So in order to be watchable and barely digestible, we need a court the size of a football field, college basketball, a return to the ever-popular plantation mentality of disposable players, 4 point plays, college basketball, white men who can jump, college basketball, a talent pool of short people who can compete with tall people, college basketball, a larger, heavier basketball, smaller baskets...
The pro game is about buckets, to quote a popular, albeit now pointless series of indie hoop film vignettes. It's the reason they widened the paint, instituted the shot clock, and recruited people like Wilt Chamberlain and Yao Ming. The basket is high off the ground. Gravity really sucks for those of us born with slow-twitch musculature and the economic impossibilites of training 4 hours a day to overcome that genetic misfortune. Wilt dominated the game statistically 50 years ago by simply playing above the rim when most of the league wasn't ready for a 7 foot track star. And yet groups of determined young men could still pour 140 points or so past the behemoth. You can't coach height, but that doesn't mean height always wins. Ask George Muresan or Manute Bol. If you want to get all gooey watching and dissecting fundamentals, try high school basketball. Or middle school basketball. I hear they even lower the rim for some games, and most coaches will revert to the five passes before shooting rule. That should get your need for purity in poetic motion fulfilled.
If you don't like the NBA game, watch soccer. It has everything you need in a short, non-height driven talent pool, where, for all I know, people get cut every other season. No, defense is never going to be popular and prioritized when the league is geared to pay the Lebrons and Durants and Melos of the world hundreds of millions for putting the ball in the hole. Bully, iso heroball can be dull when it's not working. Or it can be great when you're Lebron or Kobe or MJ and you can take over fourth quarters of games by sheer will and get chips while pumping your biceps at the crowd.
We are now complaining about a sport where there's too much athleticism for it to be truly enjoyable. Got it.
The league exists as a commercial enterprise, so the owners need players who put 20 thousand fannies in the seat every night over the long haul of a season. No one is going to spend hundreds of thousands on season tickets and corporate boxes in order to drool over how the Bruce Bowens of the world can change a game with an efficient close out (or clothesline) on a baseline drive. Those players who can bring in the gate, in turn, make disgusting amounts of money, knowing at any time that the knees can go at any time, and just about nobody will give a crap about you 5 years after your career is over. We covered all of this ad nauseum during the last lockout.
Pining away for weird rules and the Princeton offense and 50 point defensive battles is pointless. Instant replay has already ruined the game to a certain extent. Manipulating everything until the sport resembles some version of a self-playing March Madness Playstation game is the next step towards the death of sport in general.
12/15/2014 2:03 PM
