It’s finally here!
No, you ninnies, not the election! I’ve already cast my vote, and it’s for Apple Pie and a Tanqueray & Vicodin cocktail tonight! It’s the new NBA season that has ME so juiced up!
Other blogs can keep regurgitating their political rantings (that goes double for you, Sullivan); for the next two days, Virtual Memories is devoted to professional basketball!
Today’s big-ass entry is a preview of the Western Conference, written by Tom Spurgeon. Tom’s not just a hoops geek (it’s in the genes; he’s from Indiana), he’s also an unparalleled chronicler of the comics industry, and now he has the Comics Reporter website to prove it (as if his great book on Stan Lee wasn’t enough)! Without further ado . . .
I Hump This Game
by Tom Spurgeon
The best thing about professional basketball in America used to be that everybody hated it. It was an urban game played by men in bad suits in largely undisciplined but fascinating fashion, with success dependent largely on how well your college game had been imprinted into your memory. Then Larry Bird and Magic Johnson came along. Bird and Johnson were gym rats with enough in the way of physical gifts to make the game bend to their will. For seven or so years the National Basketball Association combined individual expression with a beautiful notion of flow and pressure that emphasized getting the best shot at the goal possible, usually as quickly as possible. There were great teams, like the Los Angeles Lakers, the Boston Celtics, and the Philadelphia 76ers; there were great rivalries like Dr. J versus Larry Bird and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar against an America That Did Not Understand Him.
Then Michael Jordan showed up and dunked on everybody and scored 75 points on the Celtics because his teammates included Lee Atwater and a guy from the Gap Band and things went right to shit.
Okay, it took a long time. But things did go to shit. Players started to be paid for their “entertainment value” as much as their ability to actually play the game, sort of like a company giving the person who has the most pencils in the roof above their desk the biggest salary. Players began to realized you could take three-pointers and no one would yell at you for missing them the way they did shots you should actually make. New teams showed up and employed more bad players and made a star of Muggsy Bogues, who would have been another generation’s favorite Globetrotter. The structure of salaries and ticket-demands for new stars, or at least one that sort of were like the good ones, made owners pay some really dubious talent a lot of money. Shaquille O’Neal terrified the land by making rap albums and movies with Judd Nelson.
Gil Roth’s beloved New York Knicks tend to be blamed for this state affairs, and the only way in which I disagree with conventional wisdom is that I believe it should come with sizeable electrical shocks for everyone involved when I think that way. Michael Jordan settled into a very set offensive system with the Chicago Bulls that basically allowed him to stay the same player he was by surrounding him with players who only did a few things very well – sort of like building a soapbox derby car where you skimp on every other item because you own killer wheels. Instead of making a superior team out of generally superior parts, the Knicks decided to afford a wonderful college player turned selfish pro named Patick Ewing “local Jordan” status, surrounded him with players as flawed as the Bulls, and sold the referees on the fact they should be allowed to play like the Hanson Brothers because, well, they were the logical rivals.
Fast forward seven years later and there’s America losing the Olympic Gold and Americans being happy about it. If there’s any hope for the NBA at all, it may be found in one curious and undeniable fact.
Everybody seems to hate basketball again.