The Same Old NBA

The NBA is back. Like most others, I'm struggling to give a damn.

Nonetheless here we are less than two weeks before the season tips off on Christmas Day, and there are two glaring storylines persisting that illustrates the disarray of the National Basketball Association.

Kaiser David Stern, in a move out of egotistically driven, short-sighted stupidity, voided a trade between the Los Angeles Lakers, the Houston Rockets, and the New Orleans Hornets in the incident known as "The Trade for Chris Paul That Technically Happened, but Kaiser Stern Said It Never Happened." Sure the Rockets were getting fucked over in the trade anyway, but now the Rockets are stuck with two players (Luis Scola and Kevin Martin) who are hurt with no moves on the horizon to even rectify this by distraction, considering the Memphis Grizzlies beat their offer for Marc Gasol. The Lakers lost a major part of what was one of the greatest back courts ever assembled in the history of the National Basketball Association in Lamar Odom as part of the trade-fail fallout. The New Orleans Hornets ended up having to settle for a weaker package from the L.A. Clippers for Chris Paul.

The soon-to-be Brooklyn New Jersey Nets and the Orlando Magic are biting their own collective nails because of how much Dwight Howard means or could mean to the futures of each organization. It does not really help that the unhappy center probably has no real clue as to what the hell he really wants to do with himself.

In other words, it's the same old theme of small-market teams can't hold on to players and here comes the usual suspects stockpiling on talent.

Yet, in the end, it's the same old NBA.

I guess the real difference in today's NBA is that four teams (Lakers, Celtics, Heat, and Spurs), instead of two teams like it was in the 1980s (the Lakers and the Celtics) or one team in the 1990s (the Bulls), dominate the entire league. In addition, today's dominant quartet also differ in that, while the Lakers and Heat can count three of the best players in the NBA on their squads (Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Dwayne Wade), the three individually are not leagues beyond the rest of the premier players in the NBA. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird effectively ran the NBA in the 1980s, even with rising stars such as Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, and Charles Barkley. Jordan ran the NBA in the 1990s. And what I mean by "ran" is that the road to success that any other team was going to embark on during those eras ran through Johnson, Bird, and Jordan. Bryant, James, and Wade have not reached that point, even if Bryant's Lakers have made 3 straight NBA finals appearances and James and Wade form arguably the best 1-2 punch in the league since Bryant and Shaq.

Yet, it is the same old NBA as to where it is a lot more difficult to compete in this league than it should be. There's a reason with Howard wants to leave the Orlando Magic -- even he sees that unless the Magic waits years to build up cash or completely tanks their season, the Magic will never acquire a top-tier point guard or power forward. It's the reason why Chris Paul wants to leave New Orleans -- he knows he'll never see any robust talent around him to where he'll get a ring unless, like I said for Orlando, they lounge around and build up cash, or play for a lottery pick. And just wait about 3 years -- it will probably be the same situation in Chicago with Derrick Rose, even though Rose has a decent supporting cast around him.

Note two things:

• Since 1999, only three teams have won the Western Conference Championship in the NBA -- that's the Lakers, the Spurs, and the Mavericks.
• In each of the 3 years that an Eastern Conference team won the NBA title - (2004 with the Pistons, 2006 with the Heat, and 2008 with the Celtics), the Eastern Conference playoff seeding featured at least one team with a losing record -- in fact, the 2004 Eastern Conference Playoffs featured a 36-46 Boston Celtics team. The 2007-2008 Boston Celtics and the 2010-2011 Miami Heat are the only two teams since the 1997-1998 Chicago Bulls to even have home court advantage in the NBA Finals.

While the Lakers, Spurs, and Mavericks are all solid, competitive franchises in their own right, it is also a testament to the reality that there's no parity in the NBA -- as in, its not a wide open league in terms of who will win a league championship, unlike in the NFL, the NHL, and MLB. What that snowballs into is fan bases writing their own teams off, meaning no money for the franchises, meaning even further that teams, as I said before, will either wait and build up cash or hope that they end up with 50 or 60 losses. While I'll admit that I am a fan of the Los Angeles Lakers, I am a bigger fan of basketball, and NBA basketball would vastly be more enjoyable if it wasn't just yet another season of the usual suspects.

