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.

SSX. What does it stand for?

I do not know. Nor do I care. I love it. For about a two month period in '04 I was addicted to SSX3; the open world mountain that you could traverse from peak to base was unbelieveably cool. Now it is 2008 and Ubisoft has released Shawn White Snowboarding (using a modified version of the Assassin Creed engine) and it had been posed by a few people that this could be a successor to SSX3, a game widely considered to be the best snowboarding game ever.

Shawn White is out now and hasn't been recieved as well as speculated. Stupid prognosticators are always wrong. I'm not one to buy bad or poorly made games, not now at least. I did buy Chromehounds during the Xbox 360 first Summer drought though. Poor purchase aside I saw Shawn White and it gave me the desire to play SSX3 again. So this past weekend I scoured the local Gamestops in both Bloomington and New Albany, IN with the goal of finding the five year old game. Just finding it would have been fantastic, but to find a working copy, that actually had its instuction manual (I never understand why people trade-in a game without the instruction manual. There is a place for you to put it for crying out loud. Granted I don't need it, but I hate opening a game box and seeing a huge empty space) would have been astounding. Amazingly I found a copy for the low price of $6.99.

When I arrived back at my apartment I began playing and even after five years of innovation in the Videogame Industry SSX3 holds up well. There was almost no re-learning of the controls; it felt like I had played the game just the day before. This is remarkable since most game's controls do not stick with me after I've moved onto a new genre with a different control scheme. The visuals do not hold-up as well as the controls, but that is to be expected. When you play SSX though you aren't paying that much attention to the scenery as you are pulling off your next ridiculous trick. This should go without saying, but if you haven't tried SSX3, or it's predecessor SSX Tricky, you need to give it a shot. I've never snowboarded a day in my life so knowledge of snowboarding isn't necessary.

In other news it looks as if I'll be advancing to my Fantasy Football championship game. I currently lead the #1 seed 83-63 with each of us having a player left in tomorrow night's MNF game, so barring a miracle I will win. Should I win, my next opponent, who looks to have rapped up his game too, will be a guy with a monster team; in particular his running backs who are beastly to say the least.

So tonight I will preemptively bask in the glory of my upset and play some SSX3 until the wee hours in the morning since my only classes this week are my two finals on Tuesday; starting at 8 am though. Have a happy Sunday.