Last week, I watched two basketball games in their entirety. Well, not exactly. One of them I watched from tip to horn, and only left sight of the TV in order to satisfy bodily functions. The other game I tried to watch uninterrupted, but kept flipping away because it was simply too painful.
The two games were Duke vs. Maryland at Cameron Indoor on Thursday night. And Michael Jordan's return to Chicago in the form of Wizards v. Bulls on Saturday afternoon at the United Center.
I'll let you take a wild guess as to which one was the masterpiece, and which one was the abomination of Dr. Naismith's wonderful game.
OK, for those of you who are stumped, or perhaps missed both games yourself, here's a recap. Duke-Maryland was another instant classic, with each team trading blows like Rocky Balboa and Ivan Drago. In the first half alone, there were 26 lead changes en route to a 49-48 score after just 20 minutes of play. Both teams combined to shoot 48% percent for the game. Duke's Jason Williams slashed and pierced his way repeatedly to the rack. Maryland countered with clockwork passing and ball movement, resulting in easy baskets. The crowd sounded like a jet engine at takeoff.
Fast forward to the so-called "pros" on Saturday. At half time, the two teams were locked in a pathetic 35-27 struggle. It was the kind of score you see from 10 year olds on Saturday morning at the neighborhood gym, where just heaving the ball up to the rim is no small feat. For the first half, the Bulls shot a staggering 16.7% from the floor. Luckily, the Bulls "got hot" in the second half and "improved" to 25% for the game, which barely kept them out of the NBA annals for worst single game percentage of all time. The Wizards, no modern day Globetrotters themselves, ended the game at a smokin' 37%.
Oh, did I mention the players on the Bulls and Wizards are being paid a sum total of $93.5 million per year for their, ahem, "expertise?" The crowd, which paid more than twice as much per ticket, and was almost three times larger in size, sounded about one tenth as interested in being there as did the crowd at Cameron Indoor.
So imagine for a moment, if a house guest from another country (say ... Paraguay) was visiting you last week. And he sat with you to watch both games. Imagine he knew very little about basketball. Imagine the questions he might ask while suffering through that Bulls game on Saturday.
How come the professional players can't shoot as well as the students who are amatuers? Why do fans at a professional game cheer louder before the game than during it? How come 9,000 fans sounds much louder than 24,000 fans? Is the professional basket higher? Is the hoop smaller? Do college coaches make more money than pro coaches, or are they just smarter? Do they have better strategy? If pro games look this awkward, how come ticket prices are so much more expensive?
You fumble through some vaguely reasonable answers to your somewhat confused guest. But even your own answers don't make total sense to you, much less him. You try to spin through the theory about how good the pro players are at defending opposing shooters. You mumble something about "bigger and stronger" before tailing off into a dead end rationale for why the NBA game can be so ghastly to watch sometimes. You conveniently do not tell your guest about man to man defenses, or 24 second shot clocks which were concocted specifically to make the pro game sizzle and shine. The cost of tickets to pro games is simply inexplicable. You do not try to answer this one, and just hope your guest drops it altogether.
{INSERT_RELATED}At one point in this debacle, I saw the following array of players on the court at the same time: Popeye Jones, Tyron Lue, Tyronne Nesby, Kevin Ollie, Trenton Hassell, and Fred Hoiberg. I could sooner explain nuclear fission than the existence of Fred Hoiberg on an NBA roster.
This was yet another dreadful NBA game. Just one of about a dozen every week. But your naive guest was told (by you, no less!) that this game was worth watching because you see, the greatest player of all time was returning to his former city for the first time. This was big! It was why the league itself sent its best announcers, and chose the game for a nationwide audience.
So there you are, in front of the TV, all ready for something good. And what do you get? An un-watchable, festering stink-hole of incompetence. And you can't even begin to say why. Sure, the Bulls are "rebuilding" with young players. But after having four picks in the Top-8 of the draft, they should be getting better quickly. Your guest asks: "If this pro team keeps picking the best players from college, how come they are still no good?"
You then go somewhere you really didn't want to go. You explain that well, um, actually, two of the Bulls draft picks only went to high school, not college. Your guest, momentarily duped into thinking that high school basketball is your country's most exalted game, asks what channel broadcasts these games. Now your head is spinning. You desperately hope that nobody mentions the Wizards #1 overall draft pick Kwame Brown. Too late, Bill Walton just did. Now your guest is really confused. "If these high school players are too good for college, how come they are sitting on the bench?"
You get up quickly, and ask your guest if he wants a beer. You need a moment to regroup. Between the basement and the fridge, you hope to find some sliver of logic that will end your guest's blizzard of questions about this game of basketball you told him was so much fun to watch in our country.
You come back with the beers and sit down. You hope he has forgotten about all those things he asked you about. No such luck. He wonders innocently if the NBA was always this bad to watch. You say no, it used to be very good. You tell him scores routinely reached into the hundreds, sometimes into the 120's. You tell him players used to make shots with ease. You say crowds were much louder. Players didn't make as much money, and yet played twice as hard.
Your guest's eyes go wide at the thought. And then he asks, "so what happened?"
You have no answers. And apparently, neither does the NBA.
Steve is a native Washingtonian and has worked in sports talk radio for the last 11 years. He worked at WTEM in 1993 anchoring Team Tickers before he took a full time job with national radio network One-on-One Sports.
A graduate of UC Santa Barbara, Steve has worked for WFNZ in Charlotte where his afternoon show was named "Best Radio Show." Steve continues to serve as a sports personality for WLZR in Milwaukee and does fill-in hosting for Fox Sports Radio.
