league care? Seriously, why does nobody care?
Games were FIXED!!!! It happened in baseball and players are still being punished for it decades later. Games that people paid for, and spent time watching were manipulated for a unsavory outcome. We're supposed to forget about that?
To be honest....we already have.
I can only assume it's because of my next point.
2. The Regular season is meaningless!
Baseball is a marathon grind of endurance, Football is do or die every week.
What the hell is the N.B.A. then?
Answer: It's a blatant, shameless, corporate grab for money. The N.B.A. Season is an 82 game Pre-season. The real season begins in the playoffs, and the most ridiculous part is that practically every team makes the playoffs anyways.
Seriously?
And if that's not enough when the playoffs arrive RARELY is there a surprise. So why do we even have to watch? I can tell you now who'll likely be in the finals. Not because I have superhuman powers or have traveled back from the future. It's because we already know who the best teams are. While hardly watching the games in the season. There are occasionally cute surprises....but do they really do anything significant ? To be honest...they were only footnotes. Players don't even play hard in the regular season games. It's a dog and pony show where the object is to score enough points to justify their ridiculous contracts, and do something spectacular so one can be seen on Sportscenter.
1. The Athletes are a bunch of floppers & overpaid cry babies!
People say they hate watching soccer because they hate when players flop on the ground, and roll around pretending to be hurt?
Don't watch the N.B.A. then. That's all it is now, people crying they were fouled.
Every Second.
None of this outplaying a team. I can't watch a single game now without witnessing players flopping, and pretending they were fouled. EVERY friggin time Kobe Bryant shoots the ball he cries foul....or HEY....or fling his arms out as if he's been shot in the back. He flings his arms out so hard he's starting to REALLY hurt players out there.
I'm supposed to cheer for that guy?
What happened to the hard hat mentality of Kurt Rambis and A.C. Green. Players don't flop on playground courts, they'd be laughed out of the park. Why are the elite athletes resorting to Strasberg Method acting techniques to get ahead in a game?
Why do we have to watch overpaid cry babies fall on the ground whenever someone rubs up against them softer than the way I snuggle up to my wife ? And what's worse, when they don't get their way, they are crying, and complaining up the court to the referee while the other team scores.
The NBA is Fantastic? Are you serious?
The N.B.A. wants us to pay to watch that?
It all comes down to the fact that they are all overpaid. Yeah, I know the business model doesn't support this point, they are entertainers bringing in the revenue, blah...blah....blah.... but do they have to act like primadonnas? Before games they now have a tradition of showing players entering into an arena....and what I always see is these "athletes", talking on their cell phones and listening to their Ipods, pretending not to acknowledge the cameras as if they are annoyed at the cameras very presence at the event.
These athletes look like they don't even want to be there.
Show some enthusiasm, excitement for the opportunity to be paid to play a game. I don't remember Magic Johnson or Larry Bird acting that way.
Those players loved to play.
Yeah, those men were warriors. But they loved what they were doing and they left it all out on the court every night. Hey, I'm not one of those fans that says the modern athlete could have never competed with the Legends.
I know that the modern athlete is bigger, stronger, and more talented. What I'm talking about is character.
What the N.B.A. is now, is mostly a bunch of Nouveau rich punks, who endured very little adversity in life, who haven't earned their due....they won the lottery, and we get to watch them treat us like peasants...thanks N.B.A.
Thanks for nothing.
