I want my NBA back

Yesterday I was sitting with my mother watching one of the ESPN 30 for 30 films. It was called Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. the New York Knicks and it chronciled the two intense playoff series between Miller's Pacers and the Knicks in the early 1990's. Watching it reminded me of how much fun the NBA was to watch in the early to mid 90's.

The NBA was the first professional sport where I actually sat down and watched a complete game. When I was young (around 6 or 7) I would stay up past midnight watching the playoffs; even on school nights. My mother told me how she remembers calling my father, who had transferred to a job in Philly, and telling him how I would just sit there and watch; she thought there was something wrong with me.

I loved the NBA back then.

There was Barkley, Penny Hardaway, Ewing, Olajuwon, Gary Payton, David Robinson, Malone and Stockton, and, of course, Pippen and Jordan. The league wasn't simply players though. The teams were great too; so were the series they played in. These games were physical battles and you could see the players who were men and those who couldn't handle it. The refs called these games like men were playing too. Go back and watch some games from back then. These guys were beating on each other and a foul was actually a foul, not a miniscule bump. Guys would be getting technicals and flagrants called on them constantly if the refs called those games the way they do now. And I think that many of the 'great' players of today would struggle if they were playing in the early 90's NBA.

The NBA is embarassing to watch now.

Refs repeatedly give preferential treatment and I'm not even sure they call traveling anymore. That is where the NBA is at now. They market their stars to the point that teams do not even matter. The game is called with such bias that you could put LeBron James on nearly any team and he could make the conference finals. There are no great teams and that means there are definitely no great series. Of course there are exceptions; the Bulls/Celtics series last year was special to watch and the same applies when the #8 seed Golden State Warriors beat the #1 seed Dallas Mavericks a few years ago.

The NBA exisiting as it does now is its own doing and you can easily find the genesis of it with Jordan in the 90's, but Jordan was actually great. The greatest actually, not a fraud like many of the 'stars' today.

What I am really getting at is "I want my NBA back", not this crap being peddled to fans now.

Whoops!

Man, those 15 months flew by like that (you can't see it, but I'm snapping my fingers).

I am truly a failure as a blogger. Seriously, my blogging frequency is worse than a college frat boy attending class. The absence of writing on this blog is not indicative of my writing in general though. I'm will attempt to update this blog with my thoughts and ideas because I have way too many thoughts (sometimes bad) and ideas (also sometimes bad) to not be keeping a record of, oh I don't know, a 1/7th of them.

I think if I keep my thoughts brief I should be more consistant with blogs, so this blog will end with this thought/opinion:

HBO's The Wire is fucking incredible.