Over at DadCentric, I offered up my thoughts on the NBA Finals. I am not the breed of fan that mopes around for weeks after my favorite team loses a championship; then again, when my favorite team wins, I'm not the breed of fan that wears, say, a 2000 NBA Champions t-shirt until, say, 2008. It sucks/is great for a day, then the world moves on.
If there's a silver lining to last night's Laker debacle, it's that I'm actually excited about the team and the NBA again. I'm curious to see what Buss, Kupchak, and co. will do in the offseason. On the flip side, it seems that this season may have been when the wave finally broke and rolled back; referreeing has always been atrocious, and now it seems that along with incompetance, corruption has reared its head. So here are some suggestions for making the NBA better.
1. A Stalin-esque purge of the Ref Corps: Let's face it - they all suck. NBA fans, there isn't one of you out there who can claim that their team has never been the victim of the mercurial nature of league refs. Other sports - football, baseball - see their share of the occasional bad call, but a) the NFL and now MLB are taking steps to reduce those calls in the form of instant replay and b) the subjective nature of what is or is not a foul, a travel, an illegal defense or screen has become a cancer in the NBA. Certain MLB umps will have a varying strike zone, but they're generally consistent with that from game to game; an NBA ref will call a tight game one night, and the next you get to watch the same ref oversee a rugby match on a wooden floor. That's why they're called "rules", and not "suggestions". And as we've seen, the motivation for an NBA ref's zealous or non-calls can be as simple as that ref having some sort of beef with a particular team. (The fact that Crawford hasn't been fired is a real head-scratcher.) So shitcan 'em all, and bring in NCAA refs who will call fouls as defined in the rulebook.
2. Enough with the Euro Stars. The flopping, the whining, the inability to play D. Back in the day, we had the Sabonis Drinking Game: any time some announcer made some comment about great Arvydas Sabonis was (key word: was) during his days playing for Lithuania, you did a shot. Usually you'd be on the floor by the middle of the 2nd quarter. There has NEVER BEEN NOR WILL THERE EVER BE A TRULY GREAT EUROPEAN NBA PLAYER. You want to build your team around Dirk Nowitski? Didn't think so. This isn't a racial thing, or even a nationalistic thing - it's Sports Culture, pure and simple, for the same reason that there will never be a Legendary (i.e., Pele, Ronaldo, Beckham-level) American soccer player or rugby star.
3. Quit shitting on tradition by expanding to lame ass cities. The Oklahoma City Sonics...no, no, a thousand times no.
4. Slap Bill Simmons with a hefty fine every time he makes a "Karate Kid" reference. Like many of you, I used to think he was funny. I think he lost it when the Sox won the '04 Series. Kind of like when Macchio followed up My Cousin Vinny with Naked in New York. I realize this has very little to do with the topic at hand, but I'm going to read his inevitable gloating column today despite myself...
...ok, just read it, and it brings me to my fourth and final suggestion.
5. No NBA-related jobs for you unless you've actually played in the NBA. This includes coaching positions, ref jobs, sportswriting assignments, and TV announcer gigs. Make no mistake: I am a dreadful basketball player, and I suspect most of you are as well, and even if you're not, you still are nowhere near as good as any of the guys you've been watching on TV these past few days (with the possible exception of Glen Davis, because, holy shit, dude looks like he should be squaring off against Kobayashi, not Gasol). Think about it: if you played for one of Jeff Van Gundy's teams, and this little lovechild of Larry Fine and Uncle Fester starts yelling at you to push the ball, D-Up, hit your shots, etc., would you respect that? Or would you bounce The Rock off of that sagging melon of his and tell him to fuck off? I'm not sure that there's any other sport that has so many Never-Weres in positions of authority or "expertise". And that's a problem, because when you have sideline observers/armchair point guards and not actual veterans making calls, providing "expert analysis", or trying to build better players, you cheapen the game.
Until next season, then.
