State Of The NBA Nation

Something happened to me last night.  Something that had not happened to me since May 3 of last year.  My favorite team was eliminated from the playoffs.

Since the Dallas Mavericks were beaten 111-86 last year by Golden State, I hadn’t witnessed my team’s season end in anything except with a championship.

Do I expect sympathy? Of course not. After all, I am lucky to root for three teams that even made it to the postseason. Add that to the fact that my football team (the New York Giants) was victorious in one of the best Super Bowls ever, and I have no room to gripe.

The Red Sox also emerged victorious in a great World Series, and they came back from a 3-1 deficit in the ALCS to boot.

So I am not asking for any sort of empathy from anyone. But I do have a few cogent points about how basketball is enthralling, yet so frustrating at the same time.

To start, basketball is my favorite sport. I even got the NBA League Pass this year, allowing me to watch every single game.

Football doesn’t have enough games, and the games are all on the same day.  It’s hard to watch every single game.

It’s hard to get involved in all of the 162 games that the Boston Red Sox play.

Basketball has the perfect amount of games, (82) and they are almost every day. With the exception of January 1 and the All-Star break, there are at least two games every day from October 30 to June.

Basketball is also the only major sport in which one superstar can win a game literally by himself. In football, you can have a great quarterback or running back, but they’re still only on the field half the time.

Every time Tom Brady makes a huge drive to get his team back in the game, he has to hand the game over to his defense, which may or may not help him.

Baseball is the same thing. Alex Rodriguez can only bat once per nine batters. A pitcher only does as well as the offense behind him.

In basketball, a figure such as Michael Jordan can win games or playoff series almost by himself. The superstar is on the court at all times in a tight game, especially in crunch time.

It is because of this that Reggie Miller could score eight points in 8.5 seconds. He hits the three, steals the ball, hits a three, gets a rebound, gets fouled, and then hits the two free throws.

While it is enthralling to watch a superstar take over a game, it also leads to why basketball can be so frustrating, not just to me, but to a casual sports fan. Basketball has been in a stage of perpetual dynasties since 1980.

Since 1980, only two teams have won a single title. The 76ers won in 1983, and the Heat won in 2006. Besides those two, six teams have won 28 titles between them. 

The Lakers have won eight, the Bulls six, the Spurs four, the Celtics and Pistons three, and the Rockets two. So unless you live in one of those cities, you haven’t seen your team win a title.

When we look closer at those finals, we see exactly how a basketball superstar can impose their will on the game. Jordan won three times in a row, left for a year and a half, then won three more times.

Since Jordan left the Bulls, Shaq or Tim Duncan have been in every NBA finals.

The thing about dynasties is people get sick of the same team winning. Nobody wants to see the Spurs win again. Nobody wanted the Patriots to keep winning even before the whole taping thing.

In this age of instant gratification, people want something new. That’s why the NBA playoffs have been so exciting in the beginning because teams like the Suns, Warriors, Wizards and Cavaliers are making things interesting.

Soon the teams are whittled down to the Spurs, the Pistons, the Lakers, or some other team that always win.

That’s why 2006 was such a huge year for the finals. Dallas and Miami faced off—two teams that were perpetually in the cellar.  Neither of which had ever won a title before.

If I can interject for a brief moment of self-pity and explain why this is so frustrating as a Mavericks’ fan. Besides the postseason horrors of the past three seasons, Dallas’ fans have a hard time rooting for the new, exciting teams that are rising to the top.

Let’s break it down. Mavericks’ fans won’t root for the Suns (at least until they win a title) because it would hurt to see Nash win before Dirk.

We can’t root for the Warriors, another team whose dynamic style would otherwise be great to watch. We can’t root for D-Wade or the Spurs for obvious reasons.

I can’t root Chris Paul and the Hornets this year, but maybe next season. The Lakers just piss me off, even before they were given Pau Gasol.

That’s another thing. The league threatens to veto the Kidd trade because Stackhouse shot off his mouth, costing Mark Cuban a cool $11 million.

But when Chris Wallace decides to give the Lakers the best shot at a title for absolutely nothing, there’s no problem. And I won’t even mention how the Spurs were given Kurt Thomas and were allowed to get Brent Barry back.

Back to the topic at hand. It’s not the NBA’s fault that it has been dominated by the same handful of teams for the last two decades. It is the NBA’s fault that they keep expanding and moving teams, which does nothing but alienate people.

The Sonics debacle is the latest of relocation/expansion nightmares. Thanks David Stern.

What the NBA does have going for it is a myriad of stars 25 and under who seem to be good people.

Dwight Howard, Chris Paul, Chris Bosh, Tony Parker, Kevin Durant, Greg Oden, LeBron James, Al Jefferson, Deron Williams, Andrew Bynum, and Brandon Roy are all up and comers who aren’t thugs (as far as we know).  They are great players already.

With the exception of Oden, I’ve seen each one of them play, and they have incredible talents that are only going to blossom over the next 10 years.

So maybe we’ll finally see some teams shake things up at the top. With the exception of Parker and Bynum, those names all have teams that have one or less championship.

A final Dallas Mavericks’ note. During the writing of this, the news came out that the Mavericks fired Avery Johnson. While I do like Johnson, I think it was a good move.

He is a good coach and will probably be a great coach. He was just a casualty of the 24-hours a day ESPN style coverage that makes up sports media.

When he experienced early success, he was immediately hailed as a genius.  But as Orson Welles can attest to, there is a danger in burning too bright at the beginning.

Avery had nowhere to go but down, and he did.

Case in point: ESPN has spent weeks talking about how Avery had lost the team and that his firing was inevitable. 

As soon as the news broke, the subhead on the ESPN front page is ‘Among coaches with a minimum 250 games, Johnson has the highest winning percentage in NBA history.’ Just another example how ESPN does nothing except fan the flames.