The Basketball Hall of Fame Remains Lost in Its Nonsensical Ways

The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame's Class of 2012 includes many familiar NBA faces. Most notable among them are Reggie Miller and Don Nelson, two beloved fixtures of the last few decades of professional basketball.

No matter how many eye rolls the former receives for his broadcasting shtick, nor how much flack the latter received for the final, disinterested years of his coaching career, Miller and Nelson (along with Bernard King, who was a finalist but will not be inducted) were beloved contributors to the game with ardent, passionate fans pushing for their inclusion in the Hall.

Still, brilliant though the day is for all members of both Miller and Nelson's parties, the latest class in basketball's bizarre, all-purpose Hall of Fame was just the latest showcase in inclusion and exclusion based on nonsensical voting criteria.

From an NBA perspective, that Miller was initially denied candidacy in a Hall that puts Jamaal Wilkes—one of Miller's 2012 classmates—on a pedestal is genuinely strange.

But Wilkes' specific case isn't at all the point. Along with the nominations for the Hall comes an annual conversation regarding which players should or shouldn't make the cut, often laced with alleged certainty despite the fact that the Hall's standards are nebulous, arbitrary and inclusive of several completely unique sports in a farce of a uniform system.

Claims of the Hall's faults have been made time and time again, but the nominations and selections continue to steal away a certain corner of the game's discourse despite the fact that league-specific institutions are so clearly in order.

Weighing an NBA player or coach's career against the equivalent in the NCAA, WNBA or in any basketball league around the world isn't just ridiculously difficult—it's patently unfair to all parties involved. It manages to generate a smidgen of interest but does so for all the wrong reasons.

On some level, the Hall itself is virtually inextricable from the chatter it generates; as a result of just how oddly weighted and debated Hall of Fame enshrinements are, the conversation devolves into completely separate micro-debates while assuming that all discussions utilize the same grounds.

With so many competing candidates and previously enshrined benchmarks coming from distinct leagues with very different roles and contributions, there's almost no way to create a stable conversational anchor. We're left to blindly retrofit possible criteria that could encompass a wide body of inter-league contributors and, based on that information, put together what a Hall of Fame nod is supposed to actually represent.

There's no point in logic in such a shell of an institution, just as there's no room for nuance without the proper framework to bear it. Without even the ability to engage in definitional debate to determine evaluative criteria, even the most thoughtful arguments on the subject of the Hall are drowned out with overwhelming noise.

What could be an interesting discussion over definitional merits (as we so often see with the MVP award, among other things) is instead an abyss, doomed to irrelevance by a lack of operational specificity that is as startling as it is revelatory.