Monday, 04.07.08
Beyond Boring Basketball
Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images Sport
The Best Pickup-Basketball Player in America
April 2000
Timothy Harper discovers Allan Dalton, a fifty-one-year-old pickup-basketball star from New Jersey.
NBA Predictions!
October, 2007
Each spring, basketball enthusiasts argue over the respective merits of college basketball, whose playoff tournament ended on Monday night, and professional basketball, which has one week left in its regular season. When NBA fans defend professional ball, they usually point to pro athletes' superior athleticism and college athletes' supposed "mediocrity." But professional ball's defenders have adopted a new tactic this time around, invoking the NBA season's compelling storylines as proof of its preeminence.
But play for play, the NBA is about as stimulating as curling. When professional hockey faced similar issues a few years back, the NHL took steps to uncramp rinks and allow for a more open and dynamic style of play. (Predictably, attendance jumped thereafter). Yet the NBA has spent more time of late policing dress codes than improving play. To win over the many fans who prefer the college game, Commissioner David Stern should acknowledge that today's pro players are simply too big for courts designed in an era when players were smaller, and consider radical adjustments: Raising basket heights from 10 to 11.5 feet, and increasing court sizes. The result -- a more open, up-tempo game -- would force Shaquille O'Neal to transition from lumber to light jog, and might enable pro basketball to approach the play-by-play excitement of the college hoops.
Of course fans could just skip the men altogether. As Harvard English professor and the WNBA's unofficial “Poet Laureate” Stephen Burt urges, those seeking basketball's best qualities -- in his words: "Assists. Teamwork. Defense. Determination" -- might pass on Monday's NCAA game and the remainder of the NBA schedule, and catch Tuesday's women's final instead.
NBA madnessJ.A. Adande of ESPN eschews March Madness in favor of the NBA playoff-hunt. |
Beyond conventions and debatesDemonstrating that live-event blogging isn't just for politicos, writers at storming the floor overcome structural difficulties -- no press passes, tickets, and limited funds -- to offer updates from college basketball's Final Four in San Antonio. |
Paging Ron ArtestChronicling the worst in professional basketball since January 2005, basketballawful.com offers a daily dose of the NBA's shortcomings. |
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Thanks for the namecheck! For the record, I've never said the men's game isn't exciting-- just that the women's game is. (To read people who write well and often online about the women's game, try Googling "Helen Wheelock" or "Mechelle Voepel.")
The changes you recommend in the NBA aren't going to happen, and might not make for better games if they did-- for one thing, guys' free throw percentage would drop even more if they had to re-adjust to a higher basket as soon as they moved to the pros; for another, a longer court could make it harder to bring the ball up the floor, hence easier to run a full- or three-quarter court press, resulting in less scoring.
More tightly called games, on the other hand, and more penalties for excessively physical defense, would make scoring easier, and the game more fun to watch. Both the NBA and the WNBA have tried to go this route, I believe, in the last few years.
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Women's basketball? Ha! To paraphrase a friend talking about soccer, watching women play basketball is like watching men play in 3 feet of water.
But agreed that the college game is vastly superior to pro ball, as evidenced by last night's nail biter.
Posted by TH | April 8, 2008 11:43 AM