NBA

I haven't seriously watched an NBA game in its entirety in a long time. I'd say at least 4 or 5 years, maybe more. The league just doesn't really interest me these days.

The thing is, I used to be the biggest basketball fan. Well, of course, growing up in Chicago, I don't know anybody around here who wasn't crazy about the Bulls, back during their heyday. I had the obligatory Jordan posters that every kid my age had, every championship T-shirt, Bulls stickers on everything, and I even got good at drawing Bulls logos on all my notebooks and stuff.

But I also would get fanatic about the whole league, not just the Bulls. The biggest highlight of every week for me was to come home from church on Sunday and watch the NBA on NBC with Marv Albert and Mike Fratello/Matt Guokas. I think I knew the starting lineups for every single team back then. My favorite video game was NBA Jam on Super Nintendo, and I spent most of my free time collecting and organizing my basketball cards. Off the top of my head, I can still name most of the first round players drafted the year Shaq came out (Alonzo Mourning, Christian Laettner, Jim Jackson, Clarence Weatherspoon, LaPhonso Ellis, Harold Minor) because I can picture how I arranged their basketball cards in my album.

Meanwhile, I made all these colored drawings of the guys on the Dream Team and stuck them around my room. I'd get into heated arguments with friends about whether John Stockton would break Magic Johnson's all-time assists record (the number 9,921 still sticks in my head), and pretend to be Spud Webb when I played ball in my driveway, dunking on a 7 foot hoop.

But anyways, somewhere along the way I stopped caring about NBA basketball, almost entirely. It was around the time the Bulls dynasty finally broke up, when we went from Jordan, Pippen, Rodman, Phil Jackson, etc., to Tim Floyd and a rotating group of scrubs. That in itself is probably part of the reason why I stopped liking the NBA. But I don't think I'm one of those fairweather fans who's only interested in the game when your team wins. Yeah, it's tough to watch games when you know your team has no chance of being competitive at all. But I really think the league as a whole just started to deteriorate around that time.

Here are the main reasons I can think of as to why I don't like the NBA that much anymore:

- Too much "building for the future". Yeah, guys like Tracy McGrady and Kevin Garnett are good now. But now, every team is drafting guys that they know won't be good for at least a few years, if ever. The Bulls got Elton Brand and Ron Artest to rebuild after Jordan and Pippen left. Then they let both of those guys go when they started to get good, and started over with guys like Eddie Curry and Tyson Chandler. How can you expect fans to stay interested for years, when your team sucks, and everyone knows it's gonna suck for years until your prospects develop? And what if they never develop?

- Too many guys I hate watching. I'm sick of watching Shaq play basketball. First of all, his free throw shooting is uglier than Sam Cassell. It's always been bad, but somehow it got even worse throughout the years. Second of all, knocking over defenders by bumping your ass into them and then dunking the ball hardly counts as a sport. The worst part, though, is seeing how defenders have resorted to constantly flopping as their only answer to Shaq. It gets annoying when half the game becomes guys falling down every time they get breathed on, and then spending all of their energy complaining to the refs for a call, instead of just being a man and playing hard defense. Speaking of which, there is no reason why Vlade Divac should still be in this league. Now, I don't have time to list everyone I dislike in the NBA, but lets just say that 90% of the rest of them fall into one or more of the following categories:

a) Overpaid kid who should've gone to college
b) Some sort of criminal
c) Ballhog who doesn't care about winning and can't play defense, just looking to make a flashy play that will get them on Sportscenter
d) Ugly European or Chinese guy

- Something shady about the league. For a long time now, I've had this feeling in the back of my head that the NBA playoffs are rigged. People say that it would be too hard to pull off something like that, but you know what, when there's so much money at stake, people would do anything to get as much as they can. I don't know, but think about it - notice that the league is super protective of its refs from being criticized. And in the few big games I've seen lately, there's been more than a few cases where the officiating was pretty lopsided. I'm not saying that all the games are fixed, but I just can't shake the feeling that there's some behind the scenes action going on either.

There's other reasons I don't like the NBA, but I guess what ignited this rant was watching the end of regulation for Tuesday's Lakers-Pistons game. Like about 95% of the people I know, I don't like the Lakers and I'd rather see them lose. Shaq, I talked about him before. I've always thought Kobe was cocky and annoying and disliked him even before the whole rape thing. Never liked Karl Malone or Gary Payton either, back when they were pestering the Bulls, and now even less because they decided to take the easy route to get a championship ring which will be meaningless.

Not that I love the Pistons either. Actually, they fit almost all the negatives I listed above. Think about this past offseason - coming off a pretty good playoff run, they have the #2 pick in the draft with the choice of getting someone who can help them right away (Carmelo Anthony) or getting an unproven, Ugly European Guy who clearly will have nothing to offer the team for at least a couple years (Darko Milicic). They go with the second choice. Maybe someday, Darko will be worth more than Carmelo, but come on - you know your team is so close to possibly winning a championship, and yet you still draft as if you're in a rebuilding mode. In a game like the one on Tuesday, don't tell me that having a guy like Carmelo wouldn't have made at least a few points difference over a guy sitting on the bench the whole game looking stupid. That could have meant the difference between winning and losing that game, which could mean the difference between winning and losing the series and the championship. If the Pistons go on to lose the series, they have no one else to blame but themselves.

About the game, I still can't believe how bad the Pistons played at the end, with a 6 point lead and under a minute to go. They don't foul Shaq when he's holding the ball outside the 3-point line, they wait until he gets the ball 2 inches away from the hoop, and his dunk is already halfway down, so he can have a 3 point play. Basically, they could've taken their chances with giving him 2 free throws (of which he's probably only going to make one) to try to cut the lead to 4 at best (still 2 posessions), but instead they gave him the sure 2 points and a free throw to cut it to 1 possession.

Then on the last shot, every single person watching the game knew Kobe was gonna shoot, yet Rip Hamilton still gave him plenty of space and barely even jumped to challenge the shot. Not that it would have neccessarily mattered - I mean, by the time I saw Kobe get the inbounds pass, I knew he was gonna tie the game. The Lakers just seem to make those plays happen 100% of the time, like Robert Horry's 3 against the Kings. But still, the fact is that the Pistons threw away that game, plain and simple. I didn't even watch the rest of the game in overtime, because at that point I already knew who was going to win. And why lose valuable sleep time just to confirm what you already know?

Oh well.

Larry Bird says he used to feel insulted when an opposing coach sent a white player to guard him. My question is, I wonder if Yao Ming feels the same way when opposing coaches send a yellow player to guard him? And is Wang Zhi-Zhi still in the league?