Jack McCullum article - the NBA - a look

[Crapshoot]

The other night at the dinner table I opened a packet of reader mail from Sports Illustrated and there were -- lo and behold! -- several positive responses to an NBA story I had written. Fortunately, my wife reacted quickly, yanking my face out of the meat loaf and administering smelling salts.

OK, I'm exaggerating. We weren't having meat loaf.

Covering the NBA these days is not unlike carrying the mail: You're flabbergasted when you get a compliment. Whenever strangers find out what I do (a couple weeks ago it happened at a wedding reception), I inevitably get what I call the Old White Guy Sermon. (There may in fact be old black guys delivering the same sermon -- I just haven't heard them.)

The Old White Guy Sermon (hereafter the OWGS) begins with a paean to the past. The sacred names of Bird, Jordan and Magic are conjured up, and sometimes we go back to West and Robertson and sometimes all the way back to Cousy and Russell. Then we move to last year's riot at the Palace of Auburn Hills. Then it's on to Allen Iverson and how he has single-handedly destroyed the city of Philadelphia, if not the entire republic. There is generally a dissertation on how traveling and double-dribbling are never called by optically challenged NBA referees. A mention of corn rows and tattoos can be reliably predicted. And quite often the OWGS ends with a tip of the fedora to the sacred game of college basketball and a reverie on how wonderful the world would be if everybody played like Duke.

From time to time in this space, as well as in the pages of the magazine, I have criticized the NBA. It is unquestionably a league with problems, and over the years I've felt that the league office has been slow to deal with some of them. But this engrained, knee-jerk negativity to the NBA is not only getting old but it's also unjust. (Particularly when you have to listen to it at a wedding.)

For this week's five-pack, then, I thought I'd dissect the major points of the OWGS, see what makes sense and what isn't worth two cents.
1. The players are bad guys.

Whenever I hear this, I ask the sermonizer to be specific. He usually can't get much beyond Ron Artest, Iverson and, of course, Kobe Bryant. I respond thusly: Artest is a deeply confused young man, Iverson dresses like he's 14 years old and sometimes acts like it, and Bryant, though he wasn't convicted in a court of law, made a big mistake. But there are deeply confused young men in every sport, not to mention deeply confused young men in journalism. My sons, 28 and 26, sometimes dress and act like they're 14. And the list of pro athletes who have faced charges of assaulting a woman is long and by no means exclusive to pro basketball.

There is no question that too much money at too young an age has given many of the league's young players a perverse view of reality and a disturbing sense of entitlement. But that can happen to anyone who gets too much too soon. I guarantee you that phenoms in other pursuits -- Britney Spears and tennis player Maria Sharapova to name two -- have as misguided a view of how the world works as the callow millionaires in the NBA do.

2. The players are more interested in showing up their opponents than in playing ball.

The sermonizers have this wrong. They're actually talking about the NFL, which gets an enormous free pass in our culture. I don't know how people watch pro football, far less venerate it. Endless stoppages of play. Multiple injuries. Disgustingly overweight linemen. Coaches throwing flags to call for replays. And -- most of all -- preening players who celebrate tackles and pass deflections, never mind touchdowns, as if they've won the medal of honor.


Pro basketball had a spell in the mid- to late 1990s when players taunted each other after dunks and demonstrated other forms of unsportsmanlike behavior. It looked awful and hurt the game. By and large, the league's best players got the message and, while it still happens, it's hardly epidemic, as it is in the NFL.

3. Nobody plays hard until the fourth quarter.

A desultory first half in the NFL means the teams are "feeling each other out." In the NBA, it means that everyone is laying down on the job. This claim is utter nonsense. And the amazing thing is, I hear it from the sermonizers right after they tell me, "I never watch a game." So how do they know?

4. Players skills have deteriorated.

Probably true. But deteriorated from when? I do think the game looked better in the '80s and through the early '90s. But I guarantee you it didn't look better in the '50s. And deteriorated why? Certainly the infusion of young players, who have not refined their skills, is part of the reason. But part of the fault lies also with the coaches, who, concerned about their jobs, have taken control of the game away from the players.

Did the Phoenix Suns look like a team without skills last year? Hardly. That's because they ran up and down the court and played a players' game, not a coaches' game. Endless isolations and one-on-one play will necessarily produce an inferior product.

5. Hip-hop culture has co-opted the game.

Probably true. It doesn't matter that Bryant and Tim Duncan and Ray Allen and Dwyane Wade and Chauncey Billups and Grant Hill and Elton Brand and Richard Jefferson and Michael Redd and Ben Wallace and Bruce Bowen and Emeka Okafor and Chris Bosh (and that's not even to get into the white guys) are about as hip-hop and urban as Larry Bird and John Stockton. The game has been marketed in an edgy fashion that appeals to black culture, more specifically, young black culture, and white America, to a large extent, is turned off by this. It may not be racist. But it is racial. The sermonizers see a game that isn't played for them, and so they take it out on the game. The players stink. The quality stinks. The referees stink.

