re: Sickening

["Noah P. Evans" <nevans@knox.edu>]

>     Was just reading Noah's post.  It occurred to me that it seems more
> important to the NBA players WHERE a team is (warm weather) than WHAT the
> team is.  Just another example of how low the league has fallen.
> You never used to hear that.   I've heard many of my friends say the
>past couple of weeks that they no longer care - they'll watch college ball.

Yes today's players prefer warm weather, but that is only an outward
manifestation of something deeper. Money is killing basketball, not the
player's newly acquired taste for Miami sunshine. Basketball today is a
market where its money players(i.e. Payton, Jordan, Pippen etc...) are
irreplacable commodities and are treated as such(with giant contracts) and
the other replacable players are considered superfluous(and given contracts
that reflect this). Money players, now being able to name their own ticket,
do. That's when they start quibbling over climate.
	Lately I've come to think that the best thing for professional basketball
would be its collapse. If basketball became so universally reviled; that
those who were in it for the money, certain players, all agents and probably
all of the owners took their toys and went home. If basketball became a poor
man's game again, then it would return to its blue collar, hard working,
team oriented roots.
	This won't happen of course, though. The leagues marketing machine is too
well oiled. As long as the league is marketable, able to create "stars" out
of mere mortals, basketball's decline(as a sport) will continue. Today's
basketball is more sizzle than steak because sizzle, individual, crotch
grabbing, hard dunking stars, sells .  And we miss that, underlying, cause
of basketball's current decline. The sport of basketball is declining, not
because of Allen Iverson, Isiah Rider and Chris Webber, but because of Larry
Bird, Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson. The "knuckleheads" are an effect
rather than a cause of the leagues decline. The current state of the NBA was
and is inevitable. As leeches go to blood, they also go to money. And
eventually the host, in this case professional basketball, dies.

Noah