Dr. Hall, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Not Cry About The Lockout

This post is my attempt to give a shit about the NBA Lockout. Let's see how successful I am.

Bill Simmons is right. Unless you are a die-hard NBA fan, you probably don't care too much about having two weeks of the season already cancelled.

My friend is right as well. Nobody really gives a shit about the NBA until the time period between the Super Bowl and Spring Training, and even then the NBA will play second fiddle to March Madness.

It's a shame. The 2010-2011 NBA season was one of the finest in recent memory in terms of quality of play. My Houston Rockets did not make the postseason, but it was still a fairly enjoyable season for myself -- a mere casual basketball fan. The NBA Playoffs were the most compelling in recent memory. The NBA Finals told one of the greatest sports stories ever -- in fact, probably one of the best stories ever in the history of pop culture period.

So here you have it: two sides at odds over money, a little over $4 billion. Most fans don't really care -- we don't have much of an opportunity to have empathy for those that have seven to eight figures to the left of the decimal point in salary while the vast swath of us have our yearly income stop at five digits. The owners are crying foul that players are taking up too much profits and of course the players are fighting for their money. It's just two sides wanting their fair share of $4 billion.

Michael Wilbon says that the NBA is inviting public ridicule. He's a basketball journalist and I respect his opinion. He's right to a certain extent. The ridicule won't be widespread. It will be widespread in the media and a total inverse outside of it. Because few people care.

The reality is that the NBA does not mean as much as it used to, despite its popularity these days. It's not nearly as popular as it was during the Magic-Bird or Jordan years. Players such as Kobe Bryant, Derrick Rose, LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Dwight Howard, and others are all well regarded, talented players, yet history will show that they're not going to resonate with fans to the degree that Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, David Robinson, and Hakeem Olajuwon do. I can even throw Shaquille O'Neal and Gary Payton into that camaraderie. NBA players these days are hard to get behind and are even harder to have an enduring adoration for because of the current culture of the league.

When I say current culture, I'm not talking about how the NBA has now become the hip hop culture's sporting arena, or in some pejorative views, a "thug league" -- I'm talking about the NBA's culture of being a talent-diluted sports league with mediocre television coverage. I'm talking about how for a decade one conference was vastly superior to the other. I'm talking about a league that has way too many players playing professional basketball too early. Never mind the D-League -- its not really useful as a developmental league in the degree that NBA teams hope for it to be.

A note about this past season. It was a marvelous season. Yet, as a 23 year old, I can remember back during the 1997-98 season when I was 9 and 10 years old, that the quality of play was better. And for those that just do not understand what I mean by that, find time to watch any game from the 1990s. The players were far more seasoned and fundamentally sound then because the culture of the league back then did not put value on players that left college basketball, the true farm system of basketball, too early. The NBA play of today, while decent, can be at times egregiously sloppy. It's not me trying to be classicist. There will be times that the quality of a NCAA game these days will be as good or even better than a NBA game, while a decade ago it would have been inconceivable to say that.

This is not an NBA that anybody is in love with. It just simply isn't. The NBA is a casual fan's league; the casual fan who would not lose sleep at night if they did not have the NBA to watch this winter. The NFL, as we've seen, was a different story. Same thing with Major League Baseball, albeit to a lesser degree. There's a love affair amongst fans with the NFL, Major League Baseball, and for the tight-knit fan minority, the NHL. It really does not exist with the NBA.

However, this may be a positive for the NBA, at least when the league starts up play again, whenever that will be. The casual fan will easily go back to the NBA. You may think that's preposterous, but look at it this way: the casual fan has a limited or even absent emotional attachment to the league; they won't give two shits about a work stoppage and when play begins again, they'll make time to watch it out of generic, casual interest. The reason being is that they're a fan of the game of basketball itself more so than they are a fan of any individual league or any given franchise. It will work in the NBA's favor.

In the meantime, casual fans, like myself, will observe the NBA being absent, but we're not going to cry rivers about it.

Okay, so attempting to care about the NBA lockout was somewhat successful.