Even in the glory Magic-Michael-Larry days of the '80s, pro basketball never had the secure hold on American sports culture that football and baseball do even today. The players mattered, but the game didn't. And so the NBA has always been defined by its weaknesses, rather than its strengths. Barry Bonds acts like an idiot and that's on Barry Bonds. Terrell Owens acts like an idiot, and that's on Terrell Owens. Iverson rants about how he dislikes practice, and that's on the entire NBA. I can't even imagine what people would be saying if the NBA had a steroid problem like the one plaguing baseball right now. Or if Iverson had torn apart the 76ers in the same fashion that Owens tore apart the Philadelphia Eagles this season, I honestly feel he would've had to fear for his life.

I want to emphasize again that the NBA has problems, and I will no doubt be addressing them in the months ahead. But I am declaring right now that I am officially sick of the OWGS. NBA referee Bennett Salvatore happened to be at the same wedding I was at, and I said, "Man, you must get it all the time because people recognize you."

Salvatore had an answer. "As soon as they start up, I say, 'Oh, you're mistaking me for my brother Bennett,'" said the veteran official. "'I'm Harry Salvatore, and I don't know what you're talking about.'"

Good article. He's right IMO in that it may not be racism, but it is to some extent racial, or cultural.

[Warhammer]

This might be a YWGS but here is my response to his article.

- Players as bad guys and showing up opposing players

The first thing I notice when I watch a game is that whenever a player makes a big play and gets fouled, many of them play up to the camera. If any players come up for a slap on the butt or anything, the player that made the play bulls by him, etc., etc. They are basically mugging for the camera. That does not put the players in a good light.

Two, several players and explayers have been indicted for crimes. Jason Williams of the Nets comes to mind immediately. There was an incident in town that involved Lorenzen Wright. Jason Williams, of the Grizzlies, ripping the pen out of a reporter's hand. I could go on, but do not feel like doing the research.

- Plays Hard in the Fourth Quarter

This is more of a subjective thing. However, it seems to me you can definitely see teams bear down (pull down their shorts and get into their defensive stance, etc.) in the fourth quarter. That said, I don't know how you could definitively argue this one way or the other.

However, with regards to the NFL. There is MUCH more you can game plan for in the NFL than you can in the NBA. True, you can work your offense differently or switch between a zone or man to man in the NBA, but there is not nearly the amount of Xs and Os in the NBA as there are in basketball. Because of the nature of the sports, individual talent in the NBA is much more powerful than it is in the NFL, which does marginalize the coaching, to an extent.

- Players' skills have deteriorated

There is no argument here. His attempt to bring up the 50s is laughable. Not many people have seen footage of the way the game was played back then. However, many of us remember the game from its heyday in the 80s. Games were much cleaner. The offenses were more crisp.

However, much of this was due to the refs. The other day, I saw a replay of the 88 Finals, Game 6. At the end of that game, Lambeer fouled Kareem with the Lakers down by a point or two. Kareem drains the shots, and sends the series to game 7 which the Lakers win. Today, that foul would never have been called. There are so many fouls that go uncalled today, that most fouls in the paint are basically the whim of a ref. This brings down the level of play to the lowest common denominator. It also weakens the center position to the point where being a goon is considered good play. Take the example of Shaq. I am not going to question his skills, he does have some. However, any time he gets the ball and goes to the basket either an offensive or defensive foul can normally be called.

My take is if the refs actually call the game the way it should be, the game would improve. I consider the NBA refs to be the worst of the 4 big sports behind, NFL, NHL, MLB, and NBA. It is close between MLB and NBA though. However, MLB is much more consistent to me than the NBA is. The reason why the MLB and NBA have the worst refs? I think a lot of it is based upon the game being driven by the players rather than whole teams. This results in the refs mentality of the star players getting preferential calls.

Finally, his last point I do agree with. I dislike how the NBA is marketed. This immediately puts me in a mood to criticize rather than build up the league. I disagree with it being racial. There are plenty of whites out there who buy into hip hop. However, there are probably more who do not, which gives it the appearance of a racial divide.

[Karlifornia]

This is a good article. The NBA gets so much shit from people that think the game is below them. A lot of it has to do with the rap music and "thug" image that some players give off. This is just like how your grandpa didn't like Broadway Joe Namath, and always compared him unfavorably with Johnny Unitas. It was rock 'n' roll becoming cool. I don't listen to much hip-hop anymore, but I don't listen to a lot of the Creed and Nickleback bullshit that hockey and baseball players listen to, either, but it doesn't affect my interest in the sport.

[Chubby]

"And quite often the OWGS ends with a tip of the fedora to the sacred game of college basketball and a reverie on how wonderful the world would be if everybody played like Duke."

This is where I stopped taking him seriously. College basketball is better ball than the NBA and the last thing I want is more teams to play like Duke.

[Karlifornia]

I enjoy college basketball more than pro, too. I think it has more to do with the atmosphere and the tourney than anything else.