A When-Win Situation
Will you be watching when?"
It seems like a pretty ironic slogan for the NBA, considering that basketball viewership is dropping faster than Brady Quinn's draft status. In fact, more people "will be watching when" the Houston Texans make Fat-Guy McTackleton or Fasty O'Cornerback their third-round draft pick than "will be watching when" the Houston Rockets make Andrei Kirilenko cry again.
Figuring out why the NFL is more popular than the NBA is easy.
There are only 16 games in the regular season and a one-and-done playoff system that gives people with short attention spans, people who don't go to church and people who can't afford to get drunk more than one day a week something to bond over.
The NBA on the other hand has 82 contests per team, which isn't much compared to the 162-game baseball season. Even though there are more baseball games, however, each one does seem to mean a little more than a basketball game.
Maybe it's because each game is another win or loss for a pitcher, or because baseball is a more intricate sport with stronger team-fan bonds or more people play fantasy baseball than fantasy basketball.
Or maybe, just maybe, the reason that the average basketball game doesn't always seem that important is because a lot of those basketball players get paid all that basketball money and make ticket prices so high that they just don't care as much as they used to.
The sport of basketball played at its highest level is exciting to watch, unless the people playing look to be going through the motions. This is what has been evident throughout this latest NBA season, with LeBron James coasting through the first half of the season before deciding to finally play somewhat near his infinite potential.
The poor effort put out by players was not the only thing that killed this season. People blame the abundance of crappy teams, especially in the Eastern Conference, for making what was, in all accounts, an awful NBA regular season.
I'd rather blame the good-to-great players for being unable or unwilling to lift their crappy teams. Paul Pierce, Michael Redd, Elton Brand, Jermaine O'Neal - this means you.
Sacramento had Mike Bibby, Ron Artest, Brad Miller and a career-year for Kevin Martin. Meanwhile, the New York Knicks had Stephon Marbury, who immediately cancels out any possibility they had to be successful. So how did those teams win the same number of games?
I guess it's hard to blame some of these underperforming superstars. Their teams didn't want them to play, and instead hoped to get the inside edge on ESPN-touted next-big-things Greg Oden and Kevin Durant.
Some analysts claim that these two draft-bound stars could give a team the next Patrick Ewing or Kevin Garnett. That shouldn't be the goal, since neither player has ever won a title and the Knicks only made the finals when Ewing was hurt.
But Oden and Kevin Durant have the upside of youth and growth and potential, and with enough effort, can turn around a team and a league that is losing thousands of fans every time Vince Carter goes for a windmill dunk with the Nets leading by 20 in the fourth quarter.
While the potential of these players is admirable, the hype has had ill effects. It's the "potential" of getting a once-in-a-lifetime player that makes team executives think that it is worth sucking for a year in order to get a better lottery pick.
Now that the NBA playoffs have rolled around, the teams that have been throwing games for the Oden-Kevin Durant sweepstakes are just counting down until draft day while the better teams are fighting it out in the postseason.
So, it should be easy to forget the horror that was the regular season. And when teams like the Golden State Warriors, a squad that's got all the fun of watching the Phoenix Suns without any of the desire to knee Steve Nash in the balls, and the Denver Nuggets - who I've been waiting to see play this way since Allen Iverson came over and Anthony Carmelo got out of detention - score upsets, it does make for something fun to watch.
Sure, it's only game one in a ridiculously long seven-game series. And sure, two months seems like a grueling span of time to have to endure what might become only one or two good games per series. But after six months of watching a team that starts Erick Dampier and wins 67 games, its nice to have something meaningful, or semi-meaningful, to wash this bad regular-season taste out of my mouth.
And so, despite the worst efforts of the NBA marketing team and the Pussycat Dolls, I "will be watching when" as long as I can figure out when "when" is.
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