[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Bob Ryan Bashes The NBA
[Boston Globe Online / Sports]
Can NBA lock out boredom?
Real problems are indifference, dilution
By Bob Ryan, Globe Columnist, 12/04/98
Oh, goody. They've decided to meet once again.
The NBA owners and the NBA Players Association must
realize that they now occupy the danger zone. While
commissioner David Stern has never said aloud just what
might be the ''drop-dead date,'' beyond which it would be
impossible to start the season, we must conclude that we
are creeping dangerously close to it. There is an
apparent sense of urgency now - major, major, intense,
frightening, scary urgency - that did not exist even a
week ago. And so the warring parties are once again
negotiating in the hopes of saving the (1998-)1999
season.
There are absolutely no good guys here. This is a sordid
tale involving the desire of multimillionaires and
billionaires to squeeze every last dollar out of the
public's interest in what can be a very nice sport on the
one hand and the desire of spoiled, pampered, coddled,
overhyped, self-absorbed, and delusionary players to earn
essentially undeserved millions on the other hand. They
can't agree on how to divide a $2 billion pie. And we are
supposed to care?
As a writer who has covered the league for 30 years and a
20-year season ticket-holder who has seen his cost rise
from $8 a pop for a first-row balcony seat overlooking
the foul line at the Garden to $66 a whack for a fine
seat several rows up looking at the foul line in the
FleetCenter, I come to this fracas with very intense
feelings. The NBA has meant a great deal to me personally
in both a professional and personal sense. Certain things
involving the Celtics have represented my happiest
professional moments, and by having the seats, I have had
the enormous satisfaction of family involvement as well.
One of my dearest personal possessions is a photo of my
wife and daughter seated in Section 62, Row A, Seats 1
and 2, at the Garden for a Celtics game. Every time I
look at it, warm feelings of countless happy afternoons
and evenings we all spent in that building watching
memorable NBA games spring to mind.
This doesn't mean I miss the NBA.
Well, I do, sure, but not the way I would have thought
had someone told me five years ago we'd all be sitting
here on Dec. 4, 1998, waiting to see the first game of
the season. What I really miss is the NBA that was, not
the NBA that is. I know I am not alone.
Whenever they solve this thing, the real job will begin.
The NBA will then be confronted with an angry
constituency. The league will be in need of a massive
selling job in order to restore the game's image to the
American sporting public. It will be a much more
difficult task than any of the principals know.
For if there is one clear message being delivered by pro
basketball's vox populi as this lockout insanity drags
on, it is that most people simply don't care. I cannot be
more explicit. Wherever I go in the country, people don't
care. When someone I work with comes back from a trip, he
or she reports that people don't care.
Attention, David Stern and Billy Hunter: PEOPLE DON'T
CARE!
Wow.
If anything, season ticket-holders are secretly ecstatic.
They are being forcibly prevented from paying money to
see games they didn't want to see in the first place.
What this tells me is that the public is much smarter
than it was ever given credit for by the powers that be.
If a work stoppage of this type had taken place 10 years
ago, when the league was at its artistic zenith, people
would have cared. The fact that so few care now should
tell the NBA something, and that something is that people
are hip to the fact that the average game is dreadfully
boring compared to what it once was. A 79-75 game is not
going to be as interesting as a 110-105 game, and it
won't even be in the same discussion as a 125-120 game.
I can tell the NBA people something else they don't want
to hear. All the bells, whistles, noise, and distractions
that are an inherent part of what is now officially
referred to as ''game presentation'' are
counterproductive. They have done nothing to create
legitimate interest in the sport among the younger
audience to whom they are pitched, and they have totally
alienated the serious fan base which had taken the NBA to
its mid- and late '80s height.
Be honest. Have you heard anyone say, ''Boy, do I miss
the Parquet Patrol''?
In a better sports world, the scenario would be as
follows: Before we allow them to come back, the NBA, the
NBA players, and the NBA coaches (the silent villains in
this melodrama) would be forced to deal with us, the
constituency (I'm wearing my consumer hat now). We would
demand that they stop the circus acts and turn down the
volume. We would demand the opportunity to attend the
games in peace.
Then we would demand that coaches cease thinking they are
the show. The biggest myth in all of American sport is
the idea that the NBA is a players' league. It may be in
some ways, but once that ball is thrown up, the game
belongs to the coaches, and they are strangling the life
out of it.
We would demand basketball games with flow, basketball
games with fast breaks - at present, not a single team in
the league even semiregularly attempts fast breaks out of
defensive rebounds - and basketball games with just plain
pizzazz. We had that once. We most definitely do not have
that now.
Of course, the players they are coaching are increasingly
incomplete products of a sickening system that starts
creating star-complex monsters as young as 13. I'm not
going to deny that. The players don't know what they
should know. But there has to be a way to put a more
entertaining product on the floor. Perhaps the wrong
people are coaching in this league.
People in NBA management think their only problem once
play resumes will be to persuade the public that the
owners aren't all greedy and the players aren't all
jerks. Those are just starting points. The biggest
problem will be to persuade people that the actual
product is worth both an emotional and financial
investment, based on the basketball being played.
If you have access to Classic Sports on the telly, take
this challenge. Watch any available 1980s game featuring
the Celtics, Lakers, Sixers, and Pistons, and then ask
yourself, ''Whatever happened to that game?'' There is no
comparison in entertainment value between those games and
the average NBA games, playoff or otherwise, of the last
several years.
That's the real problem, Mr. Stern. People know the
difference between what was and what is. Your nightmare
is still in the opening credits.
Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist.
This story ran on page D01 of the Boston Globe on
12/04/98.
© Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.