Three reasons you shouldn’t care about the NBA season
It’s day three of the NBA season, and I am already sick of it.
I love sports more than the next guy, and I am more than stoked that college basketball is back. But the NBA is a joke.
How many teams realistically have a shot at winning the NBA title at season’s start? ESPN put a panel together to pick this year’s champion. 28 “experts” made their prediction, with Miami getting 22 votes, Indiana and San Antonio each getting two, and Brooklyn and Chicago each getting one.
What I get from that is the experts are giving – at-best – five teams out of 30 even a remote chance at winning the title each season. The history of NBA Finals winners supports that.
In the last 25 years, only eight of the 30 teams in the league have won the title. Four of those eight of those teams combined for 18 of those 25 titles. It’s no wonder you get such a large number of bandwagon fans in the NBA when only a select few even have a shot at the title.
It doesn’t matter how well a team drafts or utilizes the free agent market – not when the league is run the way it is.
Look at the NBA Finals MVPs over that same time span. Six players combined for 19 Finals MVP awards. That’s competing against a minimum of 300 players in the league per year, so roughly 7,500 players in 25 years.
Anyone who says “superstar” treatment is a myth is an idiot. The league revolves around just a handful of players, for a two-part reason: They’re the best in the league and therefore the fan favorites.
If these are the best players in the league, why do they need help from the league office to win titles? They dont. It’s the league using these players to make money. During the regular season, they do it with super-star treatment.
They train officials to call things a certain way, and let the fan favorites get away with things because it makes fans happy, which sells tickets and generates revenue.
The best players in the league get babied and favored during games, because fans don’t pay to see their favorite players lose. They pay to watch guys like LeBron James and Kobe Bryant score 30-plus points per night and perform – not play basketball.
Teams play an 82-game season, one game against one team at a time, then the playoffs start and you play seven straight games against the same team.
Call me crazy, but they’re the best players for a reason. As seen during the regular season, any David can go out and beat Goliath for one night. But because they want to make money, the league can’t let Goliath be slain early in the playoffs.
If that happens, you end up with one or two teams few people care about playing for the title and no one watches it, so the league loses money.
So in the playoffs, they switch up the format. They make David face Goliath in a best-of-seven matchup. We all know that’s not going to happen often, especially when they train officials to call the series in a way that gives Goliath even more of an edge.
If you think that’s a lie, do some homework. Former officials have come out and said it, and former players, including Michael Jordan, have acknowledged it as well.
In laymans terms, the NBA operates as a business, not an athletic association, and it’s ridiculous, it’s stupid and it’s overrated.
– Curtis Lundstrom is a junior in journalism and communication with high sports journalism aspirations. A life-long Aggie, he’s an avid sports card-collector that wants to officiate college sports at some point in life, as well as bowl a perfect 300. Follow him on Twitter @CurtSport07, and send any comments to curtislundstrom@gmail.